Age of Empires II, and my first LAN party
Two computers, an ethernet hub, and my friend Mike. Long all-night campaigns, giant walled cities, and the first time I ever wired two machines together to play a game. It happened to be the best strategy game ever made.
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings came out on September 27, 1999, with the Conquerors expansion following in August 2000, and it landed in my life right around middle school. I had just gotten my own computer, and this became one of the games I poured the most time into, first on my own against the computer, then over the MSN Gaming Zone against real people, and finally, best of all, sitting in the same room as my friend Mike.
The first LAN party
Mike had two computers, and both of them could run Age of Empires. That simple fact opened a door for me. We could link the two machines together and play side by side, which, even though it was just the two of us, was my first real taste of a LAN party, and the first time I personally had ever wired two computers together to play a game.
The way we did it was with an ethernet hub, which is worth explaining, because the difference between a hub and a switch is a nice little window into how networks work. A hub is dumb on purpose. Any signal it gets on one port, it just blindly repeats out every other port, echoing everything to everyone and letting the computers sort out what was meant for them. A switch is the smarter, later version: it learns which machine is on which port and sends each message only where it needs to go, so nobody is shouting over anybody else. For two computers and a couple of long nights, a hub was all we needed. We plugged that little box between the two machines, and we were a network.
How we played
What made it work was that Mike and I always played on the same team. We were never the hyper-fast, every-second-counts StarCraft types where one slow click loses you the game. We liked to settle in. We would team up, take the same civilization, both run white, and then split the labor between us, one of us minding the economy while the other handled the military, which made the whole thing feel like running an empire together. Most of the time we played against the computer, a roster of AI opponents, because we could not always count on being dialed up to the internet. Sometimes we did take it online. But the core memory is the two of us, offline, on a hub, against the machine.
And we would go all night. Long, slow, sprawling games where the fun was the building as much as the fighting. We raised enormous walled cities, ringed them with towers and bombard towers, and dug in for these epic, hours-long battles and campaigns. There is a specific happiness to being a kid with a friend, a stack of snacks, two glowing monitors, and no reason at all to go to sleep. Age of Empires II gave me a lot of those nights, and it is still, in my book, about as good as a strategy game gets.