Age of Empires 1 and 2 are different to me, and had different effects. This is only about the first one.
Back in 2000 my family had lunch at some friends house, and after lunch I ended up looking on as their son played Age of Empires 2. At the time I hadn’t played any strategy games on the PC, save for advanced Risk, and AoE2 Totally blew me away. I was still using a Windows 95 computer then, and after a bit of research, discovered that AoE2 wouldn’t run very well on that computer. I made the decision to buy the original Age of Empires upon this discovery, and waited patiently for it to arrive from Amazon.
My first experience with the game was pure bliss. It had so much depth, so much polish, that I kept playing for hours oblivious to time. Age of Empires started me thinking about strategy, got me interested in ancient civilizations, and gave RTS games a special place in my mind.
The single-player campaign wasn’t great, even when I didn’t have a decade’s worth of games to compare it against. What really made AoE stick for me was skirmishes and the map editor. I probably spent more time creating scenarios in the game than playing them. I basically knew what every single unit, tree, or wall was called, how it looked, and where I wanted it on my maps. I made some really cool scenarios back then. The things I learned and did in AoE carried over to other games, and continue to influence how I think about RTS titles.
Influences is a series of articles about the things, ideas, and people that helped to shape who I am today.
