Published , by David Craddock
Published , by David Craddock
Ahead of 'Bet on Black: How Microsoft and Xbox Changed Pop Culture,' our next Long Read scheduled for publication this Friday, Nov. 13, Shacknews is celebrating all things Xbox with articles and video features every day this week.
IN THE AGE OF 1995, two factions battled for dominance. WarCraft II's orcs and humans teamed up with Command & Conquer's Global Defense Initiative (GDI) and the Brotherhood of Nod to compete against the likes of Sid Meier's Civilization II for consumer dollars.
Outside the arena of consumerism, the two factions may have been friends. All that separated them was structure. To many, the Civ series represented the apotheosis of turn-based strategy gaming. Players could take their time thinking through every possible move, like a game of chess. The faster pace of real-time strategy games like WarCraft II and C&C drove the RTS subset of strategy games to significantly higher sales compared to turn-based games. Great satisfaction comes from coming up with a brilliant plan, being forced to scuttle it when enemies launch a surprise attack on your supply line, and turning the tide while your workers--those who survived the assault--hasten to repair your burning city.
Turn-based games hold tremendous merit, too. The average session of Civ II is likely to last longer than a game of WarCraft II, and being able to think several moves ahead and outwit your opponents is just as satisfying as pivoting in real-time.
As WarCraft II, Command & Conquer, and Civilization II continued to sell, a small group of business programmers asked the obvious question: Why not both?
Like most siblings, Rick and Tony Goodman grew up close and went their separate ways as their adult lives took shape. A fortuitous series of events from their childhood caused ripple effects that reached years into their future.
RICK GOODMAN (design lead, Age of Empires): I was always into board games and I'd drag Tony into them. He was less into them than I was, but he was a worthy opponent. One of the very first board games I played that wasn't a typical board game was Avalon Hill's Blitzkrieg, a hex-based game about World War II. I was like, holy cow, this is a real game. There was armor, heavy bombers, medium bombers, a big board. I said, "I can do this," and failed miserably at copying it to create another WWII game. It's just a complex set of rules and takes years to master board-game-creation skills. As soon as I got into board games, I was modifying and creating my own board games. I could tell right away that the creative aspect was particularly intriguing to me, but I was never any good at it. The things I created in the board game space were just practice. I never showed any talent at it whatsoever.
Tony and I went to separate universities and on our separate paths. I went into accounting; he dropped out of college for various reasons. Then he started a consulting company and I joined that company. That's where it started for us. I was doing programming, and he was running the company. I was one of his employees. I played computer games like Civilization. Tony was less into gaming, but he enjoyed the culture and appreciated that game. One day, he walks into work, assembles the team of database programmers, and says, "Would any of you guys rather be making games than database applications?"
I think people were caught off-guard. We were looking around the room, like, "Is this a trick question?" But I raised my hand, and Angelo Laudon raised his. Tony was serious. He said, "I'm going to pull you guys aside and we'll make a game." I thought that was awesome. I said, "Okay! What kind of game?" None of us had any idea.
BRUCE SHELLEY (co-designer, Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon, Sid Meier's Civilization, Age of Empires): I liked playing games as a kid. I looked forward to rainy days because I could do what I wanted to do: I read a lot, and I played games. I don't want you to get the idea I was a complete nerd. I was in Boy Scouts and played sports in high school and college. I played a lot of historic games, wargames. I subscribed to Strategy and Tactics magazine; it came with a game every couple of months. I started buying Avalon Hill games. I went away to college and we played a few games there. Not much, but we played Risk and Stratego with fraternity brothers.
I got out of college and I continued to play those games pretty much on my own. I met some people in northern Virginia who played, but the big breakthrough was going to college at UVA. They had a really good game club there. We met once a week and played a lot of different kinds of games. We even played roleplaying games. One of the guys in the club started a roleplaying game based on Lord of the Rings. We sort of formed our own game company out of that club called Iron Crown Enterprises. We wrote to the Tolkien family and got what we thought was permission to building roleplaying games based on Lord of the Rings.
We published rulebooks and adventures, and I was involved with that. I was doing some writing for them part-time; we were all working part-time. I went to trade shows for Iron Crown and met guys in the board game industry, and did some work for free for SSI in New York City, which published Strategy and Tactics magazine that I already subscribed to. I did some playtesting for them and research on their games for free. They had a job opening and I applied for it. They gave me the job, but the guy who hired me got fired before I started. The job turned into a three-month internship. I took it anyway. I lived in the Bronx with a fraternity brother and took the bus down to Manhattan. I developed a resume by helping to build a wargame for them, but the job went away.
I applied to other board game companies I knew: Avalon Hill and Games Workshop out in Illinois. Avalon Hill eventually wrote to me and had me come in for an interview, but they didn't write right away, so I went back to Charlottesville and took a job as a waiter. Avalon Hill offered me a job and I started there around January 1982. I worked there a little over six years, I guess. I liked the games and the people I worked with, but there was no money in it, really. They weren't paying much and I decided I couldn't do this for the rest of my life. Before I found something else to do, I found out MicroProse was based on the north side of the city, just in the suburbs. I wrote to them, and it took a year, but they finally had me in for an interview and they offered me a job the next day.
