Age of EmpiresAge of Empires developer confirms the game is mostly written in low-level Assembly code because ‘we could scroll the screen and fill it with sprites as fast or faster’ than competitors like Starcraft ‘even though we had twice as many pixels’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Age of EmpiresAge of Empires developer confirms the game is mostly written in low-level Assembly code because ‘we could scroll the screen and fill it with sprites as fast or faster’ than competitors like Starcraft ‘even though we had twice as many pixels’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
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(Image credit: Microsoft)
Update 01/09/24: The original version of this article mistakenly credited Matt Pritchard as “coding lead” on Age of Empires. “That was Angelo Laudon, who was excellent at it,” says Pritchard. “I was put in charge of graphics and optimization among other things. Later, I was lead on the HD and DE versions.” Apologies for the error.
Some of the greatest stories about games are simply about how developers made the thing work. Ask any developer for their favourite workarounds and you’ll get a full evening’s worth of entertainment about how a giant tram is actuallyan NPC with a hat on, or how rabbits are actuallywhat makes Azeroth work, and so on.
This isn’t quite on those lines, but a redditor recently noted that Chris Sawyer wrote Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 2 in Assembly language, and apparently Age of Empires was the same: “AoE is written in Assembly: is this actually TRUE?!” It’s important to note that this wasn’t uncommon back in the day, though it would still be pretty remarkable if an entire game was hard-coded this way. Assembly language, to be as brief as possible, is any low-level coding language that communicates more directly with a computer’s architecture than high-level languages like C++.
The question about whether Age of Empires was coded in Assembly languagehit gold in the repliesthanks to Matt Pritchard, one of the founding members of Ensemble Studios, who was in charge of graphics and optimisation on the early games, and on the later HD / DE editions the coding lead.
“I guess I can clarify this, since I wrote all the assembly code used in Age of Empires and Age of Kings, along with many other parts of those games,” says Pritchard. “There were about ~13,000 lines of x86 32-bit assembly code written in total.”
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Part of why such a workaround was required is that both games were being developed at a time when standalone 3D cards were uncommon: “cutting edge was 2D with a separate 3D card like the Voodoo 1 & 2” says Pritchard. He goes into some detail on the technical restrictions of the time, noting that the Pentium 166 CPU in the machines most Ensemble developers were using “had 16K of cache… TOTAL.” Or to put it in plainer terms, “You are probably working right now on a PC with more on-CPU Cache Memory than the PC I developed AoE on had in TOTAL.”
Pritchard’s had quite the career but clearly has real affinity for Age of Empires, and mentions how the HD edition (not to be confused with the Definitive Edition) came about. “The HD edition came about after I had been knocking on doors at Microsoft for a few years trying to get someone interested, and the contract with Hidden Path (where I was at the time, working on CS:GO for my previous employer Valve) was rather small,” says Pritchard.
“I am both very fortunate to have been part of its creation and humbled to this day at all the enjoyment and more that it has brought to people. I would never have had the great career in game development that I had without all of the fans and supporters of those games.”
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