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Un videodiario sulla storia di Age of Empires, la celebre serie strategica.
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00:00www.mesmerism.info
00:09Ensemble's beating heart was passion for games and it fed into everything they did.
00:14Age of Empires had this blend of action and sort of an abstract beauty.
00:19The sun was always shining in Age of Empires games, it was inviting.
00:23It was very good gameplay and that just holds up.
00:26It's so iconic that it's really stood up the test of time.
00:34I was just out of college or just out of quitting college.
00:37I wanted to get into programming, so I first started as a freelancer
00:40and then that led to starting Ensemble Corporation with John Bookscott.
00:44It was the two of us initially and we quickly had a few more people growing that company.
00:48And it was really focused on business software, did a lot of stuff with banks,
00:52you know, your typical business stuff. But even in that venue, Tony,
00:56you know, he was always an outside-the-box thinker, super creative at heart.
01:01The company was largely successful. It grew slowly over time
01:04and there were a number of people involved in the company,
01:07maybe 30 or 40 by the time we talked about starting a game company.
01:11From the time I was a Dungeons & Dragons player in junior high school,
01:16I had always wanted to start a game company. I thought it was a board gaming company
01:20and then I thought it was a computer game company, so that was always on my mind.
01:23I think Tony really only did the business stuff so he could get to the game.
01:27We had absolutely no idea how to go about doing it.
01:30When I was in junior high, I joined a gaming club called HSS,
01:35Historical Simulation Society. Bruce was there too.
01:37I remember teaching them how to play some games and they told me later
01:40that they thought I was one of the guys in the club that they looked up to.
01:43I kept track of him thinking one day I'll start a game company.
01:47He had been the co-designer of Sid Meier's Civilization and worked with Sid Meier's.
01:51Fifteen years later or so, Tony called me up actually and said,
01:55he asked me about the process of making computer games.
01:57Our theory is we were going to get all gamers to the company
02:00and see if we could build the greatest game the world had ever seen.
02:04That was our idea.
02:05There was no game idea on the books when we started.
02:08The first idea that I recall was like the television show Lost
02:11where people are stranded on an island and they have to get their materials together to get off.
02:15The team at Ensemble definitely was taking influence of seeing how RTS was growing
02:21and how there were other RTS games out there that maybe weren't historically set.
02:26I wanted randomly generated maps. I wanted the game to be different every time we played.
02:30And we wanted to have a non-cheating AI that played like a real human being.
02:34Warcraft 1 really focused our direction.
02:37We looked at Command & Conquer and Warcraft and Civilization
02:40and we made the list of what those games were doing really well.
02:43Why were they successful? What was important about those games?
02:46We have to be as good as them and what they're doing really well.
02:49And what they're not doing is our opportunities.
02:51That's where we're going to make our game different.
02:53You know, I think the topic is the most important decision you have to make when you're doing any game.
02:58My real passion was history. I read a lot of historical fiction.
03:03And so when age came around, for me it was this perfect melding of the kinds of games that I
03:08like to play,
03:09real-time strategy games, with this history that I loved.
03:13Turns out there was an awful lot of people who liked the historical aspects.
03:16I know I was asked once by Bill Gates, we had to make a presentation to Bill Gates,
03:20and he says, man, we should be marketing this as an educational thing.
03:23And I said, no, no, no, I don't think so.
03:25I mean, there's an education that might happen, but it's not going to happen until people are having fun.
03:29So we've got to entertain them first, and if they learn something, then that's great.
03:33And then the idea came along, why don't we take the gameplay from Warcraft and Command & Concord,
03:38this real-time strategy gameplay, and merge it with the historical and economic aspects of civilization
03:44that I had helped build a few years earlier.
03:46We got an early version of Age of Empires up and running,
03:49and all you could do is chop trees at the time, but it looked kind of like Age of Empires.
03:53So Tony calls up Microsoft, and he gets a guy on the phone named Adventura,
03:56and he goes, you've got to come down and see our demo.
03:59So I had a product manager, Adventura, who was out looking at different developers
04:03and different games that we could potentially sign, and he told me about Age of Empires,
04:09and told me to come to Dallas and visit the team.
04:13It was actually pretty amazing, because what we saw in this very, very limited demo
04:18was the heart of a lot of what we loved about Age.
04:21It looked gorgeous, it looked like a world you wanted to spend more time in,
04:26and the little mechanics that they had implemented were fantastic.
04:30And so that was almost an insta-sign.
04:39PC Gamer Magazine ran a cover story called The Year of the RTS,
04:43and it had a cover story listing 50 RTS games coming in the next 12 months.
04:48Out of that, when we look back in history, only a very small number of games
04:51are ones that people even remember today.
04:53We can be proud that we stood up to a lot of competition and exploration
04:58in a genre that was exploding at that time.
05:01I don't think there's many people that don't know what Age of Empires is.
05:05Everyone knows it, everyone probably played it.
05:07You know, they gave us a plaque, I have it at home, for one million sales.
05:11They were ecstatic. It exceeded expectations at one million.
05:15At two million, I put a little sticker over it and wrote two million on it.
05:17At three million, I wrote three.
05:19After that one, I just kind of took it off and said, eh, don't need to count anymore.
05:22It just kept going.
05:25I remember coming off of the end of Age of Empires 1, which is right when I joined.
05:29Coming into the development of Age of Empires 2, it was kind of this moment that you get sometimes in
05:34the game industry
05:35where you have a team that just finished a game, like the first game in a franchise,
05:40and it's kind of, we just had this feeling of like, there's all these things we wished we could have
05:44gotten in that game,
05:45but we just ran out of time. And so everybody was dying to make the sequel.
