METROMy dad is the kind of guy who will find a game he likes and stick with it. While I’ve always been flitting around, jumping between different genres, he’s still the only person I know who absolutely does it. all has to offer. When people ask, “who actually finishes these huge sets?”, I can confidently answer that it’s a Geordie man in his 60s who loves Lego and swears creatively. Age of Empires II controlled it for over a decade.
The game came out in 1999, when I was five, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that it was a permanent feature of our domestic life until I moved away thirteen years later. The only thing that changed were the laptops I played on, which became less and less bulky as the years went by. The sound effects, from the iconic “wololo” of the priests and the villagers’ chirps of recognition when you sent them out to chop firewood, were the soundtrack of my childhood.
When I was old enough, I discovered my father’s interest in the game and it was one of my first exposures to historical media. I think it helped me develop my own commitment to history, which ultimately led me to become a historian. I’m not alone in this. When I speak at conferences about history and video games, on many occasions I have been timidly approached by historians from a certain era to tell me that Age of Empires II got them into this field.
Greg Jenner is a public historian and host of the BBC Four history podcast You’re Dead to Me. He played Age of Empires II while taking his high school exams and found that the game captured his historical imagination as well as complemented his studies, to the point that it became one of the first running jokes on his podcast. “The game definitely reinforced my passion for the past, probably expanded my historical vocabulary and gave me a wider range of global references that I wasn’t getting in school; Genghis Khan, for example,” he says.
The technology tree, which displays the various technologies and game units available to the player, especially captured his imagination. “As a historian, I’m now much more cautious about the technology tree approach to thinking about societies,” he says. “It’s interesting to look back on it, because at the time it definitely resonated with my historical tastes and actually reinforced them.”
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While I’m sure there are many military historians whose passionate interest in catapults began with this strategy game, my own historical experience focuses on the social and cultural. Playing the Age of Empires II scenarios and watching my father fight endlessly against the computer really made me realize that it wasn’t the knights or castles that interested me, but the villagers. I placed my houses and farms in a nice way that I truly believed would provide these little automatons with a good quality of life, even when they existed solely to generate resources for war. And frankly, it was annoying when enemies insisted on laying siege to my city 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 work enabled these great events.
Age of Empires really grabbed me when I discovered the map editor. Here, I was free to build my cities and create stories about who these villagers were, without the game rudely insisting on forcing me to engage with its mechanics. Dr Agnes Arnold-Forster, a medical historian at the University of Edinburgh, had a similar experience. “I just enjoyed the map editor: any kind of setting up or planning, building landscapes, drawing coastlines, establishing where settlements would be located. I wasn’t that interested in the main element of the game; “I wasn’t a big fan of fighting, although I liked harvesting fields.”
Agnes is also an expert on nostalgia and reflects on the game through this lens. “I think it absolutely informed my interest in history. I think many professional historians, myself included, begin life as nostalgic (longing for periods of the past they haven’t experienced), and Age of Empires, along with other similar games, indulges some of that nostalgia. And I guess 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 with our methodologies than others, all historians inhabit a space of experimentation and play as part of the research process.
When my father introduced me to this game, Mathew Lyons, author and historian, poetically reflected on playing it with his son. “It was wonderful to discover the game as a result of becoming a father, one of those strange and unexpected gifts that parenthood gives you,” he tells me. “I thought it was a brilliant way to explore the idea of the rise and fall of empires, and the broader 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 others. Twenty-five years after its release, we can now nostalgically reflect on the impact Age of Empires II had on us. As with any historical medium, the game is not without problems in how it represents the past. But for me, and for many other historians of a particular generation, it was a spark of joy that turned into something more. It also kept my father entertained for two decades and gave us a point of connection. For those two things, I am very grateful.