[Throughout this project, I will be handing over to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. For this post I am happy to welcome back Josh Bird, who previously wrote about Bomb Jack all the way back in 1986, and Quake in 1996. Screenshots in this one are from this video]
Few of us are truly able to reach our dream job. Lack of opportunity, competing priorities or simply insufficient competency all conspire to prevent us from becoming that Hollywood movie star or CEO of a Fortune 500 company to which we once aspired.
For some of us this challenge is compounded by historical impossibility. You see, I have long been under the misconception that I would make an excellent supreme ruler of a small to medium nation. Sadly, job listings for such roles are now few and far between – having gone the way of blacksmiths and paid newspaper journalists.
It is then some solace for aspiring despots like me that games such as Age of Empires exist. An action oriented real-time strategy game developed by Ensemble Studios in 1997, Age of Empires provides players with a chance to lead a small nation from its nascent beginnings as a Stone Age village of hunter-gatherers to the peaks of imperial glory and – as was often the case with me when I played – inevitable colonial overreach ending in ruin. While other nation-building simulator games exist, many of them have the annoying requirement that you also pay attention to the complexities of actual governance and statesmanship.
The game Civilisation, for example, requires its players to manage everything from civil discontent to taxation. Myself – and impatient autocrats of my ilk – had no time for such trivial concerns. Age of Empires was therefore perfect as it focused on a relatively simple set of goals — extract resources, build your military and expand the empire through conquest.
As a player your objective is to find new land, strip it of anything of value (e.g. timber, stone, gold) and use its riches to bolster your own might. Essentially, imperialist exploitation. However, this was the ‘90s and therefore a game which appeared to unapologetically glorify colonial rule failed to raise the eyebrows it would perhaps today. You simply sent out your virtual villagers as literal cannon-fodder—all in the cause of Empire.
However, while the game lacks political nuance, its strength lay in the plethora of historical empires open for the player to lead. History buffs like myself were able to seat ourselves at a safe historical distance on the thrones of Caesar, Ramses II or Xerxes and send our loyal minions out to conquer ever more territory in our name.
It is a testament to the winning formula inherent in these first Age of Empires games that none of the subsequent remakes and sequels released over the last twenty years have strayed from its basic gameplay. Graphics have been improved, game mechanics honed, and additional nations added — but the loot, build, expand principles remain untouched. And while there are surely more sophisticated historical strategy games out there, it is unlikely that any of them satisfy the needs of casual tyrants such as I.
