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'It was bound only to my own taste.'Д«ut an official expansion needs to look, play, and sound like an extension of the original game. 'I used to work always alone, so everything that I made in the past was 'alright' for me,' Ageitos says. It doesn't matter if it's in the spirit or the tone of the game. You can, as Ageitos jokes, make a golden cow that wields a banana-shooting shotgun. You can express yourself, experiment, and have fun without worrying about how something fits with the rest of the game or even how good it is. And achieve that certain level of quality.' You have a lot of new restrictions that you didn't face before and everything needs to make sense fit in the game nicely with the rest of the stuff. But when when you are an official dev, a lot of things change. 'You can put dragons in there and people will love it because it is a mod. 'When you are modding you can do awesome crazy stuff without caring if they will fit on the original game,' says lead artist Jorgito Ageitos.

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It was a tough transition into professional development for many of the modders, and not just because of Microsoft's fondness for firm deadlines. 'Then we kind of came back with, 'Why don't we do both?' And then apparently one guy at Microsoft agreed with that.' (Their Age of Mythology expansion is nearly finished.) 'Finally they said, 'What do you think about making another expansion for Age of Empires,'' Beeckman recalls. The answer was initially no, but Forgotten Empires kept asking.

Several months after The Forgotten's release, they petitioned Microsoft for approval to do an expansion for the then-new Age of Mythology Extended Edition.

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Thus the Forgotten Empires mod birthed the Forgotten Empires company, which in November 2013 released The Forgotten expansion - seven months after the HD remaster, 14 years after the original game, and 13 years after the previous expansion. They agreed to release an updated, more polished version of the mod as an official expansion. Microsoft took notice and opened negotiations with the modders. Today the figure stands at around a million downloads. It got that many in an hour (and their website crashed under the traffic load). Beeckman expected maybe 50,000 lifetime downloads, at best. Can I do that?' Some poor sap has the job of trawling through these messages doing his best old-school Lara Croft impression ('No.'). 'Like oh I want to sell mugs of Age of Empires or I want to sell towels with a trebuchet on it. 'They receive like hundreds and hundreds of mails each month from people who want to do things with the franchise,' Beeckman says. 'We thought, okay, if you're just gonna revitalise the game, why not go a step further and add new civs and features and new campaigns and all that new stuff we added. 'When we heard that the HD edition was going to be released on Steam, we'd kind of only just finished working on the Forgotten Empires mod,' he says. It was basically an unofficial expansion.Д«eeckman tells me that it was fortuitous timing that got them in with Microsoft. This particular thing was just more ambitious than most projects that reach fruition it added five new civilisations with accompanying campaigns and unique units and buildings and maps and sounds.

A few dedicated modders gradually morphed into many, and Forgotten Empires took shape just like any other modding project - a loose collective that grew and contracted fluidly as people gained and lost interest or time, and which, through sheer force of will from its lead developers, eventually emerged as a somewhat coherent thing.

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The team came together through the AoE2 community in 2011 after lead designer Bert Beeckman and various others finally figured out how to add new civilisations to the game. I spoke to the team to find out about the challenges of transitioning from mod team to professional development studio, and of continuing to expand a game within its ancient limits. Forgotten Empires filled the game with new stuff and rebalanced the multiplayer in one enormous mod and then two HD expansions: The Forgotten and the recently-released African Kingdoms. It's gained new steam thanks in part to an official high-definition re-release but mostly due to the ragtag group of modders-turned-developers who made that release possible. But not only has Age of Empires II endured, it has thrived. Scant few games stand the test of time and retain a large active player base sixteen years after release.