Age of Empires at 25: the strategy game that inspired a generation of historians | Games

My dad is the kind of man who will find a game he enjoys and stick to it. While I have always flitted about, hopping between different genres, he remains the only person I know who does absolutely everything it has to offer. When people ask, “who actually finishes these enormous games?”, I can respond with confidence that it is a geordie man in his 60s with a love of Lego and creative swearing. Age of Empires II had a grip on him for well over a decade.

The game came out in 1999, when I was five years old, and I am not exaggerating when I say that it was a permanent feature of our domestic life right up to when I moved out thirteen years later. The only thing that changed were the laptops he played on, which became progressively less bulky over the years. The sound effects, from the iconic “wololo” of the priests and the villagers’ warbles of acknowledgment as you sent them to chop wood, were the soundtrack to my childhood.

When I got old enough, I picked up my dad’s interest in the game, and it was one of my earliest exposures to historical media. I do think it helped develop my own engagement with history, which eventually led to me becoming a historian. I’m not alone in this. When I speak at conferences about history and video games, I have on many occasions had historians of a certain age sheepishly approach me to say that Age of Empires II got them into this 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 doing his A-levels, and found that the game captured his historical imagination as well as complimenting his studies – so much so that it became an early recurring joke on his podcast. “The game definitely reinforced my passion for the past, likely broadened my historical vocabulary, and gave me a wider range of global references that I wasn’t getting at school; Genghis Khan, for example,” he says.

The technology tree, which shows the game’s various techn and units available to the player, particularly caught his imagination. “As a historian, I’m now way more cautious of the tech tree approach to thinking about societies,” he says. “It’s interesting to look back at it, because at the time it definitely resonated with, and indeed bolstered, my historical tastes.”

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

While I am sure there are many military historians whose passionate interest in trebuchets started with this strategy game, my own historical expertise is in the social and cultural. Playing through Age of Empires II’s scenarios and watching my dad endlessly battle against the computer really highlighted to me that it wasn’t the knights or castles that interested me – it was the villagers. I placed my houses and farms in a pleasing way that I truly believed would provide these little automatons with a good quality of life, even as they existed purely to generate the resources for war. And frankly it was annoying when enemies would insist on laying siege to my town and setting fire to my crops. 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 labour enabled these big events.

Age of Empires really took ahold of me when I discovered the map editor. Here, I was free to build my towns and create stories about who these villagers were, without the game rudely insisting on making me engage with its mechanics. Dr Agnes Arnold-Forster, a historian of medicine at Edinburgh University, had a similar experience. “I only enjoyed the map editor – any kind of setup or planning, building landscapes, drawing coastlines, establishing where settlements would lie. I wasn’t that interested in the main gameplay element – not a big fan of fighting, although I liked harvesting fields.”

Agnes is also an expert in nostalgia and reflected on the game through this lens. “I think it absolutely informed my interest in history. I think a lot of professional historians, myself included, start out life as nostalgics – longing for periods in the past they haven’t lived through – and Age of Empires, along with other games like it, indulge some of that nostalgia. And, I suppose, it’s about playing with the past – which is basically what historians do for a living, whether they like to admit it or not.”

She makes an excellent point. While some of us are more explicitly playful in our methodologies than others, historians all inhabit a space of experimentation and play as part of the research process.

Where I was introduced to this game by my dad, Mathew Lyons, an author and historian, reflected poetically on playing it with his son. “It was lovely to discover the game as a result of becoming a parent – one of those strange unlooked-for gifts that parenting gives you,” he tells me. “It felt like a brilliant way to explore the idea of empires rising and falling, and the wider idea 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 one another. Twenty five years after its launch, we can now nostalgically reflect on the impact Age of Empires II had on us. As with any piece of historical media the game is not without its issues in how it represents the past. But for me, and plenty of other historians of a particular generation, it provided a spark of joy that developed into something more. It also kept my dad entertained for two decades and gave us a point of connection. For those two things, I’m very grateful.