After a year or so there, Sid Meier asked me to be his number-two guy. I did all the things he didn't want to do. I was his playtester, his test manager, his writer, his sounding board, the guy who communicated with the sales team and managers and stuff. Anything he didn't want to do, I did; that was an incredibly rich experience for me and got me into computer games.
RICK GOODMAN: We sat in our office and did consulting during the day. Around five or six, we'd do game programming until nine, 10 o'clock. We had some long days because we were still billable, but we were willing to make the investment to make this transition happen, and it eventually did. Angelo is working with Tony and me now, and is just a brilliant programmer who can do anything. We didn't know that at the time, but in hindsight, he was the perfect guy in the right place when nobody knew what they were doing. He was the only reason we could do anything at all. He could carry any load we put on his shoulders.
I love programming. It makes me feel great. It makes me feel great to use a logical, analytical language to solve problems. I worked alongside Angelo for a year and realized he was three times faster than I was, and I would never be anywhere near his quality and expertise. I had to make a decision: This was not going to be a career I could do. He was just too good. I had to find something else to do. When his hand went up, I envisioned my role as being a designer rather than a programmer. Luckily for me, there was this opportunity.
By this time, Tony had hired a second engineer and one or two artists. Scott was on board; Brad was on board. We knew we had no idea what we were doing. I said, "You know, when I was 16 and you were 12, we went to the University of Virginia's board game club. That's where we met Bruce Shelley when he was a student. Now Bruce Shelley is a MicroProse-credit game designer. He's worked with Sid Meier. Maybe--maybe--he's not busy." [laughs]
BRUCE SHELLEY: We had a little conference inside MicroProse. They brought in teams that worked for us in other parts of the world, and people in the company gave presentations. Sid gave one on game design, and it was the first time I'd ever heard anybody discuss game design as a discipline. To me, it was really eye-opening. He made one comment that's stayed with me: "A game is a series of interesting decisions." I've been mulling that ever since. I've modified the definition a little bit and asked him within the last three or four years if that still held true for me. He said it does. I think it's not enough of a definition, but it's made me think quite a bit about what goes in when you're playing a game.
There were other things I'd learned but hadn't codified. One critical thing was prototype early and design by playing. I worked on board games where somebody had built games out of systems that were very cleverly designed, or so they thought. But no one had played it much until it was published. I thought it had a really small audience: The people who liked it, loved it; but the average person didn't get it. I thought, This is a mistake. Even working with Sid on Civilization, he and I were the only ones who played it for months. He didn't want anyone else playing it, so he and I played every day and talked about it, and he'd recode. I thought that was fun for me, but still a mistake.
What I took away from that was we still want to prototype early and play every day so we can make adjustments, but it's also important to have a lot of eyes on the product, people from all different skill types and interests. You have to break your games as you make them so someone doesn't break it after they're published.
I worked at MicroProse from '88 to '92. I got married and my wife was an executive at a large bank. She gave up a transfer and left the company so I could keep my job for a while, but she had trouble finding work in the Baltimore-Washington area. When she was offered a terrific job in Chicago, I left MicroProse. The Christmas party in 1992 was essentially my last day before we moved to the Chicago area. I was in the writing business for a while. I was a writer and wrote strategy guides for a couple of years for a publisher in California. They'd done strategy guides for games I'd worked on, and I asked if I could write some guides. They hired me and I wrote three, four, maybe five books.
RICK GOODMAN: Tony called him up and said, "Are you busy?" He said, "No. I'm not doing anything." He was just writing strategy guides, which wasn't stable. His wife knew he'd probably amount to nothing, so working with us, he could save face. [laughter] By the way, he has saved face.
BRUCE SHELLEY: Going back to that game club at the University of Virginia, the people who played on Friday nights weren't only undergrads, grad students, and faculty. Townspeople and children of people in town and faculty played, too. There were too brothers, Tony and Rick Goodman, whose father was on the faculty at UVA. I met them at the club. They were teenagers, and I taught them how to play Squad Leader, an Avalon Hill game.
I must have treated them with respect and made an impression on them. Tony said years later he remembered me playing a board game with a yellow pad next to it. As I played the game, I was taking notes on what I'd do to make it better. He was impressed by that. He hadn't considered that the game could be changed.
RICK GOODMAN: Tony's into games on a psychological level, but I didn't see him play a lot of games. He doesn't do the detailed design, but he likes the adventure of creating stuff. The first game I ever made was Age of Empires, and I had no experience. I was an accountant and a programmer. What I felt was, gosh, I have no idea what I'm doing.
BRUCE SHELLEY: Fast forward 15 years at least. Tony Goodman is in his 30s and has a business in Dallas. He's building software for banks and other companies, and he's got a lot of engineers working for him. They want to make games. They're gamers, so he calls me up out of the blue. He'd been following my career and wanted to know what it was like to make computer games: what was involved, what did it take. We'd have hour-long conversations about game development, and finally I told my wife, "I think he's going to start a game company."
Sure enough, he called me up and said, "I'm going to fund a game company out of my other company. My partners and I want you to be involved." I said, "Well, I can't move to Texas." He said, "You don't have to. You can work from home and come down occasionally." I went down and met them all, talked about it. That was the genesis of it. I was only a part-time employee for the first year or two. I think I'm officially employee number four. I remember somebody had a brochure showing I was the fourth.
