Age of Ensemble, Part 1: A Titan Passes

12/16/2008 7:00 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 3

Read Part 2 and Part 3 of this feature.

When Microsoft announced that it would be closing Ensemble Studios early next year, a chill went through the strategy game community. You couldn't point to any failures from Ensemble, the maker of the Age of Empires games. You could argue that in an age of belt-tightening and spiraling development costs, every affiliated studio is a potential liability. But Ensemble, responsible for one of the most successful and important strategy series in history, was important to a lot of people.

It deserves a proper send-off.

A franchise is born

The origins of Ensemble Studios are unlikely. In the early 1970s, Tony and Rick Goodman were junior high school students who tagged along to a University of Virginia board- and wargaming club. There, they met a graduate student named Bruce Shelley, with whom they would later create Age of Empires.

Ten years later Tony Goodman started a business software company called Ensemble Corporation. Five years after that, he created a game division that became Ensemble Studios. "It was a real culture clash," he recalls. "Everyone else was in suits, but we game people had this tiny cubicle area and were much more casual."

"We knew we wanted to make games, so a couple of programmers and I broke off [from the company]. Rick came on board a little bit later, and then we got [Ensemble] going. Once we got this little tank game going, as a technical exercise, we decided we wanted to do something serious.

"I had been calling Bruce every year or so to touch base and I always had a secret plan to start a game company. Then, in 1994, the day came."

Since they had wargamed together, Shelley had turned his hobby into a career, moving from SPI to Avalon Hill (the two leading board game makers of the time) and then joining Microprose, where he worked on Civilization and Railroad Tycoon with Sid Meier -- an experience he likens to a "game design university."

"The big thing I learned at Microprose," Shelley says, "was to play the game while you were making it [aka iterative design]." The philosophy would underlie his approach to game design, and he would take it with him when he moved on. With Shelley, a veteran game designer with a marketable legacy behind him, there was a broad consensus on the type of game Ensemble should make.

According to Shelley, "[Ensemble programmer] Tim Deen told us to buy Warcraft and said that this was the kind of game we should make. We thought, 'This is really cool, but why don't we make it historical?'"

An idea for a Robinson Crusoe/desert island simulation was tossed aside. "Bruce did Civilization, so [we thought] we should do something he knew how to do," says Goodman. Because the studio was full of history buffs, the idea of a real-time Civilization made sense. "It was originally called Dawn of Man," recalls Shelley. "It was about the rise of the great civilizations on earth." They expanded the game to include Greeks, Persians and Asians (at Microsoft's suggestion).

The result, of course, was Age of Empires, the first historically-themed real-time strategy game. But for a new studio with largely unproven talent, it would take more than a unique setting to crack through an increasingly crowded real-time market. Inspired by a video demo they had seen at a conference of realistic people walking through a cityscape, Tony Goodman pushed to have that level of graphics technology incorporated into the game -- a decision that undoubtedly extended the game's development. At a time when your average RTS featured either cartoonish characters (like Warcraft) or tiny vehicles (like Command & Conquer), the choice to have human-looking villagers carrying Flintstone-sized chunks of meat was a risky one. With the game's sense of light and richness of color, Shelley says, "the sun never sets in Age of Empires."