History of the Age of Empires: “It was the best of the worst among our ideas.”

In Age of Empires , almost everything was epic.

Over the past 20 years, 50 Civilizations managed to appear in the “Epoch of Empires” , the total sales of the series exceeded 20 million copies, and the army of hundreds of thousands of fans spent countless hours playing, with many of them playing it almost every week. Age of Empires is one of the most influential strategies of all times and peoples. And today, instead of going to the dustbin of history (which usually happens sooner or later with all the old games), the Empire finally regains consciousness and returns to its fans.

In connection with the development of a new part of the famous strategy, as well as the imminent release of the first edition of the first part, it's time to take a fresh look at the history of creating one of the most famous real-time strategies. In the end, it was thanks to her that millions of impressionable youths decided to finally get acquainted with the story.
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Arstechnica spoke with the creators of the original Age of Empires about how the development of the famous game took place, and they frankly told about their successes and failures. We offer you a brief retelling of what we were able to learn; it will be primarily about the first parts of Age of Empires , which laid the foundation of the series, but we will also recall the later games of Ensemble Studios .

Dawn of man

The impulse that helped bring the idea of Age of Empires to life was born in the mind of Tony Goodman, co-founder of the consulting IT company Ensemble Corporation .

Goodman loved the game. He and his brother Rick have been board game fans since childhood. When Microsoft announced WinG , the predecessor of DirectX , in 1994, Goodman thought this was a great opportunity to grab onto - his company had to make a game as a side project. He did not know what this game would be - I just thought it would be interesting to try to make a game and see what happens.

As Rick Goodman will later recall, “He just came to the engineers once and for no reason asked, do any of you want to do game programming instead of databases?”

The room reacted with silence, because no one understood how to treat the boss’s rather strange proposal. As it turned out, asking this question, he was absolutely serious.

The next step Tony was to organize a small team of "conspirators" inside the company. These people began experimenting with the development of the engine, whose isometric perspective was inspired by SimCity . Tony, together with the programmer Angelo Loudon, made a simple tehnodemku, in which you could ride a tank and shoot at the palm trees - the game is still nothing skillful. However, a small demo reinforced them with the idea that they would be able to make the game.

So, a good idea is all that was left for the team to find at that time.

To come up with a decent concept, Tony recruited Rick and his friend Bruce Shelley, who lived in Chicago, but occasionally briefly visited Dallas to work on the game. Shelley co-wrote Sid Meier's Civilization smash hit and Railroad Tycoon . Tony and her brother met Shelley in the club board games even when they were schoolchildren, and Shelley had already studied at the university.

They spent the next few months discussing ideas that had no end in sight. Tony offered to make a game reminiscent of the Lost series, which would have taken place on an uninhabited island. The idea that hooked them was a suggestion by another programmer, Tim Dean - Tim proposed to make a Blizzard clone of the Warcraft strategy.

Together they played Warcraft and its “original source” - Command & Conquer by Westwood . When Rick offered to borrow ideas from these games, Shelley intervened - he already had a wealth of experience working on games, and it was necessary to do “Civilization” in real time.

“They nodded their heads and agreed. It was the best of the worst ideas we could think of, ”Rick would later tell.

“I had this idea: when the game starts, almost the entire map is covered with ice - well, something like the Ice Age - and you have very few settlers. As the ice recedes, resources open up and you can begin construction. Then become the founder of the very first civilizations on Earth, ”says Shelley.

It will take nine long months before they manage to complete the first playable game prototype. They will give her the working title of Dawn of Man . The whole game consisted of wood, grass and a town center consisting of several tents on a two-dimensional isometric grid. The lonely (but animated) caveman chopped wood and carried firewood to the city center, the resource counter increased. Sometimes a deer ran alongside, which could be hunted for food.

“It may seem that for such a long development period the prototype was too small. However, we started from scratch, and none of us knew how to really develop a game. As for me, we are well within our schedule, ”recalls Rick.

As soon as the developers were convinced that the concept of the game turned out to be working, they switched to game design. Here, Rick Goodman took over the leadership; Shelly and Brian Sullivan, another childhood friend, began to help.

Concept

First of all, it was decided to perform the following exercise. The creators of the future Age of Empires needed to analyze the success of Warcraft and Command & Conquer : what these games did right, why they were so successful, what features were made best of all.

