It’s quite a common criticism of the video game industry that corporate and other external stakeholders hold too much influence over the design team and that this culture is the result of many of the troubles in the industry. In recent years we’ve seen games pushed for early released such as Cyberpunk 2077 even though the project wasn’t ready, we’ve seen games like Overwatch 2 shift in it’s monetisation system and cancel it’s PvE game modes which were the original promised deliverables when the game was announced.
However, what if I told you that this isn’t a recent development in the industry and in fact corporate stakeholders have been pushing and directing developers to make decisions against the projects best interests as early as the mid-90s.
Age of Empires II: The conquerors
Age of Empires II is a popular RTS game which originally released in 1999 yet is still thriving online today thanks to an amazing community who have stayed with the game for coming onto 26 years!
Ensemble Studios, a subsidiary of Microsoft, were the original team behind Age of Empires II which released its first expansion in 2000, named the Conquerors, back when you had to buy your additional content on a CD rom and there were no online patches to fix balancing issues.
In 2013, 13 years after the Conquerors, Age of Empires was back with a new expansion called ‘The Forgotten’ this time realising digitally on steam before a further 2 expansions (The African Kingdoms 2015 and Rise of the Rajas 2016) would keep the Age of Empires community well fed with content. In 2019 Age of Empires II got a remaster in ‘Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition’ a new full release on Steam that upscaled graphics, gameplay features and added new content whilst including all the content from previous expansions to the original game for free.
But it’s the first expansion ‘the Conquerors’ is what we’ll cover today and a rather interesting corporate decision that shaped the content of its release.
The unusual yet loved addition: The Koreans
Sandy Petersen was the lead designer for the expansion after successfully being the lead for ‘Rise of Rome’ the only expansion for Age of Empires II’s predecessor Age of Empires. It was Sandy’s idea to add an expansion to Age of Empires in the first place on which corporate owners Microsoft were originally sceptical of the idea according to Sandy himself.
However, the development of the expansion would give the studio some breathing room in developing the sequel to Age of Empires. This is a common practice in video game development, to have a smaller team work on an expansions or additional content for your current game to still provide content to players whilst the larger team finishes off the next project.
Rise of Rome was a massive success and was even remarked as the “most profitable game that Microsoft had ever published” (Ramsay, Morgan 2012). The game sold between 800,000 and 1.2 million units and ranked 2nd place in the sales charts for video games in the UK in January 1999.
So, after the success of Age of Empires II Microsoft came knocking again for Ensemble to develop a new expansion and Sandy Petersen was once again lead designer.
Sandy decider that the expansion would include the Huns and the Spanish to influential civilizations from the Middle Ages the former being prevalent at the beginning of the age and latter being prevalent at the end of the Middle Ages.
In addition, Sandy decided on adding the Aztecs to the expansion to be an historical opponent for the Spanish to fight doing so would require the art team to design completely new architecture to the game to suit the Aztec and so Sandy then seized the opportunity to also add the Mayans to the expansion as the team could reuse the Aztec themed art to ultimately get more value from it.
But the expansion had one more addition to the civilization roster, the Koreans. At a first glance it’s difficult to say how the East Asian civilization fitted the theme or rational that Sandy originally laid out and that’s because they didn’t, it wasn’t Sandy’s decision to add them to the expansion….
In an interview with YouTube channel ‘Bored with Nelly’ in February 2021, Sandy revealed the reasons why the Koreans were added to the Conquerors expansion. It was a corporate decision by Microsoft.
According to Sandy a representative from Microsoft recommended the team add the Koreans to the expansions 6 weeks before development was scheduled to conclude, Microsoft deemed the addition of Koreans to be important due to the success of Age of Empires’ Sc-fi themed competitor ‘StarCraft’ in Korea.
StarCraft developed by Blizzard Entertainment was an RTS like Age of Empires but notably was set in space unlike Age of Empires historical setting. Nevertheless, due to the similarity in gameplay between the two Microsoft had paid close attention to the success of StarCraft, especially in south Korea. StarCraft’s worldwide sales reached 4 million units by July 2001, South Korea accounted for over 50% of these copies, just to demonstrate how big this game was in South Korea.
Microsoft paid close attention to StarCraft’s success overseas and believed that by adding the Koreans to Age of Empires II would allow the game to better compete against StarCraft in South Korea.
Sandy retorted by stating that StarCraft is not successful in South Korea because the game has Koreans in it, StarCraft doesn’t feature civilizations or nations from current day or historical earth. Despite Sandy’s original objection the team added the Koreans to the expansion and were able to utilise the art already used in the base game for the Japanese and Chinese and even added a Korean historical scenario ‘Noryang Point 1598’ to the game.
The Koreans however would not receive a fully-fledged campaign unlike the Spanish, the Huns, and the Aztecs due to the short time left in the development cycle of the expansion.
The impact of the expansion
To fans of Age of Empires this story about the Koreans addition was unknown until Sandy’s interview in 2021. The Koreans were a popular and beloved addition to the game and their addition was never questioned by consumers, but did the game sell well in South Korea? Did Microsoft prove that their influence on this project would be a commercials success?
No. In fact the addition of the Koreans actually brought more difficulty for the game’s success in South Korea. The original design of the Turtle Ship, the unique unit for the Korean civilization was criticised for being inaccurate and had to be later adjusted in a patch.
There was also political criticism aimed at Microsoft, I was unable to verify this from a Korean source, but according to Sandy, Microsoft faced backlash due to the depiction of the ‘Sea of Japan’ in the Korean themed ‘Noryang Point 1598’ scenario. There is a current naming dispute over the Sea of Japan with most countries agreeing the name is “Sea of Japan” but North Korea and South Korea have disputed this accrediting the name to “Sea of Korea”.
Lessons Learnt
Apart from some bad PR in South Korea there was no real downside to the Koreans addition to the expansions, if there was more time available for the project team to add the Koreans it would have been likely some of the historical inaccuracies related to the Turtle Ships would have been fixed but due to the late pressure by external stakeholders the team couldn’t properly identify and mitigate risks related to adding the Koreans.
It would also have been likely the Koreans would have been added later down the line to Age of Empires II in a future expansion had they not been part of the Conquerors. The takeaway point though is that Microsoft’s poor market analysis of why StarCraft was successful allowed them to use their misguided conclusion to put their hands on the project and make creative decisions from above the project lead (Sandy). This culture has now become synonyms with the video game industry as mentioned at the start with Cyberpunk 2077 and Overwatch 2.
Thanks for reading this far and if you’re a fan of Age of Empires or like to hear more about Sandy Petersen’s work on Age of Empires please check out the full podcast/interview by Bored with Nelly here:
Please feel free to give me any feedback either in the comments below or you can find me on twitter @TimPMInsights where I post regular insights, statistics and just my general thoughts on video games and similar industries.
Additionally, if anyone has more information on the reception of Age of Empires II in South Korea during the Conquerors expansion release in 2000 please contact me and I can make any needed adjustments to Sandy’s claims.
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References
Ramsay, Morgan (2012). “Tony Goodman”. Gamers At Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play. Apress.
“The Charts: Top Twenty”. Ultimate PC. No. 18. January 1999. p. 19.
“UK releases”. Eurogamer.net. 2000-09-01. Archived from the original on 2023-04-20. Retrieved 2023-04-20.
Tim Browne - Consultant and Researcher for Creatives 