Some of the most popular real-time strategy titles today can be traced back to Dune II and Command & Conquer, two of the most influential releases in recent memory for the genre. And the world has Las Vegas’ own Westwood Studios to thank for that.

“Video game history in Las Vegas goes back before Westwood, but not much before Westwood,” says co-founder Louis Castle.

Castle and his partner Brett Wesley Sperry (owner of Downtown’s Brett Wesley Gallery) worked on several programming contracts together before they formed Westwood in 1985.

Sperry and Castle made a profound team. Both programmers shared an interest in art, something they wouldn’t discover until they met in 1983. Early on, Castle painted, studied fine art and computer science in college and worked at Century 23, an Apple computer store that proved to be quite special for him and his colleagues.

“Numerous people who became very successful in the video game industry all worked at this little store in Las Vegas at some point,” he says. “It just goes to illustrate how incredibly small the video game industry was at that time.”

Sperry gravitated toward architecture and photography but found himself drawn to computers after a friend showed him how to program graphics. “I took to it like a fish to water,” he says. Sperry created his first unreleased computer game at age 16 and continued working on others during late nights in his university computer lab.

Westwood’s early days were humble, to put it lightly. “We started in a converted garage back room at my parent’s house, where I had all my computer equipment and a Black Hole pinball machine,” Castle remembers. The duo spent months working alone (and barely sleeping) until they hired Barry Green to program the Atari ST version of Temple of Apshai Trilogy.

Porting games consumed Westwood’s early work, but by 1988, the company had begun creating titles of its own. One of them was 1991’s Eye of the Beholder, a breakout role-playing game that sold more than 100,000 copies, according to Castle. A year later, Virgin Interactive Entertainment bought Westwood, which Castle says allowed its founders to finally draw a decent salary and add more talent to the team, including future A Public Fit theater company co-founder Joseph Kucan and award-winning game composer Frank Klepacki.

If Eye of the Beholder put Westwood on the map for RPGs, 1992’s Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis put Westwood on a throne for real-time strategy. Sperry remembers the day Strategic Simulations Inc. executive Chuck Kroegel told him strategy games were dead. Sperry doggedly disagreed. Those games just needed an adrenaline shot, he reasoned.

The developer connected with Virgin Interactive President Martin Alper. “I said to Martin, ‘I’ve got a new idea that the industry has never seen before. I want to do a real-time strategy game.’ And Martin doesn’t even know what I’m talking about, but he goes, ‘OK. That sounds like something Virgin would want to do.’”

The game would be “pretty hardcore,” the young Sperry decided. Fast, different. It would also be a prototype. “The next game after that will be the real breakthrough,” he recalls confidently believing. Alper, who had rights to certain films and books, offered up David Lynch’s Dune as a potential backdrop, and Westwood ran with it.

Dune II established itself as a blueprint for real-time strategy games. The title sold more than 100,000 units, according to Castle, even though game piracy was running rampant. “If we could go back in time and see, I think Dune II might have been played by well over a million people,” Castle says.

As predicted, Westwood delivered its breakthrough game with 1995’s Command & Conquer, which spawned a franchise that has sold more than 30 million copies, according to an Electronic Arts press release.

“You never know if you’re gonna have a million dollar franchise. You don’t know that when you’re working on the game,” Castle says. “But when you feel the entire studio wanting to play the game all the time, when you have to remind people to get back to work and stop playing, you know you’re on to something big.”

Though Westwood was later bought by Electronic Arts—and its LA and Las Vegas teams were merged with DreamWorks to create EA Los Angeles—its legacy lives on. Las Vegas’ Petroglyph Games consists of many former Westwood employees, and other alumni went on to become executives at high-profile game companies like EA, Blizzard and Zenga. Castle still works in games at GreenPark Sports, while Sperry has returned to art and architecture, though he also privately consults on games. Their paths have forked, but there’s still much to look back on with pride, Sperry says.

“It validates that working really hard, having really high standards and being exposed to that culture and that dynamic when we were in our 20s and early 30s, can set the course for so many good things later on.”

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