'Age Of Empires II' Developer Reveals How Microsoft Embraced Proto-Woke Policies Back In The 90s
Sandy Peterson, a developer who worked on Age of Empires II, Halo Wars, Doom II, and others recently shared how Microsoft had embraced proto-woke policies in the 90s and cajoled him into making a Korean faction in an attempt to play the DEI representation game.
Peterson posted to X, “In 1999, I was assigned to design the expansion pack to Age of Empires 2. I chose The Conquerors as the theme, and wishing to have 4 civs (as we had on Rise of Rome), I chose the Spanish, the Aztecs, the Huns, and the Mayans. The project went ahead extremely well. We were almost completely finished, 5 weeks ahead of schedule as of January 2000. I was excited to move onto Age of Empires 3. Then Microsoft called and we had an important conference call.”
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He continued, “Microsoft said, ‘We want you to add Koreans to The Conquerors pack.’"
I said, ‘Koreans, greatly to their credit, were not conquerors. They stayed in their lane. While they're cool, they don't fit the Conquerors theme.’
Here was Microsoft's argument: ‘Starcraft sold 3 million copies in Korea.’
Here was my counter-argument, which seemed pretty valid to me. ‘Starcraft doesn't have any Koreans in it, so those sales had zero to do with a Korean civ.’
Microsoft: ‘But ... Starcraft sold 3 million copies in Korea.’
I could see where this was going. Once someone simply repeats a previous argument, it's clear they are no longer functioning from logic or intelligence.”
Petersen then concluded his thread by revealing that Koreans took issue with the faction and a Microsoft representative was arrested and detained. He also noted the game did not sell 3 million copies in Korea.
He shared, “So I went ahead and we crammed in the Korean civ in the last 5 weeks we had. No Microsoft didn't give us any extra time. We made what apparently were three mistakes. We used the wrong art for the turtle ships (we used a legitimate source, but apparently Koreans didn't like that source), we named the Sea of Japan "the Sea of Japan" (it's called that in every nation except one. Yup.), and we said there was a Japanese invasion of Korea from 1592-98 which for some reason in 2000 was controversial. A Microsoft representative in Korea actually got arrested and detained for a while.”
“And in the end, we didn't sell 3 million copies of Age of Empires 2 in Korea after all. Don't get me wrong, Age of Empires 2 sold super-well, and so did The Conquerors expansion. But Starcraft was impossible to topple from its Korean throne,” he concluded.
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Petersen is not the only one to claim that Microsoft was pushing proto-woke policies back in the 90s and early 2000s. Legendary Halo composer Marty O’Donnell previously detailed that he faced similar policies from Microsoft.
He told Andrew Chapados in June 2024, “I started seeing it a little bit even during our Halo 2, which goes back quite a ways. We were making Halo 2 in 2002, 2003, which was close enough after 9/11. If you know the story of Halo it’s about this group of religious zealots that essentially will commit suicide to keep their religion going. That’s the characters we had for the Covenant.”
He then shared, “That started making Microsoft a little bit nervous because they felt like there could be some backlash from the Muslim community in the Middle East that maybe this could be seen as Islamophobic. All of a sudden we were being asked to be very careful about some names of people or references or phrases and things like that.”
“I started seeing that and I thought, ‘Well, that’s not necessarily unreasonable because we weren’t trying to do some sort of allegory about the political situation in the world that had to do with jihadists and all the rest of it,” he continued.
Next, he said, “Maybe you know this story, but one of our main characters, the Arbiter was not the Arbiter during the whole time we were making Halo 2. The character’s name was the Dervish. And we had recorded all the voice. I had directed all the actors and everybody was using the term Dervish. And then we found out that like this could be seen as an insult because there is an Islamic figure known as dervishes. So we had to change it. We were forced to change that name to a different name. So we came up with the Arbiter.”
“I was never happy about it,” he continued. “I thought this is an artistic choice. This is what we had from the beginning. We were not making any sort of political or religious comment. We had tons of religious imagery: the ark, halo, the Covenant. All of these things are sort of imbued with religious terminology. So I didn’t see why the Dervish was a problem, but we were forced to change that.
“I could see that the bigger the producer the more fingers would be in the pie trying to mess with things,” he concluded.
What do you make of Petersen’s revelation that Microsoft was already embracing woke policies back in the 90s and early 2000s?
I don't necessarily think that this was proto-woke. It was Microsoft trying to cash in where it had sold 3 million copies and did not want to offend Muslims. Something that people still don't want to do today.
Ahhh, the things you never realize growing up, playing these games, because you're far too young to understand or notice such things, only to grow up and see things like this and, while not exactly tainting your views of the games, definitely opens ones eyes to such horrid practices, and coming to the bitter realization of how much these have been problems for years. Also, the fact of not wanting to "risk insulting Muslim Communities" just kinda reminds me of the original concept of "The Slenderman" movie, which was completely redone when that one "incident" regarding Slenderman happened years back. I'll say the same thing about that, this, and any other instances of this sort of tiptoing around people's sensitivities that will continue to happen in the future: If you're THAT worried about offending someone, cancel the project and don't do it. Because otherwise, especially nowadays with the Slenderman example but not Halo 2, it will usually end in tragic failure. If you're more worried about what the people who are probably already preordained to hate your product think of your product, you're already doomed to failure, and forever will be.