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.
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.