RICK GOODMAN: So Bruce was on board, and it was him, myself, Tony, and Angelo.
Real-time? Turn-based? The Goodman brothers spitballed with Bruce Shelley until they realized the idea that held the most potential was an amalgamate rather than a singular vision.
RICK GOODMAN: We talked for about six months about what the game could be. Bruce said, "Wouldn't it be great if we could do a train game?" Tony said, "Maybe we could do a puzzle game where you're on a desert island, and if you solve the puzzles, you get off." That was a terrible idea. The train game was an okay idea.
I thought about it and said, "You know, I like Civilization, but there are parts I don't like. The main part I don't like is that it's turn-based." I knew that was strange because I loved board games.
BRUCE SHELLEY: We had an idea for a game and we kicked it around for a while. One of the other early employees, Tim, came in with WarCraft one day and said, "You've gotta play this game. This is what we should be making."
RICK GOODMAN: I'd played real-time strategy games. Dune II was out, and Microplay Software had put out a game called Command HQ. So I was pretty sure real-time strategy was fun in these early stages. During the development of Age, after we'd started, we saw Command & Conquer. A year later during development, that was about the time of WarCraft 1. Later, we saw WarCraft II. So during our development, we saw WarCraft 1, 2, and Command & Conquer. It didn't make us nervous, and I think that was probably because we didn't know what we were doing.
BRUCE SHELLEY: We played WarCraft and the idea came to us: We'd merge it with Civilization. The idea was to take the economy and races from civilization and merge it with the real-time gameplay of WarCraft and Command & Conquer. Dawn of Man was the first name we gave it.
Go back to the issue of a game being a series of interesting decisions. I think what really happens with real-time is decisions get a little more interesting because time is running. It's not a matter of sitting there for 10, 20, 30 minutes and picking out the optimal move, like in chess. Instead, it's important that you make the best decisions quickly. Time is of the essence because your opponent is making decisions, too. You don't have time to ponder. I thought a time limit made each decision a little more interesting.
RICK GOODMAN: What I saw was, hey, this is a pattern that we could copy. I wasn't pretending I knew anything. Bruce was the designer along with me, but he'd never designed a real-time game, so this wasn't an easy thing even with his experience. We just saw these patterns and said, "Okay, we understand this. Train units, move across the map."
BRUCE SHELLEY: We tried to get a prototype quickly. We played WarCraft every day until we got our own game playable in multiplayer. I remember I was in the office in Texas when we got it playable, and eight of us played at once. Maybe it was four. It was so exciting. We were cheering and everything as we played each other in our game. I believe that was the last time we played WarCraft. We played our game every day after that.
I gave a lot of my documents and stuff to the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. A guy did a video where he unpacked one of my old CDs and started playing it, and it was something like the prototype we showed. It was a green world: green trees, grass. The sun was shining. We had basic units: horsemen, archers, swordsmen. We had a rock-breaks-scissors kind of setup where cavalry defeated archers, archers defeated swordsmen, and pikemen defeated cavalry. You wanted to mix up your units and attack the right stuff with the right things
RICK GOODMAN: We adopted patterns like the UI of WarCraft. We didn't pay as much attention to Command & Conquer because we felt there was a lack of sophistication, and that Blizzard had incorporated that, so that became more of our model. That had to do with unit behaviors and a better fog of war, which as gamers we felt created a more sophisticated playfield. That pattern was something we adopted.
BRUCE SHELLEY: I don't know if we had this at the time, but we added deer running around. So it looked like a real world that this conflict was taking place in. It was a little different, and I think what struck people right away was it had pretty realistic graphics. Tony goodman was effectively our art director at that point, and he got some really nice-looking graphics of these ancient characters. The sun was shining, which was different than these other games, and it was historic.
I really liked Civilization, a board game by a well-known designer from Great Britain named Francis Tresham. I did one of his railroad games at Avalon Hill called 1830. There's a whole genre of railroad games called 18XX, and I'm happy 1830 was considered one of the best in the whole series. So I was couched in history. I played all those historic wargames and I loved working on Railroad Tycoon and Civilization. Those games where I told my wife, "If I could make a living doing something else, I'd still do this all day for free." It turned out the lead designer, Rick Goodman, Tony's brother, and the other designer, Brian Sullivan, the three of us all liked history games. It was natural for us to do this Civilization-inspired game.
RICK GOODMAN: That was very instructive. Where I think we didn't have fear was we felt that the historical aspect was such a broad topic that it would appeal to lots of people. Those other games had science fiction and fantasy, but there was plenty of room for what we were doing.
BRUCE SHELLEY: Within a year or so of starting to talk about this product, I remember there was an article in a magazine--possibly Computer Gaming World--that said there were 50-some real-time strategy games in development around the world following the success of WarCraft and Command & Conquer. But we were the only ones based on a historic setting. Everything else was either science fiction or fantasy. I think that turned out to be a huge advantage: People looked at our game and got it right away, and lots of people are interested in history.