The resulting list was the starting point for the team and the minimum list of requirements for their own game. In order for their game to get a chance of success, they had to do everything at least as good. In addition, they compiled another list of what they could do and only they, what innovations they could bring to the genre and what new sensations they could give to players.

Here they managed to find some interesting ideas. In addition to the historical theme, they decided to make several different winning conditions ( victory conditions ), a generator of random cards (which would give freshness to each new game game), a sense of real time, and also an AI who would not try to read - who would have no idea about what a player does and would be forced to play by the same rules as his human opponent.

Rick faced a challenge: the game had to manage to cram the entire history of mankind. He wanted to make seven epochs, the first of which would be a stone age, followed by six technological leaps, each of which would open up new units. However, he wanted to give players a choice: players could either concentrate on rapid progress in new eras, or stop in any era and go to “breadth” - explore less significant technologies that gave bonuses and additional units. This task was not an easy one.

As he will recall later, "I drew diagrams in Visio, and managed to get to 78 or 79 revisions before I got the structure of the technology development tree that you are all familiar with today."

Sullivan immediately realized that the resulting technology tree should be mercilessly cut to the most basic elements - it was so huge that you would have to abandon the multiplayer, while playing on the Internet was just beginning to gain momentum. Sullivan insisted that for an online game the maximum time for one match should be about an hour, because the prospect of playing with a stranger from the other side of the country for 3-5 hours meant that sooner or later one of the players would leave without finishing current match.

Simplifying the technology tree and reducing the number of epochs, the designers finally arrived at a working version. Following the precepts of Sid Meier, who, while working on Civilization, drew inspiration from children's books on history from the public library, the authors of Age of Empires decided to rely on what the former Ensemble employees call Hollywood History.

Hollywood story

“In any movie filmed in Hollywood, the Vikings roam in horned helmets; in reality, as far as I know, they never wore helmets with horns, ”Sullivan indulges in explanations. "But if it worked in Hollywood, it could have worked in our case."

The team’s priority was game mechanics and player entertainment, rather than strict historical accuracy. "When we had to sacrifice realism in order to play it became more interesting, then we went this way." This is where the cult priests came into the world, repeating "wololo" as the enemy's units lured away to their side right in the middle of the battle. In the textbooks of history about this will not read!

From the point of view of gameplay, the historical knowledge of the players should have helped them to understand the rules of the game, no more; There was no question of any accuracy here. While Age of Empires seemed to the players historically authentic, it was understandable to a much larger audience than dozens of fantasy and fantastic RTS, which then filled the market.

“When you play sci-fi RTS, it’s not always clear which unit is better,” says programmer Matt Pritchard. "But when a guy with a baton goes against an elephant, it is not hard to guess who, after the meeting, will have to be scraped off the floor."

Riders move faster on the map. Units that have arrows, I can shoot at long distances. Everything is simple and clear, and guessing is not difficult.

To focus on the Hollywood roots of the historicity of the game, Tony asked the brothers Stephen and David Rippi to play music that can tell the story by itself. They began with a theme in which ancient cavemen went hunting.

“We went into the forest, armed with microphones, depicted cavemen, galloped like crazy, threw stones and broke branches ... Then they went to my house and brought it all together into one rhythmic composition,” recalls Stephen Rippi. satisfied with the result. It was possible to understand what is happening - here the primitive man prepares his instrument, now hunts down the lion, kills him and brings him home. And then we put all this in the game. It turned out a complete hell, of course, chickens to laugh. "

I had to go the other way and make a lo-fi soundtrack in the Hollywood style that would sound like a modern idea of ​​how ancient music could be performed. Alas, the sound quality of the soundtrack had to be underestimated for those who continued to use terrible sound cards at home, supporting MIDI, which were then in many PCs.

A similar situation repeated with art. Despite the absence of any experience and education in art, Tony Goodman appointed himself art director and commanded a small team of artists. It seemed to him that most of the games of that time looked gray and dark. Therefore, Age of Empires, it was decided to make bright and full of saturated colors. “I wanted you to want to live in this game,” Tony says today.

This happy world, filled with the sun, helped to attract the attention of ordinary "casual" players to the game and stand out among the games of competitors. It is important to note that the appearance of the game was a decisive factor for Microsoft, which eventually became the publisher of the game.

