I won't forget how easily Age of Empires got a whole bunch of kids who had no interest in strategy games hooked on the genre with the simple promise of representation. But for a little while, they wanted to know.
Most drifted back to their preferred series like FIFA. There was also an actual Braveheart video game too.it was just, not very good. You should've seen their faces when I showed them Shogun: Total War for the first time where you could have thousands of dudes on screen at once.
These kids who'd never let themselves be called nerds in a million years were now desperately figuring out how to construct additional pylons. Soon I had folk who distinctly would've shunned "space shite" asking about Starcraft and soon enough Command & Conquer. Once you got a bunch of eager young kids into one RTS, suddenly they wanted to know about others. Hardly educational in any sense, but enthralling all the same. The campaign itself alludes to famous battles but is as true to them as Braveheart, with its base building design and simple combat not really allowing it to facilitate the kinds of tactics that defined the Scottish Wars of Independence. None of us at the time really took note of just how awful the Scottish accents are, with the actor somehow settling on being a pirate instead. The William Wallace campaign was the tutorial, introducing players to the game's basics, which was just perfect for the kids I knew. It got them into all other portions of history too! I confess at this point in time I was more interested in the Joan of Arc campaign for reasons that weren't yet clear to me (let me tell you, finding out there was a film where Milla Jovovich played her did things for me, dear reader) which was fine by the folk I knew, 'cause she also battered the English. Suddenly you had a bunch of folk who'd never touched a strategy game in their lives tearing into Age of Empires 2.
Now, trying to explain Real Time Strategy to the kid two doors down who spent more time playing football and fighting wasn't the easiest task on the planet (though explaining how to install the game on their da's computer was even tougher) but once they had it, they were away. There's still a fondness in my heart for the absurd Braveheart. Even today if you wanna be Scottish in a video game your best hope is as a dwarven warrior in some fantasy RPG. See Age of Empires 2 though? You could play as the Scots.
Games were an occasional thing, not a hobby. See, a lot of kids my age didn't have much time for video games beyond FIFA or whatever. Another American production (from the now sadly defunct Ensemble Studios), it doesn't take much to imagine that this was likely an inclusion entirely as a result of Braveheart's success (it won five Oscars, including best picture) but the effect was surprising. Then four years later along comes Age of Empires 2 with a campaign about the Scottish Wars of Independence. I cannot overstate how much this film was watched when I was growing up. Point is, finally there was some easy sense of identity for young folk to latch on to.
The fever that emerged among Scots following the film even had some English critics describing Braveheart as spreading "Anglophobia".
This over-the-top movie (whose historical inaccuracies are no better summed up than featuring the famed Battle of Stirling Bridge.with no bridge) made Scottish history tangible, emotional and inspiring. Scotland's history, of outnumbered rebels fighting against English reign is easy to romanticise but it was also abstract for a load of folk. It might sound dumb to credit one film (made by Hollywood with an American fielding a questionable Scottish accent in the lead role) with a surge in national pride but, well, it absolutely did cause one. It was difficult to be surrounded by the remains of a post-industrial nation and feel any sense of pride or hope about the future or present, never mind the past. Especially in its deprived areas (poverty fell in the late 90s but in depressing statistics according to the CPAG, it seems to be once more on the rise once again). Now I can't help but wonder as I play through the recently released Definitive Edition, are there games that could manage similar feats? Better ones? Here's a question: How do you get a bunch of disillusioned kids in the arse end of Scotland into real time strategy games? I doubt it's a question the creators of Age of Empire 2 ever asked themselves but nonetheless, they provided a definitive answer.