The first Caesar game was developed in 1992 by the British company Impressions for the Amiga, and ported to the Atari ST and the PC in the next year. This company, founded in 1991 by David Lester who designed most of the games, had already brought out a few only moderately successful strategy games, some already in a Roman setting. With Caesar they finally found success or, as one reviewer put it, their true calling.
The idea behind Caesar was to create a game like Sim City, but with more gameplay. Instead of just building one city, you would get several assignments and move up a career ladder; some strategic combat was involved, too. It put Impressions on the map.
For a while, this first version was offered as a free download by Impressiongames. This page is long gone. For a while it was on the website of the upcoming Caesar IV, but it vanished from there too. The only place I know where you can currently download it, along with the desperately needed manual, is Home of the Underdogs.
| The City Builder Series | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caesar |  |
 |
 |
 |
92 |  |
||
| Caesar II | |
 |
|
95 | |
|||
| Caesar III | |
|
98 |  |
||||
| Pharaoh | |
99 | |
Expansion Pack: Cleopatra | ||||
| Zeus | |
00 | |
Expansion Pack: Poseidon | ||||
| Emperor | |
02 | |
multiplayer support | ||||
I guess I like this one the best: The cities you build are more stable than in the later versions. But I had no interest to play the career through here: It's basically always the same, you just start with less money each time. On the other hand, I really love those message screens. Would be interesting what it looks like when you finally become emperor.
System Requirements
There are no official system requirements for Caesar. A 386 is probably the ideal computer, but it can be played on a 286 with 10 MHz. A Pentium 120 already makes animations run too fast. Apart from the animations and the scrolling there are no problems with a fast computer though. Graphics are VGA, a sound card is not necessary but makes the game a lot nicer. A mouse is optional but recommended. The game recognizes a Windows mousedriver.
On the Mac
There is a Mac version of this game. It is a very bad port. The download size is three times the size of the PC version, and the game just runs in a 320×200 window (unlike for example Transarctica, which runs pixel-doubled at 640×480). Besides, it uses default system windows and menus, which is really not a good idea for this Amiga game. It looks plain ugly.
If you really want to play this game on a Macintosh, I suggest you run the Amiga or PC version under some emulator or compatibility program like SoftWindows or VPC. But I do not recommend it. Get Caesar II instead.