RICK GOODMAN: The original vision I had in my head was seven ages. You'd start in the Bronze Age, and that might take you farther toward the Middle Ages. What I realized during development was we had scoped out a product that was already big, and that may not be necessary to the vision. It was a whole lot of extra work on the design side, the tech trees and art side.
In the middle [of development], I scoped it back to four, which seemed like a really big cut at the time, but still felt shippable.
BRUCE SHELLEY: We thought the whole gamut of history was too much to encompass. We said, "Look, if we can make ancient history work, there are future periods we could move into with follow-up games." We were building a series in our mind, figuring out how it could work.
On the surface, WarCraft II and Command & Conquer seemed polar opposites. Just below their respective patinas of fantasy and futuristic warfare, they shared much in common. Orcs and Humans instead of armies in yellow or red uniforms. Two factions harvesting the same resources. Yet in 1995, that formula was proven. Ensemble's next mission was to figure out what to borrow from their contemporaries, what to reinvent, and what to create themselves.
RICK GOODMAN: I owe Blizzard a ton of credit. But at the same time, the challenge became, how do we differentiate ourselves?
BRUCE SHELLEY: We sat down one day at the office and on a whiteboard, we made a list: a column for Command & Conquer, a column for WarCraft, a third for Civilization. Each was a list of things we thought were great about those games. I don't remember the list now. Then we made a list of things those games weren't doing. The things they were doing really well became our minimum bar: We had to do those things as well as they were doing them, or at least most things. The list of things they weren't doing became opportunities: "This is how we differentiate our game." History was one thing.
RICK GOODMAN: Sure, our theme is different, but how does the game become its own game? What are we trying to do? It's easy to be influenced in a negative way and lose your vision. That was a struggle.
BRUCE SHELLEY: Years later, I gave a presentation at a DICE conference. The idea was somebody had to look at your game and say right away, "This is different. This is not something I've played before." One thing I remember was that in Command & Conquer and WarCraft, their AIs cheated. They didn't have a blank map like you did. They knew where you were, so they could come right at you. In our games, the AI doesn't know where you are. The AI plays with a hidden map and they have to search, just like you.
Another thing was WarCraft's maps were fixed. They were always the same. I wanted randomly generated maps. We'd had those in both Railroad Tycoon and Civilization, and I thought that was a powerful thing because the games were different every time you played. We had to work really hard to make the maps balanced so they could be used in competition, so one player wouldn't be screwed right away because of his end of the map. I remember a Blizzard player, Korean, who was really good at their games, and he told somebody at Blizzard: "If you move this thing one pixel to the right, I will never lose." We didn't want that. We wanted our game to be a different experience every time.
Figuring out differences was a good first step. Next, they had to put their growing game through its paces to determine whether the concept held water.
RICK GOODMAN: Never had I thought about how many civilizations there should be. That seemed tangential to, "How does this game work? Is it fun to play?" Maybe 18 months before the end, we had to deal with this issue of how many civilizations to include. We only had one pattern, the WarCraft and Command & Conquer pattern, where there are very few factions and they have some unique differences.
I thought that was neat, but because I read a lot about history, I realized that in our theme, there were a lot of historical civilizations that mattered, that left a mark on the planet--from the Venetians to the Greeks and Romans. Everybody knows those last two, but there were many, many more. I didn't feel comfortable with picking three, so we decided--and this was a risky move--that we would do six, eight, or nine. But we knew right away that would entail tremendous compromise in terms of art. People would be using the same art assets across different civilizations, which may not make sense. But we would have the ability to say, "How'd you like to play as the Babylonians this game and the Phoenicians next game?" I thought, There's no right or wrong answer. It's a leap we're going to take.
BRUCE SHELLEY: We definitely wanted to give the civilizations a different feel. They were different cultures and there were differences in this period between the Roman legions, the Greek phalanxes, the elephants from Persia, stuff like that. I remember playing games where you tried to recreate, "How did Alexander the Great with his tiny army beat this huge Persian army?"
I remember reading about the evolution of warfare in Strategy and Tactics, how one of our technologies was the stirrup. That changed warfare. Until the stirrup existed in the Middle Ages, horsemen were just hanging on for dear life. Once we had a stirrup, the whole horse became a weapon. The strength and weight of horse and rider concentrated at the point of the spear. When that hit somebody, it was devastating. Without that stirrup, it hurt, but it wasn't quite the blow that a mounted guy on a stirrup could deal.
RICK GOODMAN: Some people like to have the theme inform design. I'm the backwards kind. I ask, "What are the mechanics, tools, and hooks in this game that we can expose, manipulate, and fold into civilizations?" Looking at my library, I have almost all the books on those ages. Probably 50 of them. I tried to get print books that talked about each civilization. I'd read each one and found quite a number of cases where the historical attribute of a civilization was something we could work with. I was pleasantly surprised. That was maybe 40 percent, but in our case, we really only needed one grand theme for a civilization that was historical enough to make people believe. Like, they know Rome was good at X and the Greeks were good at Y.
We set up data so they were all unique to some degree. The risk was, are they different enough? Will you believe that your swordsman is different than my swordsman even though they look the same? We made the statistics different, but I didn't know the answer to that question because it hadn't been tested in a Blizzard or Westwood game. If you look at the scope of what you get to play with in the first two ages, there isn't a whole lot to work with. That becomes part of your tech tree, and it gave us more hooks: more items to work with later, more changes in the database later. That created more differentiation in terms of statistics and attributes.
