The late Bronze Age collapse, the rapid decline and fall of the great civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean in the late first millennium BCE, has been attributed historically to groups of people from disparate parts of the Mediterranean who ended up on the shores of the Hittite and Egyptian Empires, identified in the inscriptions of Pharaoh Ramesses III as the sea peoples. The sea peoples have been an enigma for scholars since the words of Pharaoh Ramses III inscribed on the walls of his Mortuary Temple at Medina Taboo in southern Egypt were first translated in the 1920s. In these inscriptions, Ramesses tells of how Egypt was attacked by what seemed to be a confederation of peoples from several parts of the Mediterranean world. The sea people affected several other countries, but it is from Egyptian sources that we get the most information about them. The few surviving sources from that era tell us how they ravaged cities and brought about the downfall of several kingdoms and empires, until the armed forces of Pharaoh Ramesses III halted their bloody path of destruction.

Total War Pharaoh is a strategy game that explores the Bronze Age collapse, where the player faces the end times of the great civilizations as ruler of one of the eight factions from three cultures: the Egyptians, the Canaanites, and the Hittites. The game requires the player to maintain the pillars of civilization as the story of these kingdoms takes a turn for the worse, defend against the oncoming attacks of the sea peoples, carry civilization through disaster, and destroy rivals to become more powerful than ever before. The game features grand strategy across a world map and intense real-time battles when armies clash, offering an authentic portrayal of the Bronze Age.