Wow that's really crazy, once more thank you Phatfish for bringing this to our knowledge !

I have another funny one, did anyone know there were key shortcuts in first (main) game screen ?

CTRL-C opens credits screen, and CTRL-L runs some kind of quick load game feature.

The quick load thing does not really work because it must be an early version feature, and loads a text (yes !) file tr_wrld.txt that seem to contain other file names to load, that contain game data. Probably uncompressed version of saved games !
I didn't try to test it further, the best would be to have an example of game "text" file set. Which probably does not exist anymore since 20 years ago...

Wow that's amazing. Apart from the interface you can see a lot of the mechanics were already there.

Also if you listen to it for longer, you'll hear them talk about auto-formations in AoE2 as if it is some earth-shaking innovation. It's amazing how a feature like that went from cutting-edge to something we wouldn't even think about these days. You might want to show this to the guys over at AoKHeaven.

The fact that this thread is here and we're all able to see this now I had something to do with

The fact that this thread is here and we're all able to see this now I had something to do with

Expected .
I like that they showed a bit more of the ES team and i never imagined that Stephen Rippy was so young.

What a great time machine trip!! Aaaahhh... Age of Empires!!! I will never forget the day I first loaded it up and saw a "Scenario Builder" button on the main menu. What the devil is this, I thought?? Clicked on it, and never looked back.

Shortly before this video was made, though, one of the top designers Rick Goodman (Tony's brother) had left ES and started his own company, Stainless Steel Studios. When Rick saw the reception my AoE work had received here at Heaven Games, he shot me an email and less than a week later I'd been hired as a professional game designer on Empire Earth.

I scoured this video looking for footage of Rick, but alas, he was now one of ES's top competitors and whatever shots they had of him didn't make the final cut.

I miss Rick's visionary genius terribly. It's time for someone to reboot Empire Earth and get Rick Goodman back in the RTS business.

Thank you so much for unearthing and sharing this, HG!

[This message has been edited by Gordon Farrell (edited 07-24-2016 @ 03:10 PM).]

I like how slow that villager was walking. Seems to me like DoM had a slower pace in general, like a more relaxed civ-building game.

@Phatty

Maybe post this at AoKH?

Good call, Captain! Maybe change the thread title to: "Long Lost Footage of Origins of Medieval Monarchies Found! First there were primitive tribes, and then kingdoms slowly arose..."

[This message has been edited by Gordon Farrell (edited 07-28-2016 @ 09:46 AM).]

I like how similar the buildings are to the ones in the final game.

Woah, nice to see a golden oldie post here once more. Welcome back Gordon! And as suggested posted this on AoKH too.

Heya Phatfish! Nice to see HG still thriving!! Me, I've been getting the itch to do some old school modding. In my position at Reverie World Studios I'm in charge of narrative design and voice acting, but I don't get to do any actual building. So I'm toying with my old Julius Caesar campaign for Caesar 4...

But meanwhile I've got a related question for you as a moderator: Some of my old campaigns had custom music tracks that were uploaded to Atomic Gamer. Since that site has gone the way of all earthly things, I was wondering if there's a way to upload my rar files with the music to HG, so folks will have them available once more?

[This message has been edited by Gordon Farrell (edited 07-29-2016 @ 12:07 PM).]

Modding has been high on the agenda here past years, with numerous awesome discoveries and modifications made

You can submit your custom campaign music to the Granary (we accept quite large upload now, needs to be .zip though), but if that doesn't work you can send the .rar to phatfish att heavengames dottt com and I'll add them to the downloads section.

Awesome. I have music packs for my old AoK campaigns and also my Stronghold 2 campaigns. But here's another question: New players are getting SH2 from Steam, yes? As far as I can tell, Steam doesn't place the game files on your hard drive so if a player acquires a mod here, how is it added into a game copy purchased on Steam?

[This message has been edited by Gordon Farrell (edited 07-30-2016 @ 09:44 AM).]

If you ask about Age of Empires 2 that has a Steam version, you could release the mod or campaign there. Files downloaded outside the Steam Workshop need to be placed into the folders manually.

In this screenshot, the buildings on the borders are part of the UI, right? Seems funny to limit the game to such a small rectangle (in the already tiny monitors of that time). Very nice find.

@ Gordon Farrell

Steam installs games in its own set of folders, usually Steam Workshop mods are installed in a folder of their own within another section of Steam's directory. The folder names are just numbers, if I recall correctly.

Okay -- got it! But the data doesn't unpack into accessible files, right? Has anyone figured out how to do that? What I'm trying to find out is if it's possible to modify a game accessed via Steam without loading the mod to Steam Workshop.

Lots of things have been going on in my absence! thanks a lot, Phatfish for sharing the long lost stuff with the loyal fanbase!

Best regards!

Okay -- got it! But the data doesn't unpack into accessible files, right? Has anyone figured out how to do that? What I'm trying to find out is if it's possible to modify a game accessed via Steam without loading the mod to Steam Workshop.

Yes, you can mod it just like you mod the vanilla game, but online playing will be unsuported and your mods might get removed with updates, not sure how that is handled.