Trivia / 0 A.D.

• Doing It for the Art: The game was originally conceived as a mod for Age of Kings but the development team, Wildfire Games, soon realized that that wouldn't cut it. Since 2003, Wildfire Games has been using their own made-from-scratch engine to run the game and have gone to enormous lengths to make the historical cultures represented in it as accurate as possible, which resulted in various generic civilizations like just "Hellenes" and "Celts" being split into several more specific factions. For almost any other real-time strategy series—including the one that inspired it—it would've been enough to just have "Greeks," but 0 A.D. goes above and beyond by splitting them into Athenians, Spartans, and Macedonians, (who were themselves split into several other factions based on successor states) with fan-proposals for others like the Thebans and Syracusans. On top of all that, 0 A.D. is free-to-download and open-source. You don't get much more passionate than that!