25 Years of Age of Empires: How This Strategy Game Shaped Historical Perspectives | Gaming

MDad is the type of person who finds a game he enjoys and sticks with it. I’ve always been hopping around and jumping between different genres, and he remains the only person I know who does the absolute all It has to provide. When people ask, “Who actually completed these giant games?” I can confidently say that it’s a 60-something Geordie who loves Lego and has a lot of creative cunning. You can answer that you are a man. Age of Empires II has captivated him for over a decade.

This game was released in 1999 when I was 5 years old. It’s safe to say it was a permanent feature of our family life until I left 13 years later. The only thing that changed was the laptop he was playing on, which gradually got smaller as the years went by. Sound effects, such as the monk’s iconic “wororo” sound or the greeting chirps of villagers sent to chop wood, were the soundtrack of my childhood.

It wasn’t until I was old enough that I found out that my dad took an interest in the game. That was one of my first exposures to historical media. I think this fostered my own relationship with history and ultimately led me to become a historian. I’m not alone in this. Many times when I speak about history or video games at conferences, historians of a certain age shyly approach me and say that Age of Empires II got them interested in the field.

Greg Jenner is a public historian and host of BBC Four’s history podcast You’re Dead to Me. He played Age of Empires II while studying for his A-levels and found that the game not only captured his historical imagination but complemented his studies. As a result, the game became a recurring joke in the early days of podcasts. “This game definitely strengthened my passion for the past and probably expanded my historical vocabulary, giving me a wide range of global references that I couldn’t have learned in school. For example, Genghis Khan,” he said.

The technology tree, which shows the game’s different technologies and units available to players, particularly captured his imagination. “As a historian, I’m now more wary of the technology tree approach when thinking about society,” he says. “It’s interesting looking back, because at the time it definitely resonated with my historical tastes and actually reinforced them.”

I’m sure there are plenty of military historians out there who have a passion for trebuchets from this strategy game, but my own historical expertise is social and cultural. After playing the Age of Empires II scenario and watching my dad endlessly battle the computer, I really realized that it wasn’t the knights and castles that interested me, but the villagers. I placed the houses and farms in a pleasant way, believing in my heart that they would provide a quality of life for these little automatons, even if they existed purely to generate resources for war. And, frankly, it was annoying for the enemy to besiege my town and insist on setting my crops on fire. I see echoes of this in my current historical work, which focuses on the everyday. I wanted to know about the lives of the people whose labor made these great events possible.

I really fell in love with Age of Empires when I discovered the map editor. Here, I was free to build a town and create a story about who the villagers were without the game rudely asking me to be involved in the game’s mechanics. Dr Agnes Arnold Foster, a medical historian at the University of Edinburgh, had a similar experience. “The only thing I enjoyed was the map editor: all kinds of settings and planning, building landscapes, drawing coastlines, establishing where settlements would be, etc. I was less interested in the main gameplay elements. I didn’t. I liked harvesting the fields, but I didn’t really like fighting.”

Agnes is also an expert on nostalgia and looks at games through this lens. “I think that definitely influenced my interest in history. Many professional historians, myself included, begin life with nostalgia, a longing for a bygone era that we didn’t experience. And I think Age of Empires, along with other games like it, taps into some of that nostalgia, whether they admit it or not. Regardless, that’s basically what historians do for a living.”

She makes a great point. Some of us are clearly more playful in our methodology than others, but all historians live in a space of experimentation and play as part of the research process.

I was introduced to the game by my father, author and historian Matthew Lyons, who poetically recalls playing the game with his son. “I’m so glad I discovered this game when I became a parent. It’s one of the most unexpected and magical gifts that parenting can give you,” he tells me. “We felt this was a great way to explore the concept of the rise and fall of empires, and the broader concept of historical impermanence, in the context of the constancy and certainty of parental love.”

Play can be a powerful source of connection. To the past, to ourselves, to each other. Twenty-five years after its release, we can look back fondly on the impact Age of Empires II had on us. Like other historical media, this game is not without its problems in how it represents the past. But for me and many other historians of a certain generation, it became a spark of joy and developed into something more. It also kept my dad entertained for 20 years and gave us a point of connection. I am very grateful for these two points.