Gamasutra has just published a story on the Age of Empires panel at GCDC. Bruce Shelley, Brian Sullivan and Rick and Tony Goodman were there to talk about the history of the franchise. A note for the writers – when you have two Goodmans talking you can’t just write “said Goodman.”

There aren’t a lot of surprises in the story. Shelley has often said that the Age games were historical because nobody else was doing that in the post-Warcraft/post-Command and Conquer world. I like this sort of talk, though, because you can learn a lot about game design philosophies in panels like this.

You can see how Empire Earth was born, for example.

“Rick came in, and had a really ambitious game in mind, and Brian’s goal was to get the game back in size.”