IIRC, and I've got nearly all my emails since the nineties until now so I could find out, I sent an email to the author of that article back when I read it, I t

IIRC, and I've got nearly all my emails since the nineties until now so I could find out, I sent an email to the author of that article back when I read it, I think, still IIRC, on the Gamasutra website. And he answered me: we chit-chatted about deterministic game engines, for I wrote one in... 1991! (not for a networked-game though). The subject already came up here on HN and some posted about games using deterministic engines before AoE. The reason I did it is I had a bug which happened ultra-rarely and couldn't figure it out so I thought a long time about this and realized a could make the game deterministic and that would maybe allow me to record the bug happening and then be able to replay it. I found that by myself: back in 1991 I had never heard of anyone writing a deterministic engine back then. So I took a few days and rewrote the engine to be fully deterministic. Sure enough it eventually caught the bug: some case where the hero would clear a level after having fired two shots at once, which was an extra (by default it only had one shot at any time). The shot still on the previous level would continue to "live", invisible, in the following level, and would corrupt the memory. Classic. Oh the memories to see that article again!