‘Age of Empires II’ Marches Triumphantly Onto Apple Silicon
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In an ironic twist, one of Microsoft’s most iconic real-time strategy games has just returned to the Mac. Announced last month, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition debuts as a native macOS app optimized for modern Apple silicon Macs.
While Age of Empires II is far from a new title — it was released for Windows in 1999 and came to the Mac in 2001 — it has a fascinating pedigree as the second installment in the franchise that famously marked the return of the Mac to prominence.
Following its October 1997 release for Windows, the original Age of Empires was one of several games name-dropped by Apple’s then-newly-minted CEO, Steve Jobs, when he took the stage at Macworld 1999 in San Francisco to emphasize how the company was getting serious about gaming. He promised that Quake, StarCraft, Tomb Raider III, Age of Empires, and more would all debut for the Mac within the next 120 days, and even handed the stage over to id Software’s John Carmack, who promised to release Quake Arena simultaneously on Mac and PC.
We recommitted Apple to games nine months ago, and we’ve been working really hard on this. One of the things we did was we got the best and most-respected authors of the best games together to beat us up, and we let them, and we listened to them, and we’re really trying to take their advice and implement it.
The gaming community has really responded. We want to be the best gaming platform in the world. And today, I’m going to show you twelve of the hottest games on the market that are all coming to the Macintosh. Some of them are shipping today, the rest of them are shipping with 120 days from now.
Steve Jobs at Macworld 1999
While Age of Empires didn’t quite make Jobs’ 120-day pledge, it was out by July 1999, so we’d call it close enough. The original was ported to Classic Mac OS by MacSoft Games, a studio that would become legendary among Mac users for bringing PC games to Apple’s platform over the next few years.
However, since Mac OS X didn’t exist at the time, the original Age of Empires never made the crossover. By the time Mac OS X Cheetah arrived in early 2001, a Mac port of Age of Empires II was just around the corner, and the original was relegated to being played solely in the Mac OS X Classic Environment.
Still, that 2001 sequel wasn’t the most actively updated, especially after Age of Empires III arrived in 2006, built with native OS X support from the ground up. In fact, both the first and second installments were destined to eventually be cut off by Apple’s OS and silicon transitions: Age of Empires was relegated to the dustbin after Apple dropped the Classic Environment with the release of Mac OS X Leopard in 2007, and Age of Empires II was strictly a PowerPC app that was never ported to Intel, thereby losing playability for Mac fans after 2011, when Mac OS X 10.7 Lion killed off the original Rosetta (a fate that will also ironically befall Intel apps in next year’s macOS 28 release).
This makes today’s debut of Age of Empires II more than just a modern upgrade; it marks the return of a classic game that Mac fans haven’t been able to natively enjoy for almost 20 years. Still, the developers aren’t cutting any corners with the port:
Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition comes complete with razor-sharp 4K visuals, a fully remastered soundtrack, and includes three expansions with the base game: Lords of the West, Dynasties of India, and Dawn of the Dukes. Newcomers to the series and returning veterans alike can look forward to all the fast-paced base-building and warfare that made this game a classic, given new life over two decades of refinement and additional content.
The company has also promised a large collection of DLC out of the gate. As noted above, the $34.99 “Definitive Edition” includes Dawn of the Dukes, Dynasties of India, and Lords of the West, while a $146.89 “Ultimate Bundle” throws in Return of Rome, The Mountain Royals, Victors and Vanquished, The Three Kingdoms, and more.
For now, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition is available solely through Steam, but the company has promised a Mac App Store release “later in the year.”
