Westwood Studios co-founder and "Dune II" producer Brett Sperry said in 2008 that conceptualization for the game began when Virgin president Martin Alper approached him with the offer of using their "Dune" license to produce a game, with the understanding that Cryo's "Dune" had been cancelled. In terms of video game design, Sperry stated, "The inspiration for "Dune II" was partly from "Populous", partly from my work on "Eye Of The Beholder" and the final and perhaps most crucial part came from an argument I once had with Chuck Kroegel, then vice president of Strategic Simulations Inc ... The crux of my argument with Chuck was that wargames sucked because of a lack of innovation and poor design. Chuck felt the category was in a long, slow decline, because the players were moving to more exciting genres ... I felt that the genre had a lot of potential – the surface was barely scratched as far as I as concerned, especially from a design standpoint. So I took it as a personal challenge and figured how to harness realtime dynamics with great game controls into a fast-paced wargame." He also stated that, while ""Herzog Zwei" was a lot of fun," the "other inspiration for "Dune II" was the Mac software interface," referring to the "design/interface dynamics of mouse clicking and selecting desktop items" which got him thinking, "Why not allow the same inside the game environment? Why not a context-sensitive playfield? To hell with all these hot keys, to hell with keyboard as the primary means of manipulating the game!" During production, he found out that Cryo rushed to finish their game first, leading to Virgin publishing their game as "Dune" and Westwood's game as "Dune II", despite Sperry protesting against this decision. Louis Castle said in 1998 that the game's influence on the real-time strategy genre was unplanned, and that the team's goal was simply "to include all of the excitement and intensity of a war game, but with action-packed gameplay."