Max Design

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~ the last words ~

Max Design made games in German, for people who read German, and the half of the product that people still talk about was the part that never translated. The boxes came with manuals that were partly reference works. The one for 1869, a sailing trade simulation from 1992, contained a written history of imperialism from 1854 to 1880 and a glossary of seamen's terms. Burntime, the post-apocalyptic strategy game that followed in 1993, shipