empire-earth posts

Sometimes you just need to sit down, slide a floppy into your A: drive, and enjoy gaming retro style. We know this all too well! That's why we have a list of the best and brightest from days long gone. These are some of our favorite games of all time, and we're sure that you'll love them as much as we do, if not more. Welcome to Boot Disk, and enjoy the retro ride!

Rounding out our coverage of older, historical real-time strategy games is the excellent Empire Earth. Released only a year after the fantastic Age of Empires 2, Empire Earth aimed to push the historical real-time strategy game one step further. While it was a little rougher around the edges than the first two Age of Empires games, Empire Earth still managed to be incredibly fun and give players a look into an interesting and fictional future. If you ever wanted an RTS with the grand scope of Civilization, this is definitely the game for you. Despite its considerable age, it's one of the best games of this theme, and thanks to GoG.com, you can now pick it up without any DRM!

GoG.com has put the previous two games in the Empire Earth RTS series in its library and today the DRM-free web site has announced that that they have added Empire Earth III to its game line-up. The game was first released in 2007 by developer Mad Doc Software (now Rockstar New England) and publisher Vivendi Games. As we have reported before the Empire Earth franchise is now owned by Rebellion who have announced tentative plans for more games in the series.

Empire Earth III is now available to download from GoG.com for $9.99. Also, GoG.com has announced a permanent price cut on another game, Beyond Divinity, to just $5.99.

As promised last week, GoG.com has gone ahead and added the centuries-spanning RTS game Empire Earth Gold to its DRM-free PC game line up. The game has both the original 2001 title (developed by the now shut down Stainless Steel Studios) and its expansion (developed by the forrmer Mad Doc Software; now Rockstar New England) for just $5.99. The download includes free wallpaper, avatars and the game's tech trees.

As we exclusively revealed earlier this week, Empire Earth is currently owned by UK-based developer Rebellion and they have told us they have plans to release new games in the RTS series at some point in the future.

The merger of Vivendi Games with Activision in 2008 to form Activision Blizzard left a ton of former Vivendi Games properties looking for new owners. Many of them found new homes with various publishers. One of them was UK-based developer Rebellion, best known for their work on the first PC Aliens Vs Predator game. Currently the developer is working on a new AVP game for publisher Sega along with the first person shooter Rogue Warrior for publisher Bethesda Softworks.

Last week, the DRM-free download site GoG.com revealed they were adding new games owned by Rebellion to their catalog. What wasn't mentioned at the time of the announcement was that the games were actually former Vivendi Games titles that were not previously owned or developed by Rebellion. That got our curiosity up and we decided to contact Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley to get more information.Kingsley confirmed to us that they now own the rights to release several former Vivendi Games titles. You can check out the breakdown after the jump: