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How the developer of Orcs Must Die! escaped corporate influence

January 21, 2021

This article originally appeared in issue 350 of our glossy magazine. You can get it delivered right to your door by grabbing a subscription, which will also net you special subscriber-only covers.  Some ideas are so familiar, so entrenched in gaming history, that it’s difficult to remember how strange they were in the beginning. Take Age of Empires. Splicing the real-time battles of Command & Conquer with the grand strategy of Civilization was an odd and unprecedented experiment.”Back then, the studio was really enjoying the RTS genre, which was still nascent and growing,” says Patrick Hudson, who worked for several years as a producer at Ensemble. “There weren’t that many big titles established. There was an appetite internally to explore a historical setting.”Thirty million units later, Age of Empires feels as fundamental to PC gaming as turning on your monitor. But that success was also confining. Ensemble became trapped by its once-brave formula, unable to commit to new ideas as Age of Empires sucked attention and resources. A spy game, a 3D platformer, Diablo with pirates—all were subsumed by Microsoft’s need for more of the same.”We tried a lot of different genres and prototyped different things, but it was always…

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