One of the greatest breakthroughs of my life was realizing that you only had to type "cheese steak jimmy's" once, then ctrl-c, then ctrl-v as much as you want. It was a great day.
Strangely I am responsible for the name of this cheat code. It's an accidental-turned-intentional misnomer for a place we used to eat a lot during Age2 development called Fred's Downtown Philly.
I have never written anything up personally, but I'm sure there is some stuff out there to be found.
Get any two former Ensemble employees together, possibly buy them a beer, and you will almost certainly get some stories that sound apocryphal but probably actually happened :)
Ensemble was a truly great studio. I hear people rag on AoE3 but I personally don't think Ensemble ever missed. Once. Between you and Westwood, RTS was pretty great for a long time.
Whatever you did for them, thanks for some really fun entertainment across many years of my own life.
Thank you for some truly wonderful memories! Back in school, my goal was to join Ensemble Studios. I was really disappointed to hear that it shut down. I'm now in the games industry and I owe it mostly to Age of Empires!
Ensemble employees get free beer from me for life, if I ever get the chance to meet any of you. You guys defined a big part of my childhood, and even today as a young adult I think back to lessons I learned from that game. It made a big impact on me in many ways.
I love to see/hear/read little behind-the-scene tidbits like this about the development of the great games of yore. It lifts the veil (or, the "fog of war" HAHA [sorry]) oh so slightly and lets you in on how the magic was made. Geez... I miss the 90's. I feel old now, but thank you for the skinny on that cheat code.
Indeed, alongside lumberjack, robin hood and rock on. Even in LAN party multi player mode we used to allow these cheats, as it made the game more fun. Players would build enormous defensives with those resources until the mother of all battles would conclude the game.