Our 41st book will be Age of Empires by Richard Moss, currently available for preorder on Kickstarter. Over email Richard and I discussed his own history with the game/genre, the art of interviewing, the developers' willingness to scrap ideas, and the future of the real-time strategy game.

Gabe Durham: Since your Age of Empires book focuses on the game's history, you don't really show up as a character in the book. So I'd love to use this space to ask: What's your personal history with the game? And with the real-time strategy genre?

Richard Moss: I first encountered Age of Empires on Christmas day in 1998, at a family gathering at my grandfather's house. I remember heading downstairs after lunch to play around with the PowerBook laptop and new game my cousin brought with him. When he showed me and my brother Age of Empires, I was captivated. It was as though ancient history had come to life on the computer screen, and we could control it. I'd played (and loved) the demos of Warcraft II and Command & Conquer by that point, so I had some familiarity with the genre, but this was something else. It had the ring of a Civilization game, which I loved, but with the immediacy of an RTS. The graphics were so naturalistic and inviting, the units and buildings so instantly familiar, and the basics of early settlement building so intutive that I was instantly hooked. The only problem was that I had no way to play it beyond that one afternoon.

I later picked Age of Empires II as my one game to buy, around 2002 or 2003, when my mum used some of her inheritance to buy the family an eMac, after agonising over the decision the whole time we were in the computer shop. (I had eventually narrowed it down to Civilization III, Age 2, or whichever was the latest Tomb Raider game at the time, and reasoned that I already had Civ 2 and the second and third Tomb Raiders, but I didn't own any RTS games.)

Age 2 enthralled me. I played it so much over the next few months that I got a repetitive strain injury in my wrist (from overuse of the mouse). I know there's always been a thriving multiplayer scene, but I've only ever played it solo against the computer — sometimes meandering through the campaigns, but most often turtling my way to victory in epic random map games.

A few years later I began digging more deeply into the genre and finally played Age 1 again (it still enthralled me) as well as the campaigns for a bunch more RTS and RTS-adjacent games — including revisiting the early Warcraft and C&C games as well as playing through real-time tactics wargame Close Combat and charming economic sim The Settlers II. And that culminated in an even deeper dive into the genre for an Ars Technica article about the history of real-time strategy in 2017, in which I traced the roots back to the 1970s and 80s and explored the genre's late-90s heyday and mid-2000s decline.

In this book and in your documentary work, you've had a lot of success at landing great interviews. How do you go about reaching out to interview subjects? And how do you get the best stories and details from your interviewee?

My reputation and the quality of my past work no doubt helps convince people to give me the time of day, but there's not really any secret sauce to reaching out to interview subjects. Sometimes tracking them down and/or finding an email address can be tricky (and this is where having a good rep is most valuable, as it allows me to ask others for help), but once I have a point of direct contact it's as simple as a quick intro, a sentence about why I want to talk to them specifically, and a request for an interview.

The interview itself takes much more craft and skill. I often spend a day or more preparing for an interview — digging out and reading/watching their past interviews, poring over their work history and game credits, thinking up loads of questions, planning out what to ask when, and so on. I like to start interviews with easy questions that get people opening up about themselves and lead into the real purpose of the conversation. Just recently I began an interview about a specific game series with something along the lines of "You spent a long time at Sony. I'm curious how you got started at the company and what kept you around for 25-odd years?" And when I was working on TerrorBytes, I started most interviews by asking people about the first horror game they played and their most memorable horror gaming experience.

These kinds of questions always give me useful background information, and sometimes deliver great anecdotes too, while at the same time they serve as a kind of warm-up for the interview subject. They prime the person for talking about the topic of the interview. Then from there I loosely follow my script, bouncing around the list of planned questions and dropping in new ones as I go, always guided by two principles: let them tell their story (but be ready to challenge them if I think they're wrong or lying), and follow my curiosity (meaning I should always follow up about anything that intrigues me or feels unresolved, stopping only when I reach a dead-end or run out of time).

The other important thing to remember is that these are people, not content machines. They have thoughts and feelings and mountains of personal baggage from their past that I need to dance around with only the faintest idea which items are the most fragile. The best stories are often rooted in painful memories, and I don't ever want to cause more trauma, so I ease them into it and let them dictate the tempo. Empathy is crucial here, and so is trust — I need to show that they can trust me with their story, that I will be sensitive and careful in how I tell it. That's how I've managed to get people talking both on-camera for documentaries and off-camera for books/articles about such powerful moments as grieving lost loved ones, nearly dying from overwork and burnout, and letting go of a dream business or project.

