Thread by @SandyofCthulhu

In 1997, Age of Empires was just coming out. My job was to design a new RTS game - Sorceress. But in the first few months, they kept pulling people off my team to work on Age of Empires 2. By the end of the year, I had exactly three guys - me, one programmer, and one artist. I went to management and said, "Look, we can't possibly create an RTS game with this team, but what we CAN do is make an expansion to Age of Empires - I suggest calling it the Rise of Rome, and adding Rome and 3 Roman enemies to the game."

MicroSoft hated the idea. They said, pompously, "Experience shows that expansions are always failures." I had a background in roleplaying games and I knew for a fact that Call of Cthulhu expansions sold about 30% as many copies as the original game, plus kept the original game relevant. But were WAY cheaper than 30% of the dev cost & time. So I managed to convince the bosses at Ensemble Studios to go ahead against MicroSoft's advice.

We built Rise of Rome, with Macedonians, Palmyrans, Carthaginians, & Romans and released it in 1998. It was not only an immediate hit, but coming out a year after Age of Empires, it created a burst in AoE sales. Plus the next year, they released a gold pack with AoE + RoR in the same package for yet more sales. MicroSoft and Ensemble Studios made out like gangbusters.

I was a proud man. 1/

I did have some pushback. First, some people at Ensemble wanted to claim that Carthage was the same as Phoenician. I agreed they had a lot in common, but felt that Carthage had developed enough to be something new.

Also oddly enough I got a lot of flak from Greece - they were upset that I named a nation "Macedonia" because they said Macedonia was Greek. My counter-argument was "Well that's awesome - that means that Greece has TWO different civs representing them in the game." But the politics of the matter apparently outweighed common sense. In the end I didn't care and did Macedonia anyway, because certainly the ancient Greeks did NOT think that Macedonian = Greece. Plus our Greek sales were tiny so if we lost all 8,000 of them too bad. Later Greece banned all video games which made it even more of a moot point.
2/

The best part, for me, was at the end of 1999, when MicroSoft came to Ensemble Studios, all pompous and snide, and said, "We have learned that doing expansions for RTS games is really smart. Do one please." I looked at the MS goons and just said, "Yeah? Who taught you that?" And they actually didn't know, I guess because they had no institutional memory in the department that handled outside developers.

But I didn't mind. I loved doing expansions. They're easy and fast and I have a nice small tight team. Less politicking, less interference from above, and a clear goal. 3/end