Age of Empires II & Longevity

September 14th, 2011 | 4,050 views | 8 Comments » |

Age of Empires II is a real-time strategy game developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft in 1999. After it came out, it was the standard by which all other RPG games were measured for many years. Some say it still is.

Age of Empires II

What’s so crazy about this game is that people still play it at LAN parties, over 12 years after it came out. Talk about longevity! Of course, they’re now playing it on Windows 7, instead of Windows 2000.

It’s hard to believe it, but Age of Empires II was originally released for Windows 98 and 2000 — it came out a whole two years before Windows XP existed! Its requirements were a 166 MHz processor, 32 MB memory, and 200 MB disk space. It’s hard to believe that a video game — or any program for that matter — could possibly run with just 32 MB memory! How times have changed…

And four OS releases later, it still runs flawlessly on Windows 7. If Microsoft excels at any aspect of software development it’s definitely backwards compatibility.

You should share this with your friends:

8 Comments | Leave a comment » More posts about: Video Games

8 Comments on “Age of Empires II & Longevity”

  1. 1 Jordan said at 8:56 am on September 14th, 2011:

    I am one of those people who still play it. The sequel never lived up to the greatness of AEII either. Its only flaw is horrible online gameplay (this goes for II and III). But LAN is always great.

  2. 2 Danny Crichton said at 8:57 am on September 14th, 2011:

    Age of Empires II is really one of the most balanced and interesting strategy games too. I play Rise of Nations a lot, which was also made by Big Huge Games, but it never caught quite the following of Age of Empires.

    I think at the heart of its success lies the perfect balance between subtle detail and overall gameplay (or in other words, the micromanagement/macro divide). The game has its micromanagement with resources for instance, but you never really need to spend too much time on this. Similarly, research comes relatively quickly and is relatively cheap. Building town settlements is easy, but doing it well is quite tricky since it actually has strategic value. This is where the game gets interesting – there are enough different ways to handle the details that you can develop your strategy as you want. Thus, the game doesn’t get stuck around the micro but instead encompasses those small details into the larger vision for your empire. Few other games pull off this dynamic balancing as nicely.

  3. 3 Feross Aboukhadijeh said at 9:01 am on September 14th, 2011:

    Danny, you make some really interesting points. I’ve heard that StarCraft II also has a really nice, balanced micro/macro divide, although I’ve never played it myself. Interestingly, it too has a huge following.

  4. 4 Rishabh said at 10:05 am on September 14th, 2011:

    Perhaps the most addictive LAN game…played a lot for 2 years

  5. 5 Ezequiel said at 8:13 pm on September 17th, 2011:

    Muy buen juego,lo jugaba mucho de niño,saludos idolo,desde Argentina

  6. 6 Utkarsh said at 11:51 am on September 22nd, 2011:

    The most #awesome game created ever!

  7. 7 Haseeb said at 11:52 pm on September 27th, 2011:

    Even though i don’t do gaming anymore i still LOVE this game. I just can’t get enough of it. The new ones coming can never be compared to this :)

  8. 8 Michael Dick said at 7:16 am on October 1st, 2011:

    This game is the reason I’m a web designer today.

Leave a Reply

Fork me on GitHub