Microsoft Games

Given that Age of Empires was still just a side project for several of the company's 50 employees, Ensemble did not experience any special problems or the need to leverage additional resources. However, the time of mass digital distribution has not yet come, and the attempt to self-publish the game could have ended in failure. By the way, with the finances the company was all right, and they did not need to get involved with the first publisher. So when Tony decided to go to the publishers, and among his contacts was Stuart Mulder, a product manager at Microsoft, and it was decided to go to him.

They met at the Computer Game Developers Conference. Mulder spoke on it with a report on a new graphics API called WinG , which Microsoft was preparing for Windows ; at the same time he told that the company was going to seriously engage in the publication of games.

Participation in the Bruce Shelley project immediately gave the project a serious weight, and Mulder liked the idea of ​​making Civilization in real time. Mulder agreed to visit a studio in Dallas and look at the prototype of the game.


Mulder today recalls that the prototype of the game looked surprisingly convincing. “The game was exciting; for the most part, thanks for it was worth her visual style, which was very "rich". She did not look like all the other games of the time, which were too stylized and "cartoon". A good example of what I'm talking about is Warcraft ; fascinating game that looks far less attractive. It was a war-torn fantasy world. ”

On the contrary, the prototype Age of Empires was lush and attracted by its bright colors - downright "took over the gills," as Mulder described the game.

Microsoft offered to be the publisher of the game. Ensemble bargained with them on the fact that all intellectual property rights were transferred to Microsoft , but in return, the authors of the game received a percentage of royalties higher than accepted. Such conditions were for Ensemble the maximum of what they could in principle bargain for - after all, the company had no games published.

Rick recalls that one of the arguments in favor of choosing Microsoft as a publisher was the company's reputation. “Then it was said that they could put a cobblestone in a box from under the game, and it would still be sold in an edition of 400,000 copies.” Over time, it came to understand how naive this assumption was. “It seemed to us that people from Microsoft are equal to gods - and they, alas, just like we were mere mortals,” Rick notes.

After all, in truth, Microsoft , like Ensemble , did not understand much in games and their marketing, so they had to grope forwards together. “In fact, for us it was for the best. If they had even a little understanding of what they were doing, they would never have become our partners, ”adds Rick.

Another positive effect of the lack of Microsoft experience in publishing games was that they happily withdrew from the game, giving Ensemble the freedom of creative choice. Having scouted about this, Mulder decided not to “strain” the developers too much, because the user division of Microsoft "was not interested in the game at all." Therefore, no one was concerned that Age of Empires was decided to be postponed for six months in order to further “polish” and improve the multiplayer balance - and this happened twice.

Mandatory Playtesting

Tony Goodman always actively supported joint development, and the time spent working on the Age series was no exception. Everyone was responsible for all aspects of the game - no matter what he was working on directly - and everyone had to play it. Daily. The need for this requirement, Tony came after carefully acquainted with the game development industry. Before starting work on his game, he wanted to learn how the rest do it.

“I went through other gaming companies and looked at how they work. Often in projects one person was responsible for the gameplay, and the other for graphic assets. Once I approached some artist and spoke to him, he told me “Well, I work on this wheel, we will screw it to this, like her, trolley.” I answered, “OK, cool, but why? What do you need? "" Oh, I do not know, I'm just an artist. "

The idea that the developer is only a gear in a huge machine, Tony did not actively like. Therefore, he decided that everyone should take part in daily playtests.

After each session of similar testing, which was followed by at least one member of the game designers team, everyone got together and discussed the progress in game development, and also shared fresh ideas and comments. Sometimes, some of the artists offered to translate the idea into a visual concept right there. Often, programmers suggested ideas about the possibility that game designers didn’t think about the implementation - for example, once Matt Pritchard, who was rewriting the graphic subsystem of the game to improve its performance, noticed that he could have made the player see all the same the most that his allies see.

One of the key game design concepts was the “miracles” buildings (when built, they gave the builder a victory if the building could survive while the timer was running), and this idea also appeared during one of these meetings.

The victory with the construction of "miracles" was a real salvation for inexperienced players, and also got out sideways in the last month of game development, when it revealed fundamental flaws in the AI ​​code.

