Empire Earth Preview

As development on the popular Age of Empires was nearing completion, Rick Goodman, one of the game's original designers, couldn't help but think of what he'd like to do next. His main ambition was not to create a game that made up more than just four standard periods of recent history, as Age of Empires did, but rather to create one that encompassed the entire history of mankind. His drive eventually led him to leave Ensemble Studios and create Stainless Steel Studios, his own game-development company located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, he began work on a truly ambitious real-time strategy game that spans nearly the last half million years of human history and even extends a few hundred years beyond the modern day. "When I was finishing Age of Empires, I was thinking about what would come [afterwards]," says Stainless Steel's Goodman. "I wanted to create an epic strategy game that would simulate what it would be like to run a true civilization." His end result was Empire Earth, a 3D real-time strategy game that starts at the Paleolithic Age and ends 200 years in the future: more than 500,000 years of human history.

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Little has been seen of Empire Earth since its announcement in late March of this year. The game made a showing on the floor of E3, but beyond that, both Stainless Steel Studios and publisher Sierra have been very tight-lipped about the game, understandably not wanting to hype it too soon before its release. To date, Empire Earth has been in development for 28 months: a staggering amount of time for a typical game to be in development, especially when you consider that it still is only about 75 percent complete and won't be ready to ship until the middle of 2001. However, Empire Earth is not a typical game, as its sheer size and scope easily make it one of the most ambitious real-time strategy games we've seen to date. We recently had the chance to talk to Rick Goodman about his latest project, and we walked away impressed with what he hopes will redefine the already crowded RTS genre.

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In its single-player campaign, Empire Earth is split into around 40 different scenarios (the final number has yet to be decided by Stainless Steel), and each is divided into several campaigns. These campaigns focus on different parts of history and include missions based on historical, contemporary, and fictitious events. "One of the scenarios we've been playing the most in the office is the German campaign," explains Goodman. "It covers the years between 1915 and 1945, basically World War I and World War II, during the [game's] atomic age." Another such campaign spans eight scenarios in chronological order. Some will span a longer timeline and have more role-playing elements - to simulate famous historical situations - than others.