They gave it the working title of Dawn of Man. 'And as the ice recedes, resources are uncovered, and you can start building, and then you proceed from there to build the first civilizations on Earth.'Īnother nine months would go by before the entrepreneurs would complete the first working prototype of the game. 'I had an idea that the game would start with the map almost covered with ice, like an Ice Age, and you have little settlers,' Shelley said. 'They nodded their head and agreed that maybe, of all the bad ideas, it was the least-worst idea we had,' recalled Rick. When Rick suggested they borrow from these, Shelley brought up his past experience with the games and suggested they do a kind of real-time take on Civilization. They looked at Warcraft and Westwood's Command & Conquer. But the idea that really got them thinking was a suggestion by another programmer, Tim Deen, to riff off Blizzard's real-time strategy game Warcraft. Tony suggested something set on a desert island that would have been similar to the television show Lost. They spent the next few months discussing countless ideas.

Tony and his cohorts had met Shelley in a board gaming club when they were teenagers still at school and Shelley was in college. Shelley was the co-creator of both the hit game Sid Meier's Civilization and the business simulation Railroad Tycoon. To help come up with a solid concept, Tony brought in Rick and their friend Bruce Shelley, who lived up in Chicago but periodically travelled down to Dallas for short stays. Still, the demo solidified the idea that they could make a game. You could drive it around and shoot palm trees-that was about it. Tony and programmer Angelo Laudon put together a simple tech demo with a tank. The cabal started to experiment with building an engine, its isometric perspective inspired by SimCity. Tony then set about organizing a small gaming cabal at the company. 'I think there was a strange reaction in the room because people didn't know quite how to perceive that,' Rick continued. Tony addressed the engineering team: 'Hey, would any of you rather be programming games than databases?' 'He just came in one day, out of the blue, to my recollection,' Rick Goodman told Ars. He didn't know what it would be yet-only that it would be fun to make something and see if it goes anywhere. One day, in 1994, thinking that Microsoft's release of WinG, a DirectX predecessor, had presented a great new opportunity, Tony struck on the idea to do a game as a side project. He and his brother Rick had been avid board gamers since they were kids.

Game age of empires 1