Ensemble Studios, located in
Dallas, Texas, are a
game studio founded by a number of people from Ensemble Corp., a
database support company. Working insane hours and putting their
hearts into it, they finally shipped
Age of Empires, which was published by
Microsoft.
After Age of Empires and it's well-recieved
Rise of Rome Expansion Pack, they proceeded to create Age of Empires II, known as
Age of Kings and its associated X-pack, The
Conquerors. To this day (17 January 2003), Age II sells well, and if one were to combine weekly sales of Age II and Age II Gold Edition, was outselling Warcraft III in months as recent as November and December 2002 some weeks.
Ensemble was purchased by Microsoft between these games.
The most recent project to come out of Ensemble Studios was
Age of Mythology, which was completed in October of 2002 after years of
development. After hitting the shelves on the 31st of October-1st of November in the US, sales shot up and the game spent some weeks at number 1 on the weekly sales. There is an impressive
fan base internationally for this game, and several games involving Ensemble tester Gx_Iron were shown in Korea on television in late 2002.