Revisionist History

Before Civilization and Age of Empires, the ancient world wasn’t fertile ground for PC strategy games. What historical strategy games there were focused on the well-tilled fields of World War II or the discovery of America. There was Defender of the Crown, a light knight game, but by and large, the settings were devoid of legions and elephants.
Electronic Arts’ 1990 release Centurion: Defender of Rome wasn’t the first of its type, but it was certainly the biggest. Big enough to have been ported to the Sega Genesis the following year, making it one of the few “serious” strategy games on a console. You started with Italy in 275 BC and set out to conquer the world through diplomacy. Well, you could. Mostly it was about sending armies to beat on your neighbors.
Most people didn’t really think in terms of turn-based versus real-time games back then. Both types of game were around, but they weren’t rival mechanics or anything. Centurion was the first major release to mix them. The strategic map where you moved your armies and managed your provinces was turn-based. The battles were fought in real time, with a minimal level of control. How minimal? You chose a battle tactic and let the armies fight it out. If a unit was in your commander’s voice range, you could give it a more precise direction. Scipio Africanus was the loudest, and inevitably the first you’d lose.
The strategy stuff didn’t seem to be enough of a hook for the developers, Bits of Magic. After all, who wants to spend an entire game marching across Europe and fighting battles? Since we all learn about ancient history through 1950s Hollywood, what this game clearly needed was gladiators and chariot races. All in minigames. The lead designer, Kellyn Beck, had worked on Defender of the Crown, so the formula of strategy-plus-action seemed to make sense.
Centurion was big on minigames. Even the battles, with the guesswork involved in choosing the right tactic, could be considered more minigames than combat simulations. And they weren’t optional. If Rome didn’t get its circuses on a regular schedule, the population would rebel.
It’s too bad the minigames were so terrible. The gladiator one was ridiculously easy, the chariot races ridiculously hard. Naval battles were represented by two ships lobbing fireballs at each other. And the outcomes of these games had no impact on the strategic map. They were distractions from the main business of conquest.
The Hollywood stuff continued as the game pushed you to seduce Cleopatra instead of just crushing her armies. Even if you happened to find Hannibal a more fitting romantic prospect (and a much bigger threat), only Egypt had diplomatic interactions that could lead to partying on a barge.
These distractions are probably why Centurion, remembered as a classic by many, isn’t often held up as a harbinger of things to come. The melding of a strategic map with a tactical battle “engine” was far ahead of its time, and few developers picked up on it. 1991’s North & South from Infogrames was the closest match to Centurion; it shared the affinity for distracting minigames, this time robbing trains.
Good execution is more important than good ideas. Landmark games aren’t always the ones that come first. Ten years after Centurion, EA would publish Shogun: Total War, a revolutionary title in a new setting that would spawn the most successful historical warfare games in the industry. Now the franchise is in the hands of Sega, whose console was home to Centurion.
History likes coincidences.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #194