Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

“He redid the portraits probably fifteen times or some crazy amount like that,” said Amber Hageman. “Of course now in retrospect I can see that his art was improving a lot and it was totally worth it. . . . But at the time, he would be sitting and fiddling and changing one person for days and days and days, and I was like, ‘Come on, it looks great, you don’t have to worry about it.’ He’s kind of a perfectionist, and if he didn’t get the right feeling about it, he would want to keep doing it.”

Eric Barone, who was twenty-eight years old and couldn’t open the front door of his car, had over $12 million in his bank account. And he still drove around town in a broken Toyota Camry. “People are asking me: When are you buying that sports car?” Barone said. “I don’t need it. I don’t know when that’s going to change, you know? At some point I guess I’ll probably buy a house, but I’m not in a rush. I don’t really need luxuries. I know that doesn’t make you happy.”

“Before the game came out, we had to budget for food and stuff,” he said when I asked if he had done anything with his newfound riches. “Now I’ll get a bottle of wine if I want it, or whatever. I don’t worry about that.” He paused to think for a few seconds. “I also bought health insurance, which I didn’t have before.” Later, Barone would tell me that he bought a new computer.

“We are ninety-nine percent done,” he said, “but that last one percent’s a bitch.”

Other developers might not have bothered—especially after the launch day catastrophe.

To finish the first Age of Empires, Ensemble’s staff went through what Dave Pottinger, a lead designer, described as “a terrible death march which could never be repeated today,” working one-hundred-hour weeks for nearly a year.