Their games were getting more expensive to make, and they weren’t making that much more money despite the increased size of the market. Unfortunately this model was undone by the increasingly sophisticated PC technology of the late ‘90s except for Lords of the Realm 3 Impressions never succumbed to the siren lure of making their games 3D for the hell of it, but even sticking to the 2D art that they knew and were good at the credits list for Pharaoh had doubled to 33 people in 1999. This Microprose-like development model of small teams developing a lot of games in parallel worked during the early ‘90s because games were simpler and that kind of team size was all you really needed, so Impressions could have a lot of irons in the fire and it didn’t matter if some of them didn’t work out because the sunk cost was low and the return on investment for the hits was high. Lords of the Realm 2 was made with a core team of around 15 people. Looking at the credits of these games provides another clue as to why Impressions didn’t survive into the 21st century, though: they were made with incredibly small development teams by modern standards. That FMV ended up getting turned off pretty quickly, but both of those games were extremely respectable entries into the contemporary strategy game market The two I remember most fondly are Lords of the Realm 2, which was an excellent medieval strategy game even if its RTS battle segments were a blatant attempt at trend-chasing, and Civil War Generals, an accessible take on the American Civil War with some charming art, mechanics that were just slightly more complicated than Panzer General, and - because this was the mid-’90s - FMV of historical re-enactments that played on every. (Is that an incredulous “ Three?”, I hear you muttering under your breath? It’s true, though they’re primarily known for their City Building series, which the bulk of this post will eventually get around to talking about, but they also had an astonishingly high output rate of other games during the 1990s, releasing a whole host of crunchy business sims and wargame-lites.

Impressions weren’t exactly an industry-bestriding colossus, but after the powerhouses of Blizzard and Westwood Entertainment they were definitely the best of the rest in the strategy gaming stakes, responsible for not just one, but three classic franchises. But this would have seemed unthinkable to anyone playing PC games in the mid-to-late ‘90s. Well, obviously I know what happened to Impressions Games: they suffered a rapid decline in the early ‘00s thanks in part to interference from parent company Sierra Entertainment, pushed out the exceedingly mediocre Lords of the Realm 3, and then ended up as a casualty of Sierra’s final implosion.

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