Age of Empires was released on 15 October 1997 as the first major release from Ensemble Studios. The game arrived in a market where real-time strategy titles were still finding their audience, and strategy games carried a reputation for being forbidding. But the team building the game had a different goal in mind than simply creating the most challenging RTS on the market.
When Ensemble Studios brought level designer Ian Fischer into the fold during development of the original game, the studio had already grappled with a difficult question: how do you build a complex, strategic game that doesn't immediately drive away newcomers? Ensemble was established as an independent company in 1995 in Dallas, Texas, by Tony Goodman, his brother Rick Goodman, along with Bruce Shelley and Brian Sullivan. Studio head Tony Goodman became obsessed with a particular measure of success: accessibility.
Goodman's solution was unconventional. For each new scenario that designers created, he had a simple test. He would load up the mission, start it running, then leave his desk and go to lunch. When he returned, he would check whether the player had survived. If the artificial intelligence had defeated the player in his absence, Goodman would tell the designer the scenario was too difficult and needed revision. The logic was unforgiving in its simplicity: if a player could not survive even a brief period without the designer standing over their shoulder, they would never learn how to play. They would quit before mastering the basics.
This philosophy reflected something deeper than a preference for easy games. The success of the Age of Empires series was attributed to 'making a game which appealed to both the casual and hardcore gamer'. Goodman understood that real-time strategy games faced an image problem. Players assumed they would need hours of study before having any fun. If a new player's first experience was being crushed by an aggressive AI with no opportunity to explore the game's systems, they would never return.
The stakes were real. By 2001, the Age of Empires series had sold approximately 8.5 million licensed units worldwide and had won five Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences awards, including Strategy Game of the Year three times. But that success was built on bringing people into the genre who might otherwise have felt excluded. The goal was for players of the game to have fun, not the designers or researchers.
Fischer carried this principle with him as his career evolved. Ensemble worked in collaboration with Bungie Studios on Halo Wars, a real-time strategy game based on the Halo universe for the Xbox 360 platform. Later, he moved to Robot Entertainment, where he contributed to games like Orcs Must Die. The idea that accessibility could coexist with genuine game design never left him.
But Fischer was also honest about the limits of this approach. Developers cannot make every player happy without risking the core design. As Ensemble grew, it moved away from 'family meetings in a little room with a fireplace where the entire studio could sit around and talk about what we wanted to see in our game' because 'as we got bigger, that room got more and more crowded until eventually we couldn't all fit'. Larger teams meant more complexity. There was a real risk of designing a game so diluted that it lost its identity.
Today, decades after Goodman's lunch break test, the game industry has caught up to what Ensemble intuited in 1997. Difficulty settings are increasingly recognised as accessibility features, not compromises. Options for difficulty tie closely to accessibility, as they allow people to experience the game in full without hitting a challenging roadblock they cannot surpass due to skill level or for disability. Different players seek different experiences: some crave a demanding test of skill, while others simply want an immersive story; multiple difficulty modes, from narrative to hardcore, give players a path that suits their abilities and preferences.
The question that Goodman was wrestling with in 1997 is more relevant now than ever: how do you build something meaningful without building something that shuts people out? The challenge remains. But his approach offered a practical answer: test relentlessly, trust the evidence in front of you, and remember that a player who quits because a game is too hard will never get the chance to fall in love with it.