Age of Empires (video game)
"Age of Empires" was a hit in the German market, where it debuted at #1 on 's sales rankings for the latter half of October 1997. After holding this position in the first half of November, it remained in Media Control's top 5 through the end of 1997. The following year, "Age of Empires" placed consistently in the top 3 through March, when it rose again to #1 in the last two weeks of the month. By the end of May, it had spent 28 consecutive weeks in Media Control's top rankings, with placements of fifth and eighth that month. "Age of Empires" proceeded to become the fourth-best-selling computer game in the German market during 1998's first nine months. It received a "Gold" award from the (VUD) in August, for sales of at least 100,000 units across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Sales in the German market totaled 115,000 units by the end of September, and the VUD raised "Age of Empires" to "Platinum" status, for 200,000 sales, by November. At the 1999 Milia festival in Cannes, "Age of Empires" took home a "Gold" prize for revenues above €15 million in the European Union during 1998. It remained at 14th on Media Control's charts for the German region by January 1999, continuing a 60-week streak on the charts.
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.