Dune II was certainly a landmark game, and simply sheer good fun. I also have a soft spot for the unique strategy / adventure blend of the original Dune … a unique (and IMO enjoyable) game. A pity that this direction has never really been explored further.

Speaking of Dune, I am surprised no one in your previous list with game music mentioned the Dune: Spice Opera – definitely one of the more memorable game tracks for my money.

As for RTS, I remember playing an even older RTS game, although I’m not even sure it could properly be called RTS at that point. It was a simultaneous-move strategy game designed to be played over a direction connection, except that it had flaky network code and would desync a lot.

This makes me wonder what new genres will come along in the future, and whether we’re already playing those games but simply don’t realize how influential they are.

But I think the genre was not the foremost thing in developers’ or gamers’ minds. You can see this in the career of Sid Meier in that period – flight sims, Pirates, Civilization. There was, I think, more experimentation in broader form where now most experimentation is done on the margins with a few noticeable exceptions. That is, in large part, because the industry is more mature now and has a better idea of what works and what doesn’t.

In the Edge article, the Dune developers say that they wanted a more modern wargame. But it’s nearly impossible to look at Dune and see much in the way of wargame conventions; they didn’t bind themselves to what genres were supposed to look like. They took the general idea of a wargame (kill things) and made it larger.