BRUCE SHELLEY: The stirrup changed warfare for a couple hundred years, and then there was a response to that: Pikemen came along. Horsemen were now at risk. By the American Civil War, there wasn't much use for cavalry on a battlefield. That whole arrangement was important and a nightmare to balance. We didn't want everybody to only play one civilization. We wanted all the civilizations to be viable. That cost a lot of time playtesting and tweaking.
I've told people before that you should do your research in the children's section of a library. You want to reach out to a lot of people, not just the experts. I remember Age of Empires got a review in a history magazine that said, "The history here is really weak. There's not much going on." At the same time, we were introducing thousands and even millions of people to ancient history, so what's wrong with that? That's a positive thing. We did stuff like add the Hittites as a civilization. They're mentioned in the Bible and weren't even discovered as a civilization until some point in the 19th century. Now we know they were southeast Turkey and some northeast parts, too. But they were just names in the Bible until archaeologists identified them, so we had them in our game, and that was cool.
Since Rick and Angelo tentatively raised their hands and joined Tony in his quest to make computer games, most of their work had been done off the cuff: think of X, try X, ride that momentum or come up with something better. Some talk of finding a publisher occurred, but nothing concrete was decided--until, suddenly, it was.
RICK GOODMAN: Nine months after we raised our hands, Tony said, "I've invited Microsoft to come see our demo." That came out of nowhere. I was like, "Uh. Okay. Why would they come visit us? We don't have a game and we've never made a game." He said, "No, they've agreed to come." This was really Tony's modus operandi: One weird thing after another that a more logical person like me would say, "That's a crazy idea. That will never happen."
BRUCE SHELLEY: Tony had met some people from Microsoft at a game show. He also met people from a publisher in Dallas, and people from Hasbro Interactive. A friend of mine who I'd met at MicroProse was working for Discovery Channel, and they were playing with the concept of making games. Two guys from MicroProse came to Dallas to look at another game by another company, and they asked if they could come by our office for an hour and take a look at what we were doing. We said, "Sure, absolutely." They ended up staying four hours. They said, "We want you to bring this game back to Redmond."
We did a road trip. We flew to Boston and showed the game to Hasbro, then flew to Redmond. By chance, one of Microsoft's executives, a fella named Stuart Moulder--we'd spent a day together at a TV station in California. He was showing products from Sierra On-Line; I was showing Railroad Tycoon for the Macintosh, I think, on a TV show called the Computer Chronicles. We spent the day together and got to know each other pretty well talking about the games industry. So when we showed up at Microsoft to show our game, Stuart and I already knew each other. I had worked on Civilization, and Stuart and the other guys there were gamers. That gave us a leg in the door.
STUART MOULDER (product manager, Microsoft Game Studios): Our charge was to bring street cred from the games industry. Tony Garcia and Ed Ventura came from the games industry; now I came from there. We were supposed to find and deliver games for gamers. We built the group up and it quickly grew and split into several smaller business units called product units. I was put in charge of one of those. My line of business was to go out and find action, adventure, and strategy games, "core" games for gamers. We had some hits and misses, but the big hit was Age of Empires with Ensemble Studios.
TONY GARCIA (general manager, Microsoft Game Studios): One of the guys who worked at a company where I'd worked had gone to Ensemble. He reached out and said, "You've gotta see this demo. It's really cool." They had an early demo of Age of Empires, and I fell in love instantly.
STUART MOULDER: I had a bunch of business development/talent scout people in my unit who went out to talk to game developers and try to find project. The idea to build a games business at Microsoft was not to develop games ourselves, but to find people who already were in that process. One of my biz guys, Ed Ventura, stumbled on Ensemble. He was very intrigued by what he saw. He said I should go down and take a look.
ED VENTURA (product manager, Microsoft Game Studios): Our introduction came from timing convenience. I was working on another title with Terminal Reality out in Plano, Texas. I had earlier received a game proposal from Tony Goodman. He didn't have an official game studio at the time, but was working with his brother, Rick Goodman, on a real-time strategy title. Tony invited me to take a look at a prototype they built should I be in Texas. Because we were looking for titles to fill our portfolio, I was looking for one that would fill gamer interest for another hit at the time, Total Annihilation by Chris Taylor.
Side note, Chris and I became friends, and Chris started building games for Microsoft in the future.
Back to Ensemble. My program manager, Robert (Bob) Gallup, and I were in launch mode which required us to stay longer in Texas. I was reviewing my other game proposals and suggested we stop by Ensemble after dinner one night. I reached out to Tony and we set up an appointment to meet. When we got to the office, Bob looked at me and said something like "Are we in the right place?" We had walked into an office that appeared to be a Microsoft vendor support business.
Tony came out to greet us in a business suit. And the other staff was dressed semi-formally as well. However, he directed us to a side room where we met Rick and a few other members not in suits sitting at a table. They were not part of the vendor support business Tony owned. Rick and Tony complemented each other very well at the time. Rick being very animated and extraverted. Tony was very articulate, cerebral and introverted.
