Technosoft released Herzog Zwei for the Mega Drive in Japan in 1989, reaching the rest of the world the following year, and its historical importance is hard to overstate: it arrived three years before Dune II and is widely credited as the first true real-time strategy game. Rather than a mouse cursor, the player commands a single transforming mech that switches between a fast fighter jet and a walking battle robot. That mech carries newly built units to the front, captures neutral outposts to expand income and production, and fights directly when a position needs saving. Orders are issued by dropping units with a standing behaviour, so the battle continues whether or not the player is watching a given sector. Two players can face each other in split-screen, which is where the game is at its sharpest. Commercially it went largely unnoticed, yet its ideas about real-time production, base capture and resource control run straight through the RTS and MOBA genres that followed.