05:49And I think the Middle Ages was the best topic of all for a strategy game like that.
05:54I mean, men were still basically banging on each other and shooting arrows at relatively short range,
05:59and the units were still recognizable. We had these great images of knights and castles,
06:04and when you heard the trebuchet go off, it was really bad news.
06:07The online component of being able to play against other human players was finally coming into its own there in
06:13the mid-90s.
06:14We had just hit the sweet spot in the balance and the design of that game so that it's just
06:18endlessly replayable,
06:20especially multiplayer. The kind of scenarios that you encounter when you're playing online,
06:24they're just so varied, and there's so much strategy there that you can just kind of keep going.
06:29There's still, I think, new strategies being discovered today.
06:31I think some of what happens, and you see this in a lot of franchises,
06:35the first one happens somewhat underground, and it grows.
06:39And as a player, you feel like, oh, I kind of missed the boat on the first one,
06:43but it sticks in your head as one of these games that you have to go play.
06:48So when the second one comes around, there's a lot more interest in it,
06:52because the name Age of Empires is out there. You feel like, okay, I'm not going to miss it this
06:56time.
06:56I'm not going to miss this launch event.
06:58It was a perfect storm of a game. We'd learned so much making Age 1.
07:03Age 2 was the ultimate, kind of the pinnacle for a whole variety of reasons.
07:08My favorite review, Computer Gaming World, said this is the ideal sequel. This is what you want.
07:13It's got all the heart and the feeling of that first game that you loved
07:17with just the right amount of novelty and new features to give it new life
07:22and actually improve on that base experience.
07:32Between Age 2 and Age 3 was Age of Mythology, which was a real departure.
07:36We really love fantasy, but we also really love history.
07:40And then it hit us, you know, that's mythology. That's the perfect topic.
07:43The nice thing about Age of Mythology is it was a quasi-sequel. It was obviously rooted in a lot
07:48of the mechanics and ideas of the earlier games,
07:51but it gave them a lot more creative license. And I think it really gave them a little bit of
07:54a charge.
07:55Like, oh, hey, let's go off and learn about Norse mythology and how to work that in the game in
07:59an interesting way.
08:00And let's create some new mechanics and some things that you could never have in a historically-based world.
08:04It was this branch of the franchise, right? It wasn't a mainline Age of Empires title, but so many people
08:10responded so strongly to it.
08:12You know, it kind of had the most active and vocal community of any of the games we had worked
08:17on.
08:22By the time we got to Age 3, the team down at Ensemble was really kind of world-class as
08:28a game production team.
08:29I think a lot of times you see games' teams in that third or fourth iteration for them really hit
08:35their stride
08:36because so much of what it means to just be a team working on a video game together goes away,
08:41and it becomes about focusing on the game itself.
08:44I have to say some of the campaigns in Age 3 were one of my favorites in the whole series.
08:49We had physics, cannonballs, hit buildings and broke off little pieces of buildings,
08:53and we just tried to amp up the realism.
08:55It was Age coming to North America, which was a new challenge.
08:59We added the home city, which kind of added an RPG element to the Age franchise.
09:06There was more change, I thought, in Age 3 than the previous Ages when they were trying to add so
09:11much more to the franchise,
09:12but I was proud of what we were able to accomplish.
09:17Bruce has a fantastic saying, the sun always shines in Age of Empires.
09:21Age was always a place where it was idyllic.
09:23It was just a place that people could recognize and they could connect with.
09:27What makes Age special is it's easy to pick up and play, but it's really deep.
09:31So anybody can jump in and enjoy it, but it takes real mastery to get great at them.
09:36We do a lot of different experiences in those boxes.
09:39Nothing feels, you know, out of place, right?
09:41There's this amazing holistic environment that players can kind of get into.
09:45There's deep levels of strategy and always new things to explore and to learn.
09:49And when you have a nice big community, there's always people influencing how the game is played,
09:55how it changes over time, how the sort of meta experience of the game evolves,
09:59and it kind of keeps them fresh year after year after year.
10:03Age of Empires 2 was really built around user-made content.
10:07Even after 20 years, people are still churning out content and playing new stuff
10:12and there is no limit to that, pretty much.
10:15I was mostly just playing around the scenario editor, loved elephants,
10:19loved just screwing around and kind of building these giant battles.
10:22You would get parents that would talk about the Age of Empires as something that they felt was good for
10:29the kids,
10:29because it actually kicked off at least a question about history.
10:33And I think that's maybe as important as really injecting the history lesson right into the game.
10:39What Ensemble Studios did 20 years ago has affected millions and millions of people
10:44and gave them some good memories. To me, that's the most important thing, I think.
10:47I love working in the game industry because every once in a while I get to meet my heroes.
10:51And for me, the Ensemble guys, the Age guys, they were my heroes.
10:54We were also passionate about Age of Empires and about what we were excited to bring to the world.
10:59They worked long hours, they poured everything they had into this game.
11:02And then I think the other thing that was a little surprising was how good everyone was at their jobs,
11:08even though most of them had no background in games.
11:10The number of talented people that Ensemble Studios attracted was amazing.
11:15I think part of the formula was that we didn't know anything about games.
11:18We didn't have any ideas about what was hard, so we just thought everything would be easy and we moved
11:24forward with stuff.
11:25There are still people who play Age of Empires 1 today.
11:28If these guys didn't go anywhere in the last 20 years, I don't see them going anywhere in the next
11:3320.
11:34There are still people that were supposed to be who have kind of the beauty of these children.
11:35Thank you.
11:36Of course we got adjust us today.
11:37We have to wait 2 o'clock February.
11:38There are still people coming up to the world.
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