Anyway, I remember Rick doing the pitch and the prototype really demonstrated their passion for history using a real-time strategy game engine. It was a working prototype which Bob looked at more closely from the technical view. Because the market was going up for real-time strategy games, I was very excited to bring this to Stuart, my boss at the time.
STUART MOULDER: Both Command & Conquer and WarCraft II had really good performance in terms of sales. At Microsoft, we were more fans of Command & Conquer. But the people at Ensemble were more WarCraft II fans. They wanted to make their own WarCraft II, but hybridized with aspects of Civilization.
RICK GOODMAN: Microsoft shows up, and what we had was an isometric grid in 2D that looked like a chess board. It was undecorated. In the middle of this grid was just squares with a palm tree. There was one man, a villager. He would go back and forth between a stone mine and the palm tree, picking up stone and dropping it off at the town center.
That was it. I was like, "This is not going to sell."
STUART MOULDER: When I sat down to play what they had, there was very little there. You could get a little campfire on the map and a little caveman. You could hunt food, gather it, and build some huts with the goal of getting to the second age. There wasn't combat yet. Just hunting and gathering, essentially. But something about even that activity was really engrossing. We all liked it immediately. We all felt like, "Yeah, we want to do this." We signed them up.
RICK GOODMAN: Microsoft picked it up. They said, "We want to move forward and do this game." I had no idea.
TONY GARCIA: It was one of the first in its genre, really. You had a bunch of forces that you selected, and you built them up, you created your fiefdoms from nothing. It was an amazing demo. We were sold the minute we saw it and signed them then and there. I said, "Let's do it. Tell us what the production budget is and let's go." That was a monster title. It led to a lot of other games like it. It was a game changer.
BRUCE SHELLEY: Microsoft was by far the most proactive about trying to pursue the idea of publishing this game. They were relatively new in the games space at the time and were looking for cool projects. They became our publisher.
STUART MOULDER: There were two secrets to that demo, I think. One was the look of it. Tony Goodman was not only running the company; he was also the art director. He directed them to create a beautiful world, a world you'd want to be in. It was very different from the dystopian, dark look that really dominated games in the '90s. Games like Doom and even WarCraft II, which is still a dark fantasy world, and Command & Conquer was set in a dystopian world. But here was a world that looked like our world. The things you did in the game were easy to understand because they were from our world. You hunted and gathered. You eventually built military units that made sense to you: guys on horses went fast, guys with swords moved slower but were sturdier guys with bows that shot arrows a long way.
The second was the game was intuitive and easy to grasp. They'd done a good job with the controls, mostly lifting from WarCraft II, but they'd found a way to seamlessly and interestingly grasp the more complicated technology-research aspect of the game so you could do more of that Civilization-type of thing. Even early on, the look of it and the gameplay base were engrossing.
RICK GOODMAN: During negotiations, Tony [Goodman] said, "Ask them for 600,000 extra dollars." I'm like, "Tony, they're not... they won't... you don't just ask for that." Then I did, and they did. Time and time again, he's doing crazy stuff, eventually teaching a person like me that a bit of foolishness is needed to achieve great things. I'm more the guy who comes in every day, punches the clock, and does heavy lifting.
Maybe it was a combination of the two that was helpful, but he definitely did things that made me tell him, "We're wasting our time." Like calling Bruce and going, "Hey, how'd you like to work for us?" Bruce hadn't seen us in 16 years. But that's how Tony was.
Ensemble's real-time-meets-Civilization game was one of countless projects at Microsoft. Although they had the games group's full support, they needed the backing of one person, the right producer who believed in them and their vision, to build their game from prototype to finished product.
RICK GOODMAN: We had a great producer who was super-collaborative. We loved him to death. Microsoft put the right man on the project.
TIM ZNAMENACEK (producer, Age of Empires): The first time I saw it was November or December of '95, somewhere in there. I remember this like it was yesterday. Age is the highlight of my career in gaming.
RICK GOODMAN: He was very passionate about it, but he wasn't pushy. He'd say, "That sounds fun," or "That sounds less fun." We really respect him to this day. He had full control but he was very collaborative. That helped a lot.
TIM ZNAMENACEK: I remember business development had gotten a pitch and some kind of demo. I think it was called Tribe at the time, or maybe that was the codename we gave it. Somebody grabbed me and said, "You've got to check out this game." I went to Tony Garcia's office and he was playing it, and I said, "Oh, this is so cool." I played WarCraft, Command & Conquer--I loved that type of game. I saw Age, and it was right up my alley. The animations, the setting--everything was super-cool. I got a copy of it, of course, and just played and played.
There was very little, if any, combat in [the demo]. It was just collecting resources. You could build buildings and stuff like that, but it was super, super-early. I bugged my boss continually until he let me be the producer of that project. Once a project got signed, you'd have conversations about which producer in the group would work on it. I was working on something else at the time, but I can't remember what. They said, "We don't want to put too many projects on you at once, Tim." I said, "I've gotta work on this one. I've got to."
STUART MOULDER: I remember Tim absolutely wanted that game. I think he saw--and a lot of us did--that this was our first shot at a really big, "gamer" game. He wanted to be the producer on it, and was 100 percent committed to championing that game.
