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.

View more

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.



The Age vision

Shelley remembers a valuable early exercise when they went to a whiteboard and made a list of the attributes of Warcraft and Command & Conquer—what they were doing well, why they'd been successful, which features were great.

"That sort of became our minimal," he said. "We had to do that kind of stuff to be competitive. And then we made another list of what are they not doing that we could do that would make our game different and where we could innovate and give people a new experience."


They came up with a few things here. Besides the historical theme, they wanted multiple victory conditions, randomly generated maps that would lend a sense of "newness" to every match, a feeling of moving through time, and an AI that didn't cheat—that didn't know what the player was doing and had to play by the same rules as its human opponents did.

Rick grappled with the challenge of incorporating a sweeping history of humankind. He wanted to have seven epochs, beginning in the Stone Age and moving through six major technological leaps, each time unlocking different troops. But he was eager to give players a choice: they could speed through history, advancing quickly from age to age, or they could stop in any age and focus on breadth—to research minor technologies that grant bonuses and additional units. It was no easy task.

"I remember drawing the schematics in Vizio, and I got up to [version] 78 or 79 before we happened on the structure that you're familiar with," he recalled.


Sullivan remembers that he had a hand here in paring back the layers to get to the core elements they needed for a compelling design. When he came on board to help out, Rick's tech tree was enormous. It was so big that multiplayer matches would have been infeasible over the Internet, which was just emerging as an alternative way to play games competitively.

"I said, 'If people are going to be playing online, the longest a game should last is about an hour,'" Sullivan recalled. "You can't just find a stranger across the country and start playing a game that may take three, four, five hours, because one of you is going to have to leave before the game finishes."

Flattening the tech tree and stepping down from seven to four ages worked well with the designers' intended approach for the game, anyway. Borrowing from the lesson of Civilization, which had been designed with help from books in the children's section at a public library, Age of Empires would be about what ex-Ensemble people call "Hollywood history."



Hollywood history

"In Hollywood movies, the Vikings always have these horned helmets, while in reality I don't think they had horned helmets," Sullivan explained. "But if it worked for Hollywood, it would work for us." The team was beholden to the game's mechanics and to making it more fun to play—not to strict historical accuracy. "If we had to stretch history a little bit to make that work, we did that," he said.

Hence the fan-favorite priests that chanted "aaiiyoooo wololo" as they made enemy units change sides mid-battle. You won't find that in any history books.


History's real value, from a gameplay perspective, was as a shorthand to help players learn the rules. For that, accuracy was irrelevant. As long as Age of Empires seemed historically authentic, it would be accessible to a much larger and more diverse audience than the dozens of fantasy and science fiction RTS games in development at the same time.

"If you look at a sci-fi RTS, you might not be able to tell, 'Why is this better than that unit?'" said programmer Matt Pritchard. "But when you see, in our game, a guy carrying a big club meet[ing] up with a guy in armor riding on top of an elephant, you have a pretty good idea who's going to come out on the bottom of that encounter."

The guys on horses move faster. The ones with arrows can shoot long distances. It's intuitive.


To accentuate their Hollywood history, Tony asked brothers Stephen and David Rippy to compose elaborate music that would tell a story. They started with a piece on early cave people going out on a hunt.

"We went out into the woods with a bunch of microphones and made a bunch of ridiculous caveman sounds and ran around and threw rocks and broke branches and brought all of this stuff back to my apartment, and we kind of made this rhythmic piece of music where we incorporated all of those sounds," Stephen Rippy said.

"At the end of the day we got it pretty close. You could tell what was going on, and you could tell we're making tools, we're stalking the lion, killing a lion, bringing it back home. And we put it in the game, and it was a complete disaster. It was just a joke."


Instead, they decided to do a lo-fi, percussion- and synth-heavy soundtrack in more of a Hollywood-style, mood-setting role that vaguely approximated what ancient music could have been like. (The low-fidelity synthesizer sound specifically was a response to technical limitations—they wanted something that would sound fine on the terrible MIDI sound cards in many PCs at the time.)

Age's art style would take similar liberties with the source material. Despite having no background in the visual arts, Tony Goodman appointed himself art director and oversaw a small team of artists. He felt that most games at the time were full of drab colors. They were dark and gritty. But—in contrast to its conflict-filled gameplay and in a decision that would be crucial to the game's ultimate success—Age of Empires would favor a bright and saturated color palette. "I wanted Age to be a place that you wanted to be," Tony said.

This happy, sun-drenched world helped the game attract casual players as well as stand out from the competition. Crucially, the look of the game was also the deciding factor for Microsoft signing on as publisher.





