Age of Empires was a game you played with a desk. In 2001 a studio in Tokyo was handed the job of folding the desk into two hands.
On a PC the genre runs on a hundred small gestures: drag a box around eight villagers, click a tree, click a menu, click again, all inside the same second. None of those gestures exist on a controller. What Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo built instead was a cursor with weight — push the analog stick and it accelerates, ease off and it settles — so the pointer behaves less like a mouse and more like something you are steering.
Eight players became four. The Conquerors expansion, already a year old on PC when this disc shipped, is simply absent.
A Konami box with a Western strategy game inside does not look like Konami. That is the first thing about this disc that stops me. The logo in the corner belongs to Gradius and Castlevania, and what sits underneath it is a game about castles and villagers and stone-cutting, built on the other side of the world.
Later I went looking for the paperwork. On May 11, 1999, Konami and Microsoft signed a cross-licence that let Konami publish selected Microsoft titles on machines Microsoft did not make. Age of Empires is named nowhere in that announcement. What is on the record is only the order of things: Microsoft published the Japanese PC version itself on November 26, 1999, and two years and three months later the same game reached Japan on PlayStation 2 in a Konami box, ported by Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo. Britain had it in November 2001. North America never got it at all.
The part I most wanted to read about is the part nobody wrote down. A game built for a keyboard and a mouse had to be handed to a controller — every command, every unit selected out of a crowd, every map that had assumed a hand resting on a mouse. Somebody solved all of that, and left no interview behind. The press of the day walked past a small port, and there is now nothing to read.
Those were the years Konami was widening in every direction; in February 2001 it took over a fitness chain. Whether that widening had anything to do with this disc, I could not find out. I went through the announcements of the period and everything that survives of the paperwork, and the connection is written nowhere I could reach. If you know where it is written, I would like to hear it.
A box tells you who published a thing. It never tells you who argued for it, or what had to be given up to make it fit in your hands.
About this game
On 11 May 1999, Microsoft and Konami announced a trade. Konami took the option to publish selected Microsoft games on the PlayStation, the Dreamcast and the Nintendo 64; Microsoft took the option to bring Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill and Castlevania to the PC. Age of Empires was not named once in that announcement.
On 2 November 2001, two and a half years after that announcement, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings reached European shelves, and Japanese ones under the same Konami name. Development was done by Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, the studio behind Castlevania, Silent Hill and Winning Eleven, and the disc holds a real-time strategy game about castles, monks, siege rams and the slow arithmetic of wood, food, gold and stone.
Gallery
The Story Behind
The work landed at Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo. KCET remade the campaigns to fit tighter memory, and thinned the forests on every map until the wood economy balanced again.
Six months before the disc shipped, Microsoft agreed to buy Ensemble Studios outright: the studio whose design KCET was rewriting became part of the company that had licensed them the game.
Tricks & Tales
For about a year, this was going to be a Dreamcast game. Konami announced that port, the magazines ran it, and then it stopped — announced, scheduled, never released, and never explained.
What did survive the move to the PlayStation 2 arrived poorer than the 1999 PC original: coarser animation, simpler terrain, fewer things moving at once. And North America, the market that had made Age of Empires II a hit in the first place, never received the console version at all. Reviewers at the time braced for a disaster and did not get one.
Collector's Guide
Region & Compatibility
The PS2 is region-locked. A machine and a disc must belong to the same region to work together: NTSC-J (Japan and parts of Asia), NTSC-U/C (North America), or PAL (Europe, Australia). A Japanese console plays Japanese games. It is also Japanese 100-volt hardware — a fat model used in North America's 120 volts or Europe's 220–240 needs a step-down transformer; the slim models use an external adapter that can be swapped for the right one. DVD films carry their own separate region code, fixed to the console as well.
Maintenance Tips
The PS2's most vulnerable part is its optical drive. The laser pickup weakens with age, producing the famous Disc Read Error — discs that load slowly, read intermittently, or read games but not DVDs (or the reverse). Keeping the vents and internal fan free of dust matters, especially on the larger 'fat' models, which run warmer. Replacement laser units are still made, but match the part number to your exact model before buying, as several incompatible types exist. DualShock 2 controllers commonly develop sticky or drifting analog sticks with age; the rubber and contacts wear, and both are repairable.
What to Watch Out For
Before buying, these are the points worth knowing — from someone who handles original Japanese Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings copies regularly.
Will a European or Japanese PlayStation 2 disc work on my North American PS2?
No. PlayStation 2 discs are region-locked — a European PAL copy of Age of Empires II will not run on a North American NTSC console, and the reverse is equally true. The game released in Europe and Japan only, with no North American release. To play a PAL disc, you need a European PlayStation 2, or a modified console with region-locking disabled. The disc itself is physically identical, but the console checks the region code and refuses to boot foreign software.
How should I clean a PlayStation 2 disc?
Wipe the disc gently from the center hole straight out toward the edge — never in circles. Use a soft microfiber cloth, dry or lightly dampened with water; isopropyl alcohol works for stubborn fingerprints. PlayStation 2 discs are dual-layer DVDs with data on both layers, making them more sensitive to scratches than CD-based PlayStation 1 discs. Store them upright in their cases, not stacked flat, and keep them out of direct sunlight.
Unexpected Discoveries
Games you weren't looking for — but might be glad you found.
Rooms this game lives in
Wander deeper — explore the themed rooms where Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings sits alongside its kin.
Memories from around the world
This is a young museum, and this page is still waiting for its first voices. The memories people send reach Taisei personally, and the ones that move him find a home here over time — always with the writer's blessing. Yours could be the very first for this game.
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Age Of Empires Ii The Age Of Kings — Max Explains