The earliest known prototype of AoE - Dawn of Man:



What could have been lost forever, never to be seen by the world, has surfaced. This, dear Age fans, is the earliest iteration of what eventually became Age of Empires. It has been unearthed amongst other amazing treasury at the Strong Museum of Play, by curators Andrew Borman and Lauren, who just announced the amazing discovery on Twitter.

I contacted Andrew and asked him for further information. Here's his reply:

"The Bruce C. Shelley Papers were donated to the Strong in September 2016. The date on the .exe is 9/23/1995. It is fairly barebones, but does allow for editing which is nice. Only two test scenarios are available. The large majority of the data is the graphics, which look to just be BMP files."

This is as primitive as it's going to get. A fully working, extremely early Dawn of Man build, with some basic functionality - still a long way off from completion. The raw ingredients are there however. This is quite the reminder to what happened when Tony Goodman sent some very nice things to one our HG staff members, TAG - right around the same time. You can view those here.

Also, there is going to be a livestream featuring this very same DoM build next friday, so you can see what it is like:

"I will be doing a stream of the game, likely next Friday, April 13th at 4PM EST on our Twitch channel. It’s not 100% set in stone yet, but that is likely to be what happens. Ill also be bringing in some of the other documents related to Age of Empires during the stream, so it will be about as comprehensive as I can do in the span of an hour on a stream."

Which is very exciting news, and will give us an awesome look into both the past and the development that went into AoE

Thanks to Atrican for notifying us!

[This message has been edited by PhatFish (edited 04-08-2018 @ 09:47 AM).]