With both parties excited about their future, Microsoft and Ensemble made their partnership official. Six years and two bestselling titles later, Microsoft Game Studios acquired the Age of Empires developer.
BRUCE SHELLEY: We had a good relationship, and the issue was the president of our company, Tony, and his partners wanted some certainty in their lives. Selling our company would be one way to do that. I wasn't part of the negotiations to that extent. I was with Tony when we asked them to buy us. He asked me to go with him, and the accountants got together and decided how this would work. I didn't even know the negotiations had gone far.
We were supposed to have an off-site meeting in California for the leadership of the company at a resort. We walked in the door, all these Microsoft people were there, and we were told, "Okay, the meeting's not going to be what you think. This is going to be a discussion about an acquisition." That was a big shock.
TIM ZNAMENACEK: We were the only ones who spent a large amount of time in QA iterating on bugs to release a really stable product. We helped with platform development, like if developers ran into issues with Windows. We developed marketing, all the user education materials, the print stuff you got in the box and the box itself--that was all developed at Microsoft. We also had each discipline that worked on a game offer feedback, help with techniques, all those kinds of collaborative processes from the publishing side.
Producers were essentially responsible for bringing the product to market. I didn't own business relationships, but I owned the day-to-day working relationship between Microsoft and Ensemble. I went there once a month for about five years throughout development of the Age of Empires games before they were acquired. I was very focused on it.
TONY GARCIA: We left them alone in their space. They built a title and did a great job. The Flight Simulator acquisition was different. It was our bread and butter, and we felt it necessary to have them close. That didn't make sense with any other company. Everybody sort of stayed independent. Access Software, Terminal Reality--I've always felt it was best, wherever possible, to let a studio's culture stay what it is so they can develop great stuff and let them do what they do best.
Microsoft's games group had grown from insignificant insect to slightly-more-significant insect thanks to Tony Garcia's belief in his talent scouts who'd hit on deals like Age of Empires. As the group's revenue increased, Garcia felt the walls closing in.
TONY GARCIA: We were off the radar making maybe 30 to 40 million bucks. Then we were making 80 million bucks. All of a sudden, they were taking us seriously. When that started to happen, people said, 'You know, we should get serious about this.' We'd been serious about it for a long time. Internally, other people were like, 'Eh, it's a games group. They're doing kinda cool stuff. It's all right.' Now, we were still a blip from a revenue perspective. But from a revenue and consumer perspective, we were becoming significant. Then you have a different cast of characters.
When that happened, they started to get a bunch of people who didn't know anything about games in management positions. I'm just not that kind of a person. I can do it, but I don't like doing it. Putting together a 50-slide PowerPoint with numbers crunched down to the Nth degree? That's not who I am, but that's who they thought they needed. They just needed a different person at that stage, I guess. That's fine. I have no regrets and really enjoyed my time there.
When people ask me about it, what surprised me most was Microsoft allowing this little maverick group to exist in the first place. We were against a backdrop of trying to learn the market, to control platforms, all that stuff. It was like, 'Wow, you're going to let us do this?' They did, and we had a great run.
Garcia departed during Age of Empires' development. His successor, Ed Fries formerly of the Excel and Word teams, made sure Ensemble's project never missed a beat.
ED FRIES (general manager of games group, Microsoft): Obviously Flight Simulator was a great product and had been around a long time, but it never got credit as being a game. Flight Simulator had a huge modding community. People would fly a jumbo jet in real-time across the country, like six hours or whatever. They were hardcore in their own niche, and maybe some people didn't consider them to be true gamers or whatever. Those fights go on to this day. But Age of Empires was really the turning point for us to start being recognized.
Honestly, it was seeing they were making an RTS that got me excited. When I was interviewing for the job, I didn't get to play it, I just got to see it. Age was under Stuart Moulder. Stuart had a great business guy named Ed Ventura; Ed worked really closely with Ensemble on milestone payments, the business relationship, things like that.
EDWARD VENTURA (product planner, Microsoft): We would morph our team on the Microsoft side to match what a developer needed. We were able to find resources a developer could never afford. In addition to funding salaries, we could provide help they didn't have. Things like artists, writers, all of those roles that are crucial.
No matter how big or small their project, all game developers believe in the power of iteration. Developers at Ensemble and Microsoft held frequent playtests--sometimes weekly, more often daily. Each test galvanized them to try new concepts and exposed flaws they needed to fix as release drew near.
RICK GOODMAN: The process was collaboration. I sometimes look back and name myself the coordinator. What worked for us eventually was two things. One was you look at time in development as a resource, like collecting wood. The more of it you have, the better off you are. We took a lot of time. A lot of time. Most companies would not have survived that length of time. It was a great resource. The other thing was in the collaboration, we got to playtesting.
TIM ZNAMENACEK: One thing Tony Goodman insisted on, which I thought was fantastic, was that everybody play the game. They set up a special place so everyone could be together and made sure the current build was on everyone's machine. All the designers would play different scenarios: "Let's play with this strategy" or "Let's play this civilization against that civilization."