Mulder was not lucky in multiplayer, but he liked to play matches against AI, and over time he noticed that he wins whenever he sits down to play. It turned out that his style of playing - to find a zone with enough resources to build a “miracle”, surround it with a wall, protect this wall, quickly move forward through epochs and then build a “miracle” - was an ideal strategy against AI. Why did everyone miss this flaw? It turned out that everyone else was playing multiplayer at that time, and building walls there was no use - experienced players coped with walls without any problems, managing to bypass or destroy them.

Best-seller

Age of Empires finally came out in October 1997. Microsoft planned that in its entire life the game would sell in the amount of no more than 430,000 copies. In truth, the expectations of the developers themselves were even more modest.

“I remember, as one of our employees said shortly before the game’s release,“ Well, if we sell a million copies, I’ll buy you a Ferrari, ”Tony laughs. “We thought that if we miraculously managed to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, we would be serious guys."

The first million came earlier than any of them expected. According to the memoirs of the developers, everything was against them - Age of Empires had to compete with such heavyweights of the RTS genre as Dark Reign and Total Annihilation , not to mention the good fifty of all the rest of the RTS with a smaller caliber, which were then in development. To their surprise, the release of Dark Reign had absolutely no effect, and the game quickly sunk into oblivion, and with the great Total Annihilation the game went on a par - and eventually overtook it.

Familiar gameplay, a popular genre for its time, good game design turned into a resounding success and incredible sales. Age of Empires sold over three million copies before the year 2000 began. Now that Ensemble had a hit on its hands, it was time to move on and take up the next game.

When the whole team got together to discuss plans for a sequel, they agreed on one thing - the action of Age of Empires II was postponed to the Middle Ages.

“Knights and castles seemed to be the obvious choice for a step forward. Middle Ages? Well, yes, after the Ancient World come the Middle Ages. As it turned out, this period of time is one of the best that you can choose for a strategy. With knights and castles you can come up with so many cool ideas - this time is just perfect as a setting in which you can make a game. ”

But Rick Goodman wanted to go in a different direction. He wanted more epic; he was attracted by the idea to make the very “Civilization” in real time, to fit the entire history of mankind in one game. And Ensemble was going to cope with the development of Age of Empires 2 in one year. Rick did not like it, so he left the company, founded Stainless Steel Studios and made another game - Empire Earth .

Castles and knights, as well as developers miscalculations

Rick left, Brian Sullivan was busy signing a new contract with Microsoft to publish the second Epoch on more favorable terms, and Bruce Schully moved away from the rest, taking the role of consultant. All this meant that the main designers of the project were people who joined the team at the end of the development of Age of Empires 1 : they were Jan Fisher and Marc Terrano.

“These guys were all new, and so they did what most newbie designers do - they tried to stuff all the cool ideas into the game that came to their mind,” says Sullivan.

By the time the game was ready for gaming testing, its individual parts did not converge with each other. "A lot of cool new features, but none of them are well thought out, and features do not interact with each other," he recalls.

Stuart Mulder compares the early stages of the development of Age of Empires 2 with the letter they received from a fan about the first game: these were eight completely unreadable sheets, written in fine, small handwriting on both sides, in which the fan of the game wrote in detail to the developers the details of what should was to go on. “I remember, then we laughed at this letter; However, alas, as practice has shown, in the end we did just that with the design of the new game, ”Mulder recalls with sadness.

Ensemble was able to bring a lot of new things into the game: a complex system of diplomacy, a market, ways to automate actions, complex constructions for groups of units, and much more. Attempts to process them with a file didn’t lead to anything good, so I had to act radically - the designers removed absolutely all the features from the game, then repeated all the functionality of the first part on the new version of the engine, and then added one feature at a time. Each similar feature was tested and brought to the ideal - and if this did not happen, then it was cut out of the game.

The final result of their efforts was a compact game, in which practically there was nothing superfluous or unsuccessful, and which really was better than the original. Sales confirmed this conclusion - the milestone of two million copies was taken just a few months after the release, and the post-release “tail” turned out to be such that the rest of the games can only be envied. In 2005 alone, 6 years after its release, the second Age of Empires sold 675,000 copies - and that was more than most new releases on the PC that year.

Many fans and critics criticized Age of Empires II for being too much like the original; it seemed to them that the developers decided to play it safe, and therefore there were not enough changes in the game.Actually, this was not the case, because Age of Empires II not only added new gameplay mechanics, civilizations and units, but also became a total upgrade of the first part in almost everything: automation of routine tasks, AI and graphics.

But the players' expectations continued to grow. The genre evolved, computers became faster and faster, and with them grew the demands of the players. According to Pritchard, "We have really seriously improved the game, but it seemed to the players that we are standing still."

Time for a change

By the time the fantasy spin-off Age of Mythology hit the shelves (it happened at the end of 2002; the game itself was inspired by Greek, Egyptian and Norwegian myths), the strategy genre had changed a lot. Everything went out of control: game consoles gained popularity, high-quality 3D graphics became a prerequisite for any game, and strategies became less ambitious and went into tactics (one of the reasons was that video cards could not render as many 3D units how many once contrived in 2D). The entire PC industry has declined, piracy has grown, and sales of hardware and software have fallen.

And yet, Age of Mythologyallowed developers to win some more time. Her flirting with 3D graphics was enough to make the game look modern; successful innovations appeared in the game, such as heroes, mythological creatures and divine powers; plus MIDI took the soundtrack, recorded by the orchestra. In just 4 months, the game was able to disperse with a circulation of 1 million copies.

Age of Empires III was supposed to go even further away from its “gameplay” roots. Trikvel's budget exceeded ten million dollars, and there was no doubt that visually the game would look just great. However, for Tony Goodman, it was obvious that the third "Age of Empires"never succeed in the mainstream because of the unsuccessful choice of the time interval that came on the first wave of colonization of America by Europeans, which did not belong to any of the most popular epochs: antiquity, medieval and modern times.

“There have been infinitely many films about gladiators and knights, however, far fewer films are devoted to the war with Napoleon or the topic of the American Civil War,” Tony said.



In terms of game design, certain mistakes were made, since some of the fresh ideas were felt out of place and did not fit in with any other game. Unlike the second part, where almost all the problems that arose with the design, could be detected and eliminated at the development stage, Age of Empires 3 had to release the way it turned out.

Bruce Shelley recalls that for the most notable feature of the new game - "home cities" - at least a dozen different implementation options were made. Cities were supposed to be a meta-game, but according to Tony Goodman, this “feature” never worked in full force, remaining a potentially interesting design idea, which in the final game was reduced to the level of a large beautiful menu.

However, despite all its flaws, Age of Empires 3 became one of the best games of 2005 and sold over 2 million copies - it is difficult to call the game a failure with such and such sales; rather, she could not become the same mega-hit as her predecessors.

Heritage

Age of Empires III was the last game in the Epoch series, on which Ensemble Studios worked. The company was developing several projects of different genres that were at different stages of development - and all of them were canceled, including a new RTS for Xbox 360 called Halo Wars . Then, after changes in the management of Microsoft in January 2009, it was decided to finally close the studio, which Microsoft bought in 2001.

The closure of Ensemble Studios led to the emergence of five independent studios. One of them was Robot Enteratinment under the leadership of Tony Goodman, who made a deal with Microsoft to develop the fourth game in the seriesAge of Empires . Later, it turned into a free-to-play game Age of Empires Online in the MMRTS genre, which was released in August 2011 and existed until January 2013, which was a fairly short time. Looking back, Goodman believes that the failure of this game was predetermined from the very beginning - “there was simply nothing more to do in the RTS genre.”

The most interesting thing is that now, in early 2018, Microsoft is again trying to put the once great franchise on its feet. The company Relic, recently celebrated Dawn of War 3 , which received mixed reviews of players, today is developing the next full game in the series. The company of former modders Age of Empires 2 , gathered under the flag of Forgotten Empiresand released as many as three additions to Age of Empires 2 HD , will soon release an updated version of the very first part of the series, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition , which is being worked on by Matt Pritchard and several other veterans from Ensemble.

Bruce Shelley, one of the game designers of the original game, today compares the popularity of AoE 1 and AoE 2 with sports. “As for me, the game resembles digital football or digital baseball. In America, baseball has been played for 150 years, and people still love to watch the game. And we seem to have made a game that has a similar property - people will enjoy playing it for the rest of their lives. And they do not need any other game, it will be enough of this. "

Then he adds: “Everyone who worked on the game today is pleased to know that our legacy has been such a game that remains with you forever.”