Despite being largely forgotten in favor of its sequels, the original Age of Empires remained popular decades later in Vietnam, due in large part to pirated copies of the game being bundled in Vietnamese computers and a long history of LAN matches dating back to the 1990's. Modern Vietnamese players often use custom rulesets, and top players have earned tens of thousands of dollars in tournaments viewed by audiences as high as the hundreds of thousands.

In 2023, this popularity in Vietnam was formally acknowledged by Forgotten Empires, the modern developers of the series, in their "Return of Rome" expansion for Age of Empires II, which ported and updated content from the original Age of Empires to Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition. The expansion included a new faction, Lac Viet, "in honor and recognition of ["The Rise of Rome" expansion from the first Age of Empires game's] phenomenal popularity in Vietnam."