Growing up, I spent weekends and most holidays with my father. Not to be undone by my mother’s purchase of a SNES, he decided that he would buy a Sega Genesis for his place. But I was not allowed to take it back with me during the week – it was supposed to be something special that I could only play at his place. Fair enough.

This must have been later on in the Genesis lifecycle, because the game that it came with was Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I have a lot of great memories of that game, which always felt kind of more involved than you think. Looking at a complete playthrough video though, that is probably the nostalgia and/or “kid losing multiple times” talking. Still, it was pretty inventive stuff for the time to have your platformer have those quasi-3D tunnel sections, the introduction of Super Sonic, and so on.

In any case, I did end up beating Sonic 2 and my father was… kind of not happy about it. If I was able to beat these games and thus become bored with them so quickly, then he’d rather not buy any more games at all. Thus started the weekend tradition of renting games from Blockbuster.

The whole situation is kind of funny, when you think about. Renting games back then, that is. This was all before the advent of memory cards, so if a game allowed you to save your progress – which was not always a sure thing! – it belonged specifically to that cartridge. Thus, if you didn’t beat it, chances are that your save file would be overwritten by the next person renting the game. Or maybe you rent the same game but get Blockbuster’s 2nd (etc) copy instead. Meanwhile, videogame companies were occasionally making their games almost impossible to beat on purpose, so kids couldn’t just rent them and be done in a weekend.

At some point during renting random Genesis games, I came across Dune: the Battle for Arrakis.

This game outright blew my mind. It’s not very often that you recognize that you are playing an archetypal game when it’s initially released, and I certainly would not have known what “archetypal” meant in 1994, but I felt it. If you have ever enjoyed a Real-Time Strategy game, such as Command & Conquer, Warcraft, and/or Age of Empires, all of their conventions pretty much originated in Dune. Base-building, fog of war, micromanaging of units, having a resource-gathering economy, all came together in a unified whole in this title.

Over the next several years, I probably rented Dune enough to have purchased it twice over. I could have sworn part of it was due to having my save file overwritten, but the Wiki is saying it had codes for the levels instead. I like my own headcanon version better, but alas. Dune did feature three separate factions with their own unique units and, I think, unique maps. I mean, it’s Dune, so everything was rock and sand anyway, but you know what I mean.

Dune was definitely the highlight of my Sega Genesis days. And it would become a very important piece of serendipity in meeting my soon-to-be best friend, whom has remained so for ~30+ years.