Reminder that Age of Empires 2 in its entirety cost about the equivalent of $38 million in modern dollars. One of the best dollar values ever. And was MicroSoft grateful? They didn’t act like it. Instead they wrote a contract for us to sign that gave Ensemble LESS money than before. We refused and they were adamant. We literally went on strike- Ensemble management ordered us not to work on Age 2, but only side projects unless MicroSoft caved. 1/3

true fact: In Age of Empires I, the Asian artwork was based on the design of the Benihana's restaurant down the road. Right down to the blue-tiled roof.

I looked over my “audience” according to X, and it’s 67% USA, which doesn’t surprise me. What did surprise is that the second biggest contingent at 5% is Argentina!

I've posted this before, but why not again? In 1997, I was the lead designer of Ensemble's next cool IP - "Sorceress", which was a magic-based real time strategy game. We'd moved quite a way along it. We had elves being produced from tree groves, wraiths created by transforming corpses, and so forth. It was rapidly becoming a whole game. But Age of Empires 2 was happening at the same time, and Ensemble Studios wasn't that big. So every week, the management would come to me and say something like, "We need Don to switch over to Age 2. That's okay, right?" Well I'm a team player so sure take Don. But the hits kept coming. By January or February, ALL BUT TWO members of my team had been poached for Age 2. All I had left was me, a top programmer, and a top artist. So I went to the company's suits, and said, "There's no way I can create an entire new RTS with three people. But I have a suggestion. When I was working on roleplaying games back at Chaosium, we found that each expansion sold something like 25%-35% as many copies as the original. If that holds true for RTS games, we could put together an expansion for Age of Empires on the cheap, taking only a few months, and a tiny team. If the expansion sold even 10% as well as Age, we'd make a mint." 1/