California Doubling: While the scenes requiring real landmarks were filmed in Egypt, vast majority of the film was shot in... Uzbekistan, then part of the USSR. Some were shot even on the Polish Błędów Desert, which was then still a military proving ground and thus consisted predominately of empty dunes.
Star-Making Role: Jerzy Zelnik was a young, straight-out-of-acting school actor. Ramses was his second role ever, and he was playing the lead for the first time. He became a fixture in the Polish film industry for the next half century and eventually even managed to get out of Typecasting.
Pharaoh is a spinoff of Caesar III, developed and released by Impressions Games the previous year (1998), but almost none of the creators of Caesar were involved.
Cleopatra was made by Breakaway Games, with little involvement from the original Pharaoh team, who where already working on Zeus: Master of Olympus.
Going into the audio files reveals that architects, bazaar buyers and workers have a lot more quotes than the one or two lines they normally give. And the architect was apparently called an engineer previously, with a flagrantly-overdubbed "architect" added.
The remake removes the time limit from certain levels, with the mission briefing updated to match... but the voiceover isn't.
In the remake, the carryover of veteran regiments is mentioned in the briefing of Qadesh, but it's not implemented.
, which was then still a military proving ground and thus consisted predominately of empty dunes.