Well, what better time to unveil a game set in China than on the dawn of Chinese New Year? To commemorate this event, we recently had the opportunity to talk to Payne about Emperor, and even though the game is still almost a year away from completion, we learned some new details about what's clearly shaping up to be yet another promising City Building strategy game. Since then, production on Emperor has been moving along at full steam, but publisher Sierra kept news of the game's development quiet, waiting for the right time to reveal its hand. "We're currently busy working on Lords of the Realm III, so we approached BreakAway with the idea to do this game." The idea to create Emperor was conceived at Impressions in late 2000, shortly after the release of Zeus, and BreakAway began actively coding the game with a full development staff in April 2001. "We have a great relationship with those guys," says Payne. According to Impressions producer Jon Payne (who, surprisingly, has no relation to Max Payne), BreakAway was the obvious choice for Emperor's developer. If you recall, BreakAway developed Cleopatra, the expansion pack to Impressions' Pharaoh, as well as the excellent add-on to Tropico, Paradise Island. Maryland-based BreakAway Games has that particular distinction. And there's actually a third thing to take note of: It's not being developed by Impressions at all. The two most important things that you should know about Emperor is that it takes place in China and that it'll be the first City Building game to have multiplayer support.
Agriculture is an important part of building a successful empire. That's all about to change later this year when Sierra releases the latest entry in the City Building Series, called Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. But while the evolution of these games has been shaped by a full decade's worth of advances in gameplay innovations and graphics technology, the entire series has been defined, up until now, by two constants: They all take place in the Mediterranean, and they all lack any form of multiplayer support. Since then, the company's City Building Series has been bolstered by two more Caesar games, a pair of Pharaoh games, and most recently, Zeus and its subsequent expansion pack, Poseidon. It's hard to believe that it's been nearly 10 years since Impressions released Caesar, the first in what would become a long line of well-respected city-building strategy games.
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