Ensemble Studios

» see ensemblestudios.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

age of empires 2 was on every cafe machine in ankara around 2000-2002, sitting next to counter-strike and the half-life mod folders. the splash screen said ensemble studios in small letters under the title. nobody i played with knew or cared who that was. you double-clicked the icon and you queued for a 2v2 random map. franks vs goths, the same fifty hotkeys, the same villager death sound.

ensemble studios was founded in 1995 in dallas, texas, by tony goodman, with his brother rick on the design side and bruce shelley (ex-microprose, ex-civilization) as the senior designer. the original age of empires shipped in october 1997 on the genie engine the studio built in-house. it was the first rts to use real historical civilizations instead of fantasy factions.

age of empires 2: the age of kings followed in september 1999 and is the title most people still mean when they say age of empires. then age of mythology in 2002, star wars galactic battlegrounds in 2001 (licensed reskin), age of empires 3 in 2005, and halo wars in 2009 as the final shipped title. microsoft bought the studio in 2001 for around a hundred million dollars and folded it into microsoft game studios.

i was not paying attention to the corporate side at the time. the shutdown was announced in september 2008, while halo wars was still in beta. microsoft kept the team on staff long enough to ship halo wars on february 26 2009. the studio itself was finalized closed on january 29 2009, a month before the game it had built came out. tony goodman left and formed robot entertainment in dallas with a chunk of the senior staff. it became one of the cleaner ms-studio-closure aftershocks of the late 2000s.

~ the record ~

~ what it made ~

the genie engine was the actual thing. it was a 2d isometric tile engine with sprite-based units, written for windows 95, that survived through age of empires 2 and age of mythology and the conquerors expansion. the engine is what definitive editions are still effectively running underneath. forgotten empires (the modder team that became microsoft's go-to studio for the de re-releases) was a fan project from the early 2010s that got formalized when microsoft realized the player base had never actually gone away.

age of empires 2 sat in a sweet spot that nothing in the rts genre has hit at the same scale since. four resources, twelve to eighteen civilizations depending on edition, dark age to imperial age tech progression, monk-conversion chess at the unit level. the wololo joke survives as a meme nineteen years after the conquerors expansion.

~ the postmortem ~

microsoft had bought ensemble specifically to make a halo rts on the xbox 360, since the studio had the rts engineering depth. halo wars was the project that justified the acquisition. when it was clear the game was going to ship but microsoft did not see a long-tail rts business outside of pc, the studio became a fixed cost without a forward roadmap. the september 2008 announcement gave staff time to find new positions, and the january 2009 close was a planned wind-down rather than a sudden layoff.

~ the inheritance ~

robot entertainment took the original aoe online project after microsoft handed it over and shipped it as age of empires online in 2011. that game shut down in 2014. robot pivoted to orcs must die and the dungeon defenders style tower-defense space. bonfire studios (david rippy) and newtoy (the bettner brothers, later words with friends) and boss fight entertainment all came out of the same diaspora.

the age of empires brand itself stayed inside microsoft and is now stewarded by world's edge studio. forgotten empires (uk) and tantalus media (australia) do most of the actual code on the definitive editions. age of empires 4 shipped in 2021 from relic entertainment. the genie engine line is alive in the de re-releases. the dallas office that started all of it has been gone for seventeen years.

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