Anno 1602

Max Design was founded in 1991 by Wilfried Reiter and brothers Albert and Martin Lasser in Schladming, a small town in the Austrian Alps. By 1996 the studio was in financial difficulty, close to collapse, with previous titles like the trading simulation 1869 — Hart am Wind! having built a following but not enough revenue to guarantee survival. That April, the team began work on what would become Anno 1602, conceived as a spiritual successor to 1869 but broader in scope. The full development team consisted of four people: Reiter as designer, Albert Lasser and Martin Lasser handling code and animation respectively, and Ulli Koller as artist. Music was composed by Marcus Pitzer. Sunflowers Interactive, a German publisher, came aboard and the game released in Germany in April 1998.

The North American version, published by GT Interactive in 2000 under the title 1602 A.D., included the original six scenarios plus nine additional ones and bundled the expansion. Everything else was the same game.

Anno 1602 is a real-time colony-building and economic simulation set vaguely in the early seventeenth century, though the historical setting is mostly aesthetic. Players control an unnamed European nation, represented by a choice of coloured banner rather than any specific country, establishing colonies across a procedurally varied archipelago of islands. The deliberate neutrality was by design: Max Design stripped out national identities and ideological differences to keep the economic systems as the primary driver of competition. There are no civilisation-specific bonuses or unique units, no asymmetric faction abilities. What differentiates players is how they manage production chains and respond to the needs of their population.

Population management is central and layered. Settlers arrive as Pioneers and progress through tiers — Settlers, Citizens, and beyond — as their needs are met. Each tier demands different goods and services, requiring the player to expand production capacity and build appropriate infrastructure: schools, churches, taverns, markets. Meeting those demands increases income and unlocks more building types; failing to meet them causes stagnation or unrest. The visual feedback is direct — housing improves as population grows, and the colony physically looks more developed as tiers advance. Production chains run through farms, workshops, and transport networks, all of which require the player to manage supply and demand across potentially multiple islands with different terrain and resource profiles.

Combat exists but is peripheral. Musketeers, cannons, and warships are available, and players can attack rivals or defend their own islands. Winning purely through economic dominance and trade efficiency is viable and, for much of the game’s audience, preferable. Military units cannot be recruited until the colony reaches a population threshold capable of supporting weapons production, which itself requires a chain of prerequisite buildings and sustained income. The game was designed to make war a costly option rather than a default strategy. The AI was described at release as “progressive,” meaning it calibrated the pace of the game to how quickly the player acted, slowing down against cautious players and becoming more aggressive against fast-expanding ones.

The map editor shipped with the game allowed players to build custom scenarios, and an expansion, New Islands, New Adventures, released later in 1998 for the German market and bundled with subsequent international releases, added over forty new scenarios, volcano eruptions, improved AI, extended production and ship limits, and a more refined trade route management system. A second German-exclusive mission pack, Im Namen des Königs, followed. The Königsedition collected everything into one package in 1999.

The commercial performance in Germany was the kind that gets written about. Anno 1602 debuted at number one on Media Control’s sales chart in April 1998 and held that position for six weeks, by which point it had already sold 200,000 copies. Der Spiegel covered it as a cultural phenomenon. PC Games reported that Germany had been “plagued by Anno 1602 fever” in the months following release. Sunflowers saw a 300% year-over-year revenue increase. By September 1998, domestic sales had reached 360,000. The game held a position in Media Control’s top rankings for seventy consecutive weeks. It became the first computer game to receive the German entertainment software association’s Double Platinum award, for 400,000 sales in German-speaking countries, and remained the region’s highest-selling computer game of all time as late as 2003, with 1.7 million copies sold there alone. Worldwide sales reached 2.7 million by 2004.

The audience was also notably broader than the German market norm. A significant proportion of buyers were women, which the German press remarked on at the time as unusual for a computer strategy game. Max Design made Anno 1503 in 2002, then closed in 2004, selling its IP to Sunflowers. Ubisoft acquired Sunflowers in 2007 and has continued the series through Anno 1701, 1404, 2070, 2205, 1800, and Anno 117. The original game is available via GOG and Ubisoft Connect.