Age of Empires
Age of Empires is a series of historical real-time strategy video games, originally developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft Studios. The first title of the series was "Age of Empires", released in 1997. Seven titles and three spin-offs have been released.
Empire (1972 video game)
"Empire" was created in 1972 by Peter Langston, taking its name from a Reed College board game of the same name. It was initially created by Langston in BASIC on an HP2000 minicomputer at Evergreen State College. Between 1972 and 1974, Langston expanded on the game, with additions by Ben Norton, Chuck Douglas, Mike Rainwater, and several others. When the host computer was retired, the original game was lost. Subsequently, two other authors each independently wrote a new version of the game, both named "Empire", and several ports of the game were created for other computer systems, such as "PSL Empire" for the PDP 11/70, and a version with added weather effects for the VAX-11. Langston, now at Harvard University, recreated the game in C, and shared the source code with a few other developers; disliking the changes they made, he stopped doing so, maintaining the canonical version of the game until 1985, when he stopped development. Around that time, he gave the source code to a group including Dave Pare, who was attempting to reverse engineer the game. Pare then adapted the game into a version named "UCSD Empire" after the University of California at San Diego, and the following year into "BSD Empire" with several additions such as planes.