Age of Empires
"Age of Empires", released on October 26, 1997, was the first game in the series, as well as the first major release from Ensemble Studios. It was one of the first history-based real-time strategy games made, utilizing the Genie game engine. GameSpot described it as a mix of "Civilization" and "". The game gives players a choice of 12 civilizations to develop from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. The expansion pack, "The Rise of Rome", published by Microsoft on October 31, 1998, introduced new features and four new civilizations, including the Romans. Although the two games had contained many software bugs, patches resolved many of the problems.
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (video game)
"Shadows of the Empire" was released on December 3, 1996 for the Nintendo 64, three months after the console's launch. It was released in Japan on June 14, 1997. With the developer reporting more than one million copies sold by 1997, "Shadows of the Empire" is the third top-selling Nintendo 64 game for that year (September 1996 to August 1997) and the third top-selling game on any system for the 1996 Christmas shopping season. A version for Windows 95 was released one year later on September 17, 1997. As computers became more powerful and 64-bit architecture became more common, the game began to have issues running on these systems. Taking this into consideration, the game was re-released for current Windows systems on May 3, 2016 through Good Old Games. The re-release allows the game to play properly on 64-bit Windows installations.