There are a very small number of PC games left to cover in my story of the British charts. They are charts which have always covered the sale of physical cassettes, cartridges and discs, and PC games went a different way earlier than most. Despite Empire: Total War selling enough discs to top the charts, it still shows that alternate path. Buying one of those physical copies does not provide a standalone copy version of the game: the installer on the disc only works via the then-relatively-new Steam.
I found that the serial number in my copy had already been used, acquired a different one, and found that Steam still pushed me to the updated, 2018 Definitive Edition of the game with patches and extras included. There was to be no experiencing the game as it was, rather than mediated through a look back. Given the historical topic of the game, it feels rather appropriate.
Empire: Total War is pretty remarkable in the scope of what it aims to simulate. Developers The Creative Assembly had a fairly unusual run-up to it which in some ways looked like the reverse of many a faded British success story. They produced ports and less prominent licenced games for EA Sports before managing to pivot into the PC-based passion projects of their Total War series, an increasingly detailed series of games combining military strategy with a wider nation simulator. Having done Sengoku era Japan, Medieval Europe, and ancient Rome, they moved onto a broad swathe of more modern history centred around European powers, with big sea battles as a key new selling point.
2008’s sole PC game chart-topper was Spore, and there is something similar in the extent to which Empire: Total War is two different games bolted together, though in this case they alternate. There’s the turn-based management of your resources and construction and recruitment and tax-collection and diplomacy and so on, which is like Civilization at a slightly smaller scale. As the introductory campaigns slowly introduce different elements of this, it’s inescapably fiddly but a bit more streamlined than the Civilizations old enough for me to have played them. It shows a single soldier as representative of a whole army in the same way, and in a more realistic 3D map the way they walk around and shake swords at each other is considerably more goofy and kind of great.
Then there’s the battles, which you can ‘auto-resolve’ in Civ fashion, but which you can also take as chances to do troop placement, think tactics on the go, and watch gunshot fly back and forth. The ability to smoothly move the viewpoint around the battlefield, zoom in and out, pause and play, lets it be both tactical map and arena. Tweaking things can be important but there’s also a lot to be said for just sitting back and watching things play out, which provides entertainment and a delicate sprinkle of mechanical learning. The engine for a previous Total War game was used as the basis for the BBC’s Time Commanders, in exactly that spirit of showing off the details of ancient military tactics (via a team of members of the public playing a lightly disguised computer game).
Empire: Total War is a big and detailed slice of history to get stuck into, and history is a complex thing. There is no such thing as rewriting history, or rather all history is rewriting history; there is no definitive edition. The most straightforward assembly of facts still reflects attitudes and perspective through what it includes, and indeed what it does not. Putting together a complex interactive simulation of real events? That can’t help but say a lot.
Things didn’t look promising when the first loading screen quote I was presented with was US president John Adams saying “We’re in a war, dammit! We’re going to have to offend somebody”. It’s not a sentiment that Empire: Total War is built on, though. Battle result screens might occasionally label your victories as heroic, but it’s not the place for abrasive glorification. That wouldn’t fit with its mood of genteel indifference, its bloodless animated pieces on a big board to be moved to and fro. The note in the intro noting the contribution of the National Maritime Museum in providing ship plans is more representative of the elements The Creative Assembly were really interested in, rather like Eidos Hungary and Battlestations: Midway before them. Just like that game, or plenty of other historical war games past, the position of neutral technical onlooker is untenable.
The crafted “Road to Independence” campaign that serves as the intro to Empire: Total War has you set as playing as British colonial settlers in America. When you’re building up your small settlements, you get a choice between building cotton plantations or tobacco plantations. The notes that go with them say that “slaves are self-explanatory”. This miniscule acknowledgement of what the empire (and others) was built on stands pretty much completely alone. There are a couple of mentions of empires’ power gained from colonialism, but what that actually means, all the worst human costs of it, are rendered completely invisible.
Meanwhile, being a gentle intro into the game, the campaign starts you off with a nice easy battle. That is, a completely mismatched massacre of Native Americans. When you complete the relevant missions, you’re told that you have built a home from “inhospitable land” by “taming” it. Your vulnerable people (invading force) have now been protected from threats (the people who lived here). It’s euphemisms for genocide all the way down.
I haven’t played Rome: Total War but I don’t imagine it went big on the crimes of the Roman Empire. That’s not a problem to the same level because it’s not the same thing, though. The setting of Empire: Total War is known as the early modern period and the modern world we live in is still visibly built upon it. The countries you play as in it are the people who invented and propagated racism as we still know it, and who made it impossible to cover any international cultural subject today without “see: colonialism” footnotes. The understanding and teaching of this history is still an extremely live subject, not least in the US and UK. We are still playing an updated version of the same game.
Top of the charts for week ending 7 March 2009:
