I remember I played AoE1 but I cant remember I played it online.
I preferred playing StarCraft.
Now I want to experience AoE4. So far I am okay with it. But I still prefer the fast pacing of Starcraft 2.
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Probably because there was no real online play in Age1 times. 
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It was 2008 or 2009 idk exactly the year ⊠My cousin gave me a cd of AOE demo disk , soo I was there playing a campaing , but I quit ⊠but after a few days looking of something on Internet the name age of empires came to my mind (Im not joking) , here come the fun fact ⊠I discover the not only the first game on full , but the second one âŠ
It was instant love âŠ
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I donât post much, but I think Iâm going to take a bit of space here. Read on. Iâm a writer by trade.
ca. 2003
My dad was in graduate school, and a classmate told him about this sick cool game called Age of Empires. He took me to Gamestop and let me pick out a Gameboy Color game. He grabbed AoK off the shelf. My cheap Gameboy color game sucked (I canât even remember what it was).
I sat on my dadâs lap while he played the Teuton campaign on his graduate school laptop. I fell in love with the game then and there. My dad didnât care much for it (AoK Taunt 9), but I reveled at the chance to play a game where you are the king of a medieval village with knights, castles, and everything.
I think he had a bad experience because he was playing v1.0* on one of these, which sounds like terrible quality of life when compared to our modern AoE2:DE in 4k with a gigabit fiber optic line:
Eventually, we moved on to other games (my father, age fifty something, still plays PS5 regularly. He loves Ark. Heâll grind 10 hours of Ark without stopping). He sold a business in 2006, and brought one of the old business computers to our home.
We didnât have internet at the time, but that didnât stop me from rummaging through every junk drawer in the house to find that disc. I spent one whole summer playing as Mongols or Teutons vs. the AI on every map that shipped with the game. I played every campaign.
When we finally got internet, I updated my game to patch 1.0c and played on Gameranger. I also learned that there was a THIRD Age of Empires game. I happened across that fact by typing âAge of Empiresâ into the YouTube search bar and seeing â3â as one of the suggested searches. My Age of Empires III life is a story for another time, I think.
Anyway, my grandmother came to town one day to make her quarterly Samâs Club trip. She lives in the country, and is a lifelong Samâs Club shopper as a result. In one of Samâs Clubâs bins that day, they had one Hell of a deal: Age of Empires I (Plus Rise of Rome), Age of Empires II, and the Conquerors expansion for $5.00. It was actually on clearance. There were tons of copies there. If I were old enough to have a job, I wouldâve drained my bank account buying every copy for archival purposes. Oh well. I also think there was an Age of Mythology bundle, but that wasnât my home like Age of Empires was. Thatâs how I got my hands on the Conquerors expansion, and could finally play the (then) full game online.
Santa gave me a copy of Age of Empires III for Christmas in 2006. I woke up at 4 AM and actually shed a tear when I saw the cover. Not even joking. I also acted like a spoiled brat when the (very, very base model) graphics card that Santa brought me was incompatible with the motherboard on our retired business desktop. âWhat grateful children we have!â I remember my mother saying. Not sure why, but that comment kinda traumatized me. Iâve never been ungrateful for a gift ever since.
Anyway, this got really sappy and Iâm sorry. Merry Christmas, if thatâs your thing. I always seem to find myself playing Age of Empires around this time of year.
Best wishes to all!
*For those who are too young to remember the first term of the George W. Bush administration, installing a game patch was not something to look forward to. We lived on campus with dial-up internet. I have no clue how large the patch was in terms of file size, but it probably would mean a whole evening without being able to make or receive phone calls. Not to mention youâd have to go online and find the file, and the game might take up additional precious HDD space after the patch. So if you were just trying a game out in those days, you were unlikely to download patches.
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I was still in elementary school when one of my classmates borrowed me AOE1. Loved the game, but looking back, man, I sucked. Itâs always a good feeling to visit games youâve played as a kid, using the knowledge and gamer experience you have now.
Still playing the AOE games and loving it to bits 
cheers from the Netherlands
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If i remember correctly Age of empires 1 was the first game i ever bought with my own money when i was 6 or 7 years old
I bought it because i liked knights etc.(thinking there where knights on the boxâ:joy:
)
I think it was the year 2001đ€ and i bought it for around 5/10 euroâs. I remember that i really liked seeing those small berry bushes and seeing villagers chopping wood and seeing those farms and how they worked on itđ
I just dragged matches on because i liked seeing the villagers work, chopping all the trees on the mapđ
I remember very clear this on map with 2 vs 2, i was blue and red was my ally and yellow and green the enemy, and i always wanted to play that but never knowing how to play that map, sometimes i got and sometimes i didnâtđ
Later on in life i got Age of mythology + titans and i really liked that one more, i remember playing Age of mythology on the pc with on the background Teenage mutant ninja turtles playing on the tvđ great times
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Mine was this past weekend. I wouldâve played for longer but my gametime got chewed up not installing the game properly.
In my case it was my second uncle who gave me the AoE 3 demo in 2004, then I saw it with its musket cover in 2005 and the rest is history⊠AoK, TC and AoM came in 2006, AoE 3 TWC and TAD in 2007, AoE 1 in 2008, etc etc etcâŠ
Thatâs a cool image, thanks for sharing @HardcoreGame351