Microsoft Games

Ensemble was hardly hurting for resources, given that Age of Empires was a side project for a few people in a company that Tony recalls had around 50 staff. But the realities of software distribution at the time meant the road to self-publishing was fraught with danger, and Ensemble's secure finances meant it couldn't be bullied into a bad deal. So Tony approached a few publishing contacts—including Microsoft product unit manager Stuart Moulder.

They'd met briefly at the Computer Game Developers Conference. Moulder had just given a talk about Microsoft's new graphics API for Windows games (called WinG) and the company's decision to expand its games-publishing efforts.


Bruce Shelley's involvement lent the project instant credibility, and Moulder was intrigued by the idea of a real-time Civilization. Moulder agreed to come in and have a look at the prototype during a trip to Dallas to check on the progress of a different studio's game.

Moulder remembers that the prototype was surprisingly compelling. "It was captivating, and part of what was captivating was that, visually, it was very rich," he said. "It didn't look like other games out there. Other games tended to be stylized and cartoonish. Warcraft is a good example. It's an attractive game, but it's not an attractive world, if you will. It's a war-torn fantasy world."

The Age of Empires prototype, by contrast, was lush and green—attractive "at some gut level," as Moulder describes it.

Microsoft offered to publish the game. Ensemble eventually agreed to a deal that stipulated Microsoft would own the intellectual property rights but also pay a higher-than-standard royalty rate. This was about the best Ensemble could get as a studio with no published games.

Rick remembers that Ensemble went with Microsoft because of the software giant's reputation. "At the time, the saying was, 'They could put a rock inside a box with a game package and that would sell 400,000 copies,'" he said. In time, it became clear just how naive such thoughts were. "Your assumption is that these people are godlike," Rick recalled, "and it turned out they were mortals like us."


The truth is that Microsoft was as clueless as Ensemble. Neither company knew how to operate in the games market, and both were hurriedly finding their feet. "Lucky for us," noted Rick. "They would never have partnered with us if they had known what they were doing."

Microsoft's lack of games-publishing experience also meant it was happy to sit back and let Ensemble make all creative decisions. And Moulder found that he could give the team even more slack because Microsoft's consumer division "didn't care about games." The division felt obligated to participate in games, but it paid little attention to what the tiny games publishing group did. It barely kicked up a fuss when Age of Empires was delayed six months—twice—in the interest of adding polish and improving the multiplayer balancing.

Mandatory playtesting

Tony Goodman actively encouraged a collaborative environment throughout the Age series. Everyone took ownership of every aspect of the game—regardless of which part they directly worked on—and everyone was required to play the game. Daily. Tony had decided this was necessary while he was researching the games industry before Ensemble started on Age 1.

"I had gone around and looked at other game companies, and I had seen these projects where somebody is working on a driver and somebody else is doing the graphics," he said. "I remember I walked up to some artist and talked to this guy, and he's like, 'Yeah, I'm working on—this is a wheel. It goes on, like, a cart.' I said, 'OK, yeah, that's cool. What's it going to do?' 'Oh, I don't know. I'm just the artist.'"


Tony couldn't stand this idea of a developer as a cog in a machine, so he mandated that everyone be involved in daily playtests.

After each playtest, which was observed by at least one member of the design team, everyone would have a meeting to discuss how the game was progressing and to bring up ideas for changes or additions. Sometimes, one of the artists would say they could actually show some concept, visually. Often a programmer would suggest an addition nobody realized was possible, such as when Matt Pritchard, who was handling a rewrite of the graphics system to improve the game's shoddy performance, noted that he could make players have a shared line of sight with all of their allies.

One key design concept, the Wonder buildings (which if completed will grant victory to the builder, provided the building remain standing when a countdown timer runs out), also came up during one of these meetings.


That Wonder victory became a beacon to less-skilled players, which turned out to be critical in exposing some fundamental flaws in the AI code during the final month of development.

Moulder was terrible at multiplayer, but he liked to play single-player matches against the AI and found he could beat it every time. It turned out that his play style—to find an area with enough resources to build a wonder, wall it off, defend that wall, quickly advance through the ages, and then build the wonder—was the perfect strategy to defeat the AI. It hadn't been picked up before because multiplayer taught people not to bother with walls (good human players could bypass or defeat them effortlessly).

Becoming a bestseller

Age of Empires finally came out in October 1997. Microsoft's sales projection was 430,000 lifetime copies, miles beyond the team's own expectations through most of the game's development.

"I remember saying to one of our employees, not too far before Age shipped, I think, 'Well, if we ever sell a million of these things I'll buy you a Ferrari,'" Tony laughed. "Because we were thinking if we could sell a hundred thousand we got ourselves a real business there."


