# Age of Empires let eight players fight big battles over a 1997 phone line.

- Series: [How It Spawns](https://miu.fm/howitspawns.md)
- Published: 2026-10-25
- Page: https://miu.fm/howitspawns/age-of-empires-let-eight-players-fight-big-battles-over-a

## Story

Age of Empires let eight players fight big battles over a 1997 phone line. How did all those armies fit through?

Ensemble Studios' targets "in early 1996" included "Support for 8 players in multiplayer" on a "16MB Pentium 90 with a 28.8 modem" (about 28,800 bits a second). "Just passing X and Y coordinates, status, action, facing and damage would have limited us to 250 moving units in the game at the most."

So they sent the orders, not the army: "run the exact same simulation on each machine, passing each an identical set of commands that were issued by the users at the same time." "Turns were typically 200 msec in length", and commands were tagged "to be executed two "communications turns" in the future". Even "the random numbers were seeded and synchronized as well".

The catch: "Any simulation that ran differently was tagged as "out of sync" and the game stopped." "A deer slightly out of alignment when the random map was created would forage slightly differently -- and minutes later a villager would path a tiny bit off, or miss with his spear and take home no meat." Microsoft's product manager had warned them: "In every project, there is one stubborn bug that goes all the way to the wire -- I think out-of-sync is going to be it."

The coast, figures, orders and checksums in this film are our own simplified version, built in code.

Which game's hidden trick should we cut open next?

Source: "1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond", Game Developer, 22 March 2001 (Ensemble Studios).
Unofficial. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.
Sounds and music: our own, made in code.

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