oldImpressions Games was a studio founded in Britain at the end of the eighties that later moved to the United States. It started with military and economic simulations for the PC — Air Bucks about running an airline, Cohort about the Roman army, High Seas Trader about overseas commerce — and it was solid, dense, not especially welcoming work for people who enjoy reading a manual.
The decisive break came with Caesar. Impressions combined city building with the thing that still makes the genre exceptional: a city is not a spreadsheet, it is a place where specific people walk around. Build a well and a water carrier comes out of it, walks the streets and supplies the houses he happens to pass. Lay the street out badly and he turns the other way, leaving the district dry.
That one mechanism changed how cities get built in games. You stop placing buildings on a grid and start designing routes — and with them the shape of the town and where in it anybody can live.
A whole line grew from that single idea. Caesar III polished it into the form fans regard as the high point of the genre, Pharaoh moved it to ancient Egypt and added pyramid construction, and Zeus: Master of Olympus took it into Greek myth, with gods who genuinely turn up in your city.
Beside the city line stands Lords of the Realm, a medieval strategy game in which you farm an estate and then march to war. In the mid nineties Impressions became part of Sierra, which gave it budgets and distribution — and that is exactly the period in which its best work was made.
What we have from them
Caesar, Lords of the Realm, High Seas Trader, Air Bucks, Global Domination, Discovery and Front Lines all run straight in the browser. Caesar III, Pharaoh and Zeus are here to download.
