Referee Ross Cowling

In September 1999, I got to head up the expansion pack for Age of Empires 2. I chose The Conquerors as my theme, and since I wanted 4 civs (like we had on Rise of Rome) I chose the Spanish, the Aztecs, the Huns, and the Mayans. I know the Mayans weren't as famous in conquest as Aztecs, but they WERE imperialistic, and since we'd have to make a new building set for Aztecs anyway, this let us re-use it. The goal was to finish up by the end of March 2000 for a fall release. It went EXTREMELY well. In early January 2000, we were actually on track to complete the whole thing by the end of the month - weeks ahead of schedule. I realize this is almost unheard of for a software project but I credit two things - first, we had planned for the same dev time as Rise of Rome, but had a bigger team. Second, the civs worked out super, and were both fun and quite well-balanced even from the start. I will be happy to take mucho credit for the balance part. The team was excited. We would finish early, and then we could move onto either Age of Mythology or Age of Empires 3 respectively (the new game projects). Then MicroSoft weighed in. We had an important conference call and I was required to be there ... 1/