According to Virgin Interactive vice president Stephen Clarke-Willson in 1998, the development of "Dune II" began when Virgin Interactive planned to cancel the production of Cryo Interactive's adventure game "Dune", after which he was given the task of figuring out what to do with the "Dune" license. After reading the original "Dune" novel, he decided that "from a gaming point-of-view the real stress was the battle to control the spice," so a resource-based strategy video game would be a good idea. It was around this time that employee Graeme Devine (who later founded Trilobyte) introduced to everyone at the Virgin office a real-time strategy game on the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive console called "Herzog Zwei" (1989). Clarke-Willson described it as a game where the player "kept clicking on stuff and then zooming off to another part of the screen. It was very hard to keep track of what was going on as an observer. Still, everyone liked it, it had fast action, and it was a strategy game." Virgin staff, including Clarke-Willson and Seth Mendelsohn (who later worked on the "Ultima" series), then went to Westwood Studios to talk about making a "Dune" game. According to Clarke-Willson, "Westwood agreed to make a resource strategy game based on "Dune", and agreed to look at "Herzog Zwei" for design ideas." It later turned out that Cryo's game of the same name was not cancelled, and Westwood's real-time strategy game was called "Dune II" as a result.