The first million came faster than anyone predicted. Moulder remembers thinking everything was stacked against them—that Age of Empires, the odd-duck historical-RTS from boring old Microsoft, looked set to be crushed by the hotly anticipated sci-fi RTSes Dark Reign and Total Annihilation or perhaps just by the sheer weight of the four dozen RTS games in development at the time. Then Dark Reign just about sank without a trace, and Age managed to stand toe to toe—and ultimately outdo—Total Annihilation on the merits of its more accessible theme and presentation.

Familiarity, when tied to a good design in a hot genre, translated into huge sales. Age of Empires would surpass three million copies sold before the beginning of 2000. Now that they had a hit, it was time to push on with a second game.

The whole team gathered into a room to discuss plans for the sequel. "We talked about periods of time, and we all came back to medieval," Shelley recalled.


"Knights and castles seemed like the next obvious leap. The Middle Ages—after ancient days you have the Middle Ages. And it turned out that that period of time is one of the all time greats for a strategy game. There's so much cool stuff going on with castles and knights. And it was a perfect place to build a game."

But Rick Goodman felt compelled to go in a different direction. He wanted to try something more epic—to go back to that real-time Civilization idea and tackle the entirety of human history rather than a mere subset of it. And, in any case, Ensemble hoped to get the sequel done in a year—which wasn't a good fit for how he worked. Rick decided it would be best if he struck out on his own, so he left to form Stainless Steel Studios and develop Empire Earth.

Castles and knights and development missteps

Rick was gone, Brian Sullivan was busy negotiating a new contract with Microsoft for Age 2's publication, and Bruce Shelley continued to take more of a high-level supervisory, almost-consultancy design role from afar. That meant lead design duties for the sequel fell to Ian Fischer, who had joined Ensemble late in Age 1 development, and Mark Terrano, who had been a programmer on Age 1.

"These guys were kind of new to it, and they did what I think a lot of new designers do, which is they kind of put in everything and the kitchen sink into the design," Sullivan said. "Every cool kind of thing they would put in."


This made for an incoherent game once it was ready for playtesting. "It had tons of these cool new features, but none of them were proven and none of them really worked together very well," Sullivan recalled.

Stuart Moulder likens the early stages of Age 2 to a fan letter they'd received for Age 1: eight barely legible, handwritten pages, front and back, crammed edge to edge with all the things this fan thought should go into the next game. "We laughed at that letter, but it was kind of the approach we took with the design, unfortunately."

Ensemble came up with elaborate new diplomacy and market features, a host of automations, complex unit formations, and much more. Retuning all these features didn't seem to be helping, so the design team ripped them all out. The team then replicated the Age 1 features in the new version of the engine and added the new features one at a time. Each feature would be playtested and refined, and, if it still didn't work, it would be cut from the game.


The end result was a lean game with little to no cruft that meaningfully improved on the original, and Age 2's immense sales reflected this—with two million copies sold in its first few months and a long tail few games can match. In 2005, six years after its initial release, Age 2 sold 675,000 copies—more than most new PC games managed.

Many fans and reviewers criticized Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings for being too safe, however. They felt it didn't change enough. In reality, Age 2 added unit formations, automation of some tedious tasks from Age 1 (building queues, finding idle villagers, hotkey unit groupings, patrols, etc.), defensive building garrisoning, different civs and units, new buildings like castles, market trading, unique units for each civilization, improved graphics and AI, scripted events in single-player scenarios, and more.

But players' expectations were a moving target. The genre was evolving, and computers were rapidly increasing in graphical and computational power. "You actually had to improve the game for people to feel like you just stayed still," said Pritchard.



Changing times

By the time fantasy spinoff Age of Mythology came along in late 2002—with new features and campaigns inspired by Greek, Egyptian, and Norse myths—the real-time strategy genre had irreversibly changed its course. External factors were running amok. Game consoles were on the rise. High-fidelity 3D graphics had become an expectation, and with them most games were getting smaller and more tactical (because the graphics cards couldn't render as many units/bad guys as before). And the whole PC industry was in decline, with piracy on the rise and sales of both hardware and software dropping.

Age's other legacy Age of Empires' greatest legacy may not have anything to do with its continued popularity. "I believe that there were two big successes that had to happen to Microsoft for the Xbox console to happen," said Moulder. "One success was the success of Age of Empires' greatest legacy may not have anything to do with its continued popularity. "I believe that there were two big successes that had to happen to Microsoft for the Xbox console to happen," said Moulder. "One success was the success of DirectX , which showed that we had the chops on the operating system side to deliver technology that made it possible to build great games—and that's what DirectX was." "Then on the other side," he continued, "we had to show that we have the ability as a first-party publisher to deliver a hit game aimed at core gamers—because that's people who buy and play console games." Age of Empires was the game that fulfilled that second criteria. If it hadn't been a hit, Moulder theorizes, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer might have never signed off on the billions of dollars in losses that it takes to enter the console space when Ed Fries—who at the time was vice president of game publishing at Microsoft—pitched the idea in 1998.

Age of Mythology managed to keep that old dance going a little longer. Its flirtations with 3D graphics were enough to keep it looking modern, and both its gameplay additions—notably, hero and mythological creature units plus god/culture-specific abilities—and its fully orchestrated dynamic soundtrack—finally Stephen Rippy could get away from MIDI—were critically acclaimed. One million units were sold worldwide in just four months.

But Age of Empires III needed to stretch further from the series' gameplay roots. Its eight-figure budget ensured that it would look amazing, at least—especially with the way cannonballs would bounce and roll across the world. For Tony Goodman, Age 3 never had much hope of matching the mainstream success of its predecessors, because its timeframe, which charts a course through much of the first wave of European colonization, isn't one of the "big ones"—ancient, medieval, and modern.

"There [are] a million movies done about gladiators and a million movies about knights," he explained, "but there's not that many movies, if you think about it, done about Napoleonics or Revolutionary War/Civil War."


There were missteps on the design side, in any case, with new ideas that didn't feel right for an Age game and that didn't gel together. Unlike in Age 2—in which nearly all early design problems were resolved during development—Age 3 would end up shipping with some of these.

Bruce Shelley recalls a dozen different versions of the big new feature, home cities, which were intended as a kind of meta game. But Tony Goodman doesn't think the feature ever fully worked. "The home city worked more like a big menu," he said. "And the gameplay on it I thought was—it was a good attempt on our designers' part, but it's never anything that I personally was able to connect with."

Problems aside, Age 3 was still rated one of the best games of 2005 and sold more than two million copies—so hardly a failure, just not the mega-hit that its predecessors had been.

Legacy

Age of Empires III was the last Age game that Ensemble Studios worked on. The company had many projects across several genres that were cancelled, at one point or another in development, along with a Halo-themed Xbox 360 RTS called Halo Wars. Then, in January 2009, after a change in management at Microsoft had killed an in-development Halo MMO the previous year, Microsoft decided to close the studio (which they had acquired back in 2001).

Ensemble's closure triggered the formation of five independent studios, including Tony Goodman's Robot Entertainment—which made a deal with Microsoft to work on a fourth Age of Empires game. That became the short-lived free-to-play Age of Empires Online MMORTS, released in August 2011 and put on life support in January 2013, which doubled down on the saturated colors of old with a cartoony look. Looking back, Goodman thinks Online was destined for failure because by then "there just wasn't much left in the RTS genre."


But now, as we enter 2018, Microsoft seems to be throwing its weight behind the Age franchise again. A new mainline Age of Empires game is in development at Relic, the studio behind the critically acclaimed Company of Heroes and Dawn of War series. And the team of Age 2 modders-turned-developers at Forgotten Empires, who were responsible for Age of Empires II HD's three expansions, will soon release Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, a complete overhaul of the original game, under the technical guidance of Matt Pritchard and with a few other Ensemble veterans in the ranks.

Pritchard said Definitive Edition is like the original game in a "mech power suit or something, from a technical standpoint"—such is the extent of enhancements he and the team have made to modernize the codebase, fix longstanding issues, streamline annoying features, and enhance the good stuff, all with care taken to preserve the feel of Age 1 as opposed to the games that came after.

There are still no formations, for instance—that's an Age 2 feature. But now villagers can walk across farms, so no more accidentally trapping them and worrying so much about farm placement. And the designers are leaning on both their own memories of the original and those of the tens of thousands of beta participants to ensure they stay as faithful to the spirit of the original as possible.


If they get it right, there's sure to be an eager audience waiting to snap up Definitive Edition. And not a small audience, either—at the time of writing, SteamSpy estimates Age of Empires II HD's number of active players at around 400,000.

For the original team, this is a wonderful thing. "I have a couple of teenage kids," Sullivan said, "and it's really cool because now I have the whole family playing Age 2 all the time. My wife's not really a computer gamer at all, but she likes Age 2; it's a nice, accessible, fun kind of game, and the kids like it. So here it is—I don't know—15 years later, and we're still playing this game almost weekly."

Bruce Shelley turns to a sports analogy to reflect on Age 1 and 2's enduring popularity. "To me, it's like digital soccer or football or digital baseball," he said. "I mean, baseball has been played in America for 150 years practically. And people still enjoy just watching it. Well, we've built a game that seems to have the same kind of draw that's going to keep people happy for the rest of their lives. And they don't need another game."


"It's a nice testament to all of us who worked on it that we built a game that has that kind of life."

Richard Moss is a writer and technology/games historian based in Melbourne, Australia. His first book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is due out in Spring 2018. He also produces a documentary-style podcast called The Life & Times of Video Games and Ludiphilia, a storytelling podcast about how and why we play. You can follow him on Twitter @MossRC.