Not much about Age of Empires isn't epic.

Over the last 20 years, these epoch-spanning games have starred more than 50 historical civilizations, sales have surpassed more than 20 million units, and a core fanbase of hundreds of thousands has put hours upon hours into playing one series entry or another on a weekly basis. Age of Empires is one of the most influential strategy games of all time. And far from fading into obscurity, as history is wont to do, Empires is now squarely back in the (games-playing) public consciousness.

With a new Age game in development and a " definitive edition " reboot of the original just around the corner—and given our recent foray into the evolution of the entire real-time strategy genre—we thought it'd be interesting to dig into the history of this RTS series. After all, RTS games like Age have introduced millions of impressionable youths to the delights of... well, history.

I spoke to several of the two dozen or so people who worked on the original Age of Empires about how it was made. I asked them to reflect on the series' triumphs, successes, failures, and legacy. This is a compressed retelling of their many stories, focusing on the early days—the building of the foundations that are so central to both the Age story and each of the Age games—but spanning the full breadth of the series' life.









Dawn of Man

The seed of the idea for what would become Age of Empires lay with Tony Goodman, the co-founder of an IT consulting company called Ensemble Corporation.

Goodman loved games. He and his brother Rick had been avid board gamers since they were kids. One day, in 1994, thinking that Microsoft's release of WinG, a DirectX predecessor, had presented a great new opportunity, Tony struck on the idea to do a game as a side project. He didn't know what it would be yet—only that it would be fun to make something and see if it goes anywhere.

"He just came in one day, out of the blue, to my recollection," Rick Goodman told Ars. Tony addressed the engineering team: "Hey, would any of you rather be programming games than databases?"

"I think there was a strange reaction in the room because people didn't know quite how to perceive that," Rick continued. "But it turned out he was serious."

Tony then set about organizing a small gaming cabal at the company. The cabal started to experiment with building an engine, its isometric perspective inspired by SimCity. Tony and programmer Angelo Laudon put together a simple tech demo with a tank. You could drive it around and shoot palm trees—that was about it. Still, the demo solidified the idea that they could make a game.

Now, the team just needed a good idea.

To help come up with a solid concept, Tony brought in Rick and their friend Bruce Shelley, who lived up in Chicago but periodically travelled down to Dallas for short stays. Shelley was the co-creator of both the hit game Sid Meier's Civilization and the business simulation Railroad Tycoon. Tony and his cohorts had met Shelley in a board gaming club when they were teenagers still at school and Shelley was in college.

They spent the next few months discussing countless ideas. Tony suggested something set on a desert island that would have been similar to the television show Lost. But the idea that really got them thinking was a suggestion by another programmer, Tim Deen, to riff off Blizzard's real-time strategy game Warcraft.

They looked at Warcraft and Westwood's Command & Conquer. When Rick suggested they borrow from these, Shelley brought up his past experience with the games and suggested they do a kind of real-time take on Civilization.

"They nodded their head and agreed that maybe, of all the bad ideas, it was the least-worst idea we had," recalled Rick.

"I had an idea that the game would start with the map almost covered with ice, like an Ice Age, and you have little settlers," Shelley said. "And as the ice recedes, resources are uncovered, and you can start building, and then you proceed from there to build the first civilizations on Earth."

Another nine months would go by before the entrepreneurs would complete the first working prototype of the game. They gave it the working title of Dawn of Man. The game had a tree, some grass, and a town center composed of tent huts on a 2D isometric grid. A lone animated caveman would chop wood and carry it to the town center, incrementing a resource counter. There might have also been some deer running around that you could hunt for food.

"It seems like an incredibly long time for such a small prototype," Rick said. "But we started with nothing, and we didn't have any people that really knew how to make a game. So I guess in that sense we were on schedule."

Once this basic proof of concept was sorted out, attention turned to the game's design. Rick Goodman took the lead here, with help from Shelley and another childhood friend of theirs by the name of Brian Sullivan.