What is Ensemble Studios's story?

[DrewReaLee]

I thought the guys behind the Age of Empires series went out of business after AOEIII. I heard the Forgotten Empires was the work of a few fans that created new civilizations from scratch without any help from the original team. Was AOEII HD created by Microsoft and the former Ensemble Studios team because of the increasing popularity of the game? I'm really confused.

[FE_HockeySam18]

One former ES member, Matt Pritchard, tried to revive AoE2 to its former glory for several years, and eventually played a part in spearheading the effort that became AoE2HD. The rest of the ES team afaik has moved on, save for one or two others still sporadically involved in the AoE2 community.

[DrewReaLee]

Originally posted by AoF_HockeySam18:

One former ES member, Matt Pritchard, tried to revive AoE2 to its former glory for several years, and eventually played a part in spearheading the effort that became AoE2HD. The rest of the ES team afaik has moved on, save for one or two others still sporadically involved in the AoE2 community.

I really appreciate the answer. Thanks!

[FE_HockeySam18]

No problem ;)

[Sir Jasper Trund]

Originally posted by AoF_HockeySam18:

One former ES member, Matt Pritchard, tried to revive AoE2 to its former glory for several years, and eventually played a part in spearheading the effort that became AoE2HD. The rest of the ES team afaik has moved on, save for one or two others still sporadically involved in the AoE2 community.

I wondered what happened to Matt Pritchard's ideas, so it's good to know he was part of this in some way at least. I noticed he's in the credits - is he part of the current team, or was he just involved in formulating the idea?

[-sb- zveroboy]

Ensemble have a fascinating history; its employees had, between them, been involved in the creation of DOOM, Quake, Empire Earth, World of Warcraft and other stuff, not to mention AoM and AoE II and III.

Legends of the industry!

[💢𝓐ℓ ¢нємιѕт💢]

Actually the popularity of Age of Empires 2 and Conquerors Expansion never decreased.

Since M$ stopped supporting the game after 2.0a patch for Age of Kings and 1.0c patch for the Conquerors, and even after shutting down MSN Zone, the community has pretty much supported and kept the game alive.

We made the patches, the match making service, the wide screen and new OS fixes and the anti-hack measures to keep the 'gg' experience going.

The Forgotten Empires is just one part of all this effort by the community. It never got the following that the developers wanted. So it has nothing to do with the popularity of the game.

So the game has been pretty much popular in one form or another since 2004 MS Zone shutdown.

The new thing was the revival of M$ interest in the game. I can pinpoint that to the release of Age of Empires 3 on Steam. When M$ launched the game on Steam, it became the best seller for quite a while and brought alot of attention to the AOE franchise.

And alot of that attention came from old AOE 2 fan base who wanted that game to be released on Steam also. People said that they will be willing to shell $50 for this old game if they bring that on Steam. (atleast I did :)

I remember MS Ryz0n assuring us that our wishes are being conveyed to Microsoft. ( Also telling us weird stuff like no one actually knew who had the authority to give the green light to dust off the old AOE2 source files and revive it.)

So with the good sales of AOE 3 on Steam and high demand from the community for AOE 2 HD, M$ finally realized that there was $$ to be made here, and wallah! we got this game. :)


As for Ensemble Studios, the last job that they had was making some RTS version of HALO, if I remember correctly. After that they were disbanded. The disbanded folks formed Robot Entertainment (makers of Age of Empires Online and Orcs Must Die seires).

The Conquerors expansion was the last game Ensemble Studios made independently. After which they were acquired by M$. Which is probably why they couldn't repeat the success of AOE2. Before that they kept improving the game while keeping it 'real' to the original game..

After that, they went on completely different direction. Even though they were good games for single player, they didn't had the ingredients that made AOE 2 and Starcraft the only true competitive RTS multiplayer games that are still played by thousands today.


AOE2 HD is brought to you by Hidden Path Entertainment. The only link of between HPE and ES is Mark Terrano.

You can google (or bing :P ) "Mark Terrano's developer's diary" and "Mark Terrano on Reddit" to learn more about him. He has alot of interesting stories regarding AOE2.

[-Dare Devil/x/]

Originally posted by Al Chemist:

The disbanded folks formed Robot Entertainment (makers of Age of Empires Online and Orcs Must Die seires).

-Thanks for the backstory, it was a great read, assuming it is all true. =P

-I only quoted this portion because I wanted to point out that OMD and OMD2 are two great games and I really enjoyed them (100%'d both) and I wasn't aware of this connection. Thanks for the fun fact. =]

[blitzkragz]

Originally posted by AoF_HockeySam18:

One former ES member, Matt Pritchard, tried to revive AoE2 to its former glory for several years, and eventually played a part in spearheading the effort that became AoE2HD. The rest of the ES team afaik has moved on, save for one or two others still sporadically involved in the AoE2 community.

just out of curiosity. Is Matt Pritchard maimin_matty ?

[FE_HockeySam18]

No idea, actually.

[Abi!]

Originally posted by blitzkragz:

Originally posted by AoF_HockeySam18:

One former ES member, Matt Pritchard, tried to revive AoE2 to its former glory for several years, and eventually played a part in spearheading the effort that became AoE2HD. The rest of the ES team afaik has moved on, save for one or two others still sporadically involved in the AoE2 community.

just out of curiosity. Is Matt Pritchard maimin_matty ?

Nope - maimin_matty is someone called Matt Scadding (at least from what I can find on google)

[Hummuluis]

For those who might not be aware, Robot Entertainment was founded by those from Ensemble Studios. I've been following them since they started up.

" Based in Plano, Texas, Robot Entertainment is a world-class independent game development studio founded in 2009 by veterans of Ensemble Studios. "

[Sten]

Greg "DeathShrimp" Street went on to become Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street of Blizzard Entertainment. He was one of the main designers for World of Warcraft for several years, but he just left Blizzard in the last week for something else.