DUST: A Short History
Hi everyone, [So]Rice here with a short history of Paolo Parente’s DUST Universe. With Dust Warfare just released, I thought I would explain a bit of how Dust came to be.
The world of Dust is set in an alternate historical world where World War II raged on past 1945. With the discovery of a crashed alien spacecraft in Antarctica, the Germans were able to create giant walking robots with the mineral named Vk which allowed them to halt the Allied offensive at the Battle of the Bulge and defeat the Russians in Stalingrad turning the war in their favor. Eventually the Allies stole the technology from the Axis and created walking tanks of their own. Due to disagreements, Russia split from the Allies and formed the Sino-Soviet Union with China.
The idea of Dust was envisioned by Paolo Parente way back before the creation of the game AT-43. The Dust Universe was pitched to Rackham to be their Sci-Fi range, but unfortunately Rackham did not wish to include Nazis in their game and the Dust concepts were used to create Rackham’s After Trauma: 43 game, more commonly known as AT-43. It is rumored that AT-43 originally stood for Alternative Timeline ’43.
The Dust universe was eventually published in the Dust Wars comic books and featured on posters and skateboards. Long before the creation of the Dust Miniatures, Paolo Parente and Dust Studios created scale model kits of the Dust range in 1:35 and 1:48 scales. With the success of the comics, the Dust line also included action figures and 1:6 models of the popular characters.
After the collapse of Rackham, the board game publisher AEG worked on creating the game Dust Tactics. Just before the debut, AEG sold the rights of Dust Tactics to Fantasy Flight Games (On the Original Core Boxes, the FFG logos are actually stickers and you can peel them off to reveal the AEG logo). Fantasy Flight Games released Dust Tactics at GenCon 2010.
The Original Dust Tactics games retailed for $100 US and contained everything in the picture above (4 Walkers, 6 – 5 Man Infantry Squads, 2 Heroes, Cards, Book, Dice, Terrain Tile, and Obstacles). The setting of Operation Blue Thunder (now referred to as the Original Core Box) was set in Antarctica and pitted an Allied invasion force and a German platoon defending secret base.
After the original success of Dust Tactics, Fantasy Flight Games began to release Expansions for the game. The first was Operation Cyclone which continued the story line from Operation Blue Thunder with the Allied amphibious landings of Antarctica. Operation Cyclone contained additional terrain tiles, 3-d terrain pieces, and 2 new hero models, Rosie and Manfred. Along with Operation Cyclone, the Original Core Box minis were released as individual squads with an additional Medium Walker configuration for both armies.
Operation See Lowe, more commonly known as Sea Lion was the invasion of Great Britain by Germany. Operation See Lowe introduced the heroes OZZ 117, the first armor 3 model and Markus, a genetically enhanced Gorilla fighter. Individual kits released a long with See Lowe the first power armored Allied soldiers, the Grim Reapers and the Gorillas for the Axis. Other kits included Tank Busters and Zombies.
After Operation See Lowe, Fantasy Flight Games pulled the Original Core Set, and released the Dust Tactics Revised Core Set. This set contained 2 heroes, three squads for each side, and two light walkers. Much to the dismay of fans, the cardstock terrain tiles were replaced with a poster map. The Revised Core Set retails for $80.
It is worth noting that Dust models come pre-assembled and pre primed. Also there is a Premium Edition of the figures available. Premium Edition models come pre-painted for $40 (regular squads retail for $15, however the SSU Units retail for $20 per squad). The Premium Edition Models are painted much better than any other games.
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