RICK GOODMAN: Once we started playtesting rigorously every day, we collected a debrief. I folded that into our schedule. Before 6:00, I was a producer and a coordinator. From 6:00 to 10:00, I was the designer. I would take our debriefing into design and recommend changes for the coming weeks. It was pure iteration based on team feedback that slowly moved our game in a positive direction, but it was really slow. A year of daily playtests to get to where it was first playable to fun. It was a long, long time.
TIM ZNAMENACEK: Everybody on the team [on the Microsoft side] played it constantly. We had no shortage of people volunteering to play. It became our five o'clock, let's-play-something-for-fun game. During Age II, I had more than one manager in other departments email me and ask me when we were planning to do our beta. They wanted to know so they could understand the impact it would have on their development schedule. "Can you just tell me when you're going to do the beta so I know when my engineers will be distracted?"
RICK GOODMAN: One of the inherent advantages of our design, which was true of WarCraft and Command & Conquer, was you start with almost nothing. You never miss the full agency over what it is you're looking at in the endgame. If your endgame is massive and comprehensible, it's because you took steps to get there. There was another aspect that was, I think, the major thing we were most concerned about, which I didn't have a solution for.
All developers playtest their games. Microsoft went a step further by assigning experts from their usability research laboratory to every project. The researchers' forte was stepping outside the box of game-savvy analysis to find ways to communicate better design and mechanics to all types of players.
ED FRIES: Ensemble did an amazing job, but it was their first game. There was a lot of stuff they didn't know. Also, we were starting our user research department, so we did a ton of playtesting and gave them a ton of user feedback.
BILL FULTON (user testing lead, Microsoft): WarCraft was a beautiful game, and Age took that and added the component of historical growth. WarCraft games grow in the sense that your empire grows, but it didn't have that feeling of, now you're in the Bronze age. Technology wasn't as large a portion of it. To me, WarCraft felt performative: build fast, then take advantage by using your strengths against your opponent's weaknesses. Age had that, plus a great feel to it. It also had greater variety. The tech tree was bigger, so you had more ways of trying to win.
TIM ZNAMENACEK: Microsoft had this user testing discipline established, the equipment, special rooms with the two-way mirrors. We did a lot of testing and tuning for the tutorials, for instance; and the interface design: making sure goals were clear, things like that.
BILL FULTON: Trying to test it was interesting. I was familiar with the genre and the history aspect of it, but getting people who knew neither, and realizing, Wow, they don't know resources exist. They just think it's scenery. And Oh, you can hunt deer, but now they're trying to hunt birds, but you can't, because they are scenery. Certain fundamentals like that, they don't know there are resources. They don't know villagers aren't warriors.
All the knowledge you bring with you if you know the genre is problematic for helping you get someone who doesn't have any of that knowledge into the game. That's where the importance of the tutorial came in for games with the complexity of Age of Empires.
ED FRIES: We'd send them feedback of people playing the game and struggling: not knowing how an RTS works. It almost got to the point where we had to teach people how to use a mouse so they could play the game.
RICK GOODMAN: Accessibility wasn't the main topic, but it was pretty high on the list. That was our own sensibility, but also Microsoft's. I think we were all on the same page on what "accessibility" meant.
TIM ZNAMENACEK: Tony Goodman was really impressed by Blizzard and what they'd done. He saw the strategy space was booming, and he was pretty deliberate about using that genre model, but putting it into an accessible setting that was way broader than WarCraft. Blizzard may have outdone us in unit sales, but the variety of people who were attracted to Age of Empires was super-wide.
BRUCE SHELLEY: A friend I used to work with at Avalon Hill told me Age of Empires helped him connect with one of his daughters. She would play the game, and she taught him how to use a computer. She was so good at it that she was explaining the basics, possibly the mouse and keyboard for all I knew. She was seven or eight years old and had a complete grasp on how to play the game. My friend said, "My daughter was teaching me more about how to use a computer than I'd had experience with because of your game, and she was having fun playing."
I thought that was another important thing about Age: It crossed all sorts of borders. We were successful in Asia, Europe, America; we were successful with casual gamers, but hardcore gamers were also playing very competitively, and still do. It was a really great product.
BILL FULTON: Age was my first big game I worked on in terms of games we knew would be a success. Flight Simulator paid for all of our failures, and there were many. But Age of Empires was legitimately a good game. In the evenings, there'd be what we called bug bashes, which is everyone playing the game and logging whatever bugs they found in real-time.
RICK GOODMAN: There are two types of players. One is the multiplayer, kill-or-be-killed, zero-sum, competitive player, which is what we all enjoyed. Then there was the single-player who enjoyed the story, turtling, and the experience of building a civilization rather than the experience of conquest. Our game was headed toward the WarCraft/Command & Conquer pattern and I didn't have a way for the game to express big build-ups. I wanted it to be a game that appealed to both audiences, but I didn't know if we could because those are really different games. One of the ways we tried to do that was spending a lot of time on walls.
Walls are important to people who want to build up and keep out other people. That was the best thing we had for those who wanted to build an empire. It wasn't much, but without walls, you can't claim and defend a territory, so I tried to make them extra strong. A lot of people complained about how strong they were at the beginning, and they had to be adjusted for both players because you had to be able to win. There couldn't be a stalemate.