Age of Empires II is a real-time strategy game developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft in 1999. After it came out, it was the standard by which all other RTS games were measured for many years. Some say it still is.

What’s so crazy about this game is that people still play it at LAN parties, over 12 years after it came out. Talk about longevity! Of course, they’re now playing it on Windows 7, instead of Windows 2000.

It’s hard to believe it, but Age of Empires II was originally released for Windows 98 and 2000 – it came out a whole two years before Windows XP existed! Its requirements were a 166 MHz processor, 32 MB memory, and 200 MB disk space. It’s hard to believe that a video game – or any program for that matter – could possibly run with just 32 MB memory! How times have changed…

And four OS releases later, it still runs nearly flawlessly on Windows 7. If Microsoft excels at any aspect of OS development it’s definitely backwards compatibility.

(If you liked this, you might like Cheating in Video Games.)