Reading the book, I was struck by the team's willingness to so often throw away game elements that were not working and start over. You're telling so many stories of iteration, revision, and huge changes to gameplay from one build to the next. Do you have a favorite anecdote or element of the game that you were particularly interested to see change over time throughout the story of the game's development?

I loved seeing how the tech tree/R&D system for buildings and units evolved throughout development, from the in-the-weeds minutiae of early versions — which even had things like glue and rope as technologies you could research — through a long period of streamlining and simplification that eventually culminated in Rick Goodman's light bulb moment of dividing the game into four distinct "ages" and picking a small number of key innovations for each age.

But my favorite anecdote from development is probably the time when assistant designer Ian Fischer was helping network programmer Mark Terrano fix an out-of-sync bug — a bug where the game state during multiplayer suddenly differs between each computer. It was one of those obscure, hard-to-track down bugs, and Terrano only knew that it related to the game's gaia (animals) simulation, so he gave Fischer a build that significantly increased the number of birds in the hopes that this would make it more likely to occur. Fischer told me about how he started the game and then seconds later hundreds of birds flew in and converged from every side of the monitor, freaking him out. I remember he got really animated as he was telling me this story, and every time I think of it I get a delightful visual in my mind of the moment as it must have happened, sometime around August or September 1997.

For games like Age of Empires, sound effects and dialogue snippets become earworms through repetition. In addition to the iconic "wololo" moment depicted on the book's cover, are there sounds or lines from the game that have rattled around in your head for decades?

Rogan? All the villager barks have stayed with me to some extent and will instantly transport me into the game if I hear them, but besides the iconic "wololo" priest chant I'd say the two other sounds from the game that live rent-free in my head are the beautiful "villager ready" breath sound and the "under attack" horn. Both are phenomenal pieces of sound design that perfectly encapsulate the feeling of that moment — the contentment and joy of a new villager born into your little hamlet, and the tension and alarm of a tribe suddenly downing tools to fight for its life.

Why do you think Age of Empires II became the biggest seller -- and the game contemporary fans still play the most?

It's set in a more iconic and familiar time period and it's a better realization of the original Age of Empires design. The first game was brilliant, but frustrating. Villagers would get stuck on the edges of farms, or even wind up locked between multiple farms (as they couldn't walk across a farm). The pathfinding was bad. The lack of build queues created annoying and unnecessary micromanagement busywork. And so on. The second game fixed all that stuff with a load of great quality-of-life improvements while also expanding the original's barebones trade system, adding more depth to the tech tree, creating greater differentiation between the various playable civilizations, and introduced optional formations that deepened the combat system.

And while it lost some of the purity of the first game, it largely retained the core gameplay, pacing, and gorgeous presentation style. Plus multiplayer had more options, single-player had more elaborate campaigns, and of course there's also the fact that sequels are easier to market and sell. I'd be remiss not to also note that the competitive scene was bigger for Age of Empires II and the modding community stayed more active long-term than it did the first game, with lots of big fan-made scenarios, campaigns, AI files, and total-conversion mods. Fun fact: The studio that's been making all the expansions for the Age II HD and Definitive Edition remasters, Forgotten Empires, actually started life as a modding team. I interviewed them back in 2015 about how they'd helped keep the game alive.

Although the AoE remasters have done well, the RTS genre hasn't had a new hit in ages. Are we due for a renaissance? What would it take for a new RTS game to pop off?

I doubt we'll get a new RTS hit any time soon, unless it's a great new sequel to one of the big RTS franchises. The audience has fractured, and other genres now serve the tastes of most players better than RTS games ever did. The RTS genre always was an uneasy alliance of different play styles and distinct design modalities, but that progressively broke down as new spinoff genres got more established during the 2000s. Now competitive players have MOBAs, or the evergreen brilliance and ongoing fandom of Age 2 and Starcraft 1 and 2. Tacticians have tower defense games and real-time tactics games like Manor Lords or the Total War series. Settlement builders have the burgeoning colony sim genre. And economy optimizers have plenty of non-RTS options too.

Given the niche success of Petroglyph Games over the past 20 years and the struggles to break through of seemingly every game that tries to reinvent the genre for the modern day, I'd guess we're likely to see real-time strategy remain a niche genre going forward. Although having said that, we might just not have yet had the right update to the old formula to hit across all those different play styles and blow up into a big hit.