Age of Empires

Bruce Shelley left MicroProse at the end of 1992 after co-designing Railroad Tycoon and Civilization with Sid Meier. In 1995, Tony Goodman – an old friend from a board game club at the University of Virginia – asked him to join a new studio in Dallas called Ensemble. Goodman’s pitch to Microsoft, when the studio was ready to show what they had, was partly that Shelley had co-designed Civilization, which turned out to be the right name to drop. Microsoft was new to publishing games and struggling to be taken seriously. Neither party had much to lose.

The game spent its early development under the working title Dawn of Man, and the team was figuring out what it was while building it. Shelley described the design brief clearly: take Civilization’s historical content and wrap it in real-time strategy gameplay like Warcraft and Command & Conquer. Very few people at Ensemble had made a game before. Dave Pottinger handled the AI. Tony Goodman handled the artwork. Stephen Rippy handled music and stayed in that role across the entire series. The studio and the game were built at the same time, which is not an efficient way to ship a product but is a reasonable explanation for why Age of Empires arrived with software bugs that required patching.

The game released on October 15, 1997, under its final name, covering ancient history from the Stone Age through the Iron Age across twelve playable civilisations. The historical setting was a deliberate choice to stand out from the fantasy and science fiction settings that dominated the RTS genre at the time, and reviewers noted it positively. GameSpot criticised what it called a confused design. Computer and Video Games praised the single and multiplayer. One reviewer called it digital cocaine. The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences named it Computer Strategy Game of the Year for 1998. It debuted at number seven on US PC sales charts in October 1997, outsold Total Annihilation and Dark Reign combined over the same period, and shipped over 650,000 copies globally by December 12. The series eventually reached 20 million units sold before Ensemble closed.

The four-age progression – Stone, Tool, Bronze, Iron – structured the game’s pacing by gating units and technologies behind advancement requirements. Moving up an age cost resources and time, which meant committing to advancement while remaining militarily vulnerable, or staying in an earlier age longer to build economic and military strength before pushing forward. Each of the twelve civilisations had specific bonuses: faster resource gathering, stronger unit types, cheaper research. The combinations were wide enough to encourage different approaches without the factions feeling mechanically distinct at the level the series would later achieve. The technology tree required prioritising upgrades against limited resources, which kept the economic layer in constant tension with military demands.

Shelley’s description of the development philosophy was direct: prototype early, design by playing, polish. The team researched historical content mostly from children’s library books, on the basis that the goal was player enjoyment rather than academic accuracy. Parents later told Ensemble that their children were reading about ancient Greece because of the triremes, or looking up medieval history because the game had taught them what a trebuchet was. Shelley considered that an acceptable outcome.

The Rise of Rome expansion came out in October 1998, adding four civilisations including the Romans. Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings followed in 1999, shifted the setting to the medieval period, and is generally considered the stronger game – Shelley described the sequel as an opportunity to apply everything learned making the first one, with a better subject, a better publisher relationship, and expert players on staff for testing. Microsoft entered serious acquisition discussions with Ensemble after Age of Empires II rather than after the original. The deal closed in May 2001 for a reported figure well above $100 million, which had been Goodman’s stated floor since founding the studio. Ensemble was closed in January 2009 after completing Halo Wars, its only console title and its last. Shelley expressed shock at the closure in his final blog post and did not join any of the entities that formed from the studio’s remains.

The Definitive Edition remaster released in February 2018, updating graphics and AI while keeping the original design intact. The series is still active under Microsoft.