About
Pharaoh, together with its Cleopatra expansion, was originally developed by Impressions Games. A separate, unrelated official remake, Pharaoh: A New Era, was released later and is not compatible with this project. Akhenaten reimplements the Pharaoh game engine to run on modern systems, forked from the Julius/Augustus project (which targets Caesar 3) and retargeted at Pharaoh. It's under active development, builds via CMake across Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and web/Emscripten, and can already load original Pharaoh save files and play through the initial campaign missions without major issues.
How it differs from the original
It requires the original Pharaoh plus Cleopatra installation's assets to run, since it only reimplements the engine, not game content; the Pharaoh demo lacks required resource packs and is rejected at startup, and assets from the separate 2023 remake are explicitly not compatible.
Getting started
After downloading a build or compiling from source, point Akhenaten at an existing Pharaoh installation folder patched to version 1.3 with the Cleopatra expansion. If you only have an installer executable rather than an installed copy, the program can extract GOG/Inno Setup or retail InstallShield installers automatically.
History
The project began as a fork of Julius/Augustus, a community-maintained modernization of the Caesar 3 engine, retargeted to run Pharaoh instead since no equivalent existed for that game.
Known limitations
- save_compatibility: Can load original save games from Pharaoh and play initial campaign missions without major issues, but full compatibility not guaranteed.
Media
Additional notes
- Modding
- Supports loading mod archives from a specified mods directory, plus hot-reloading of the game's embedded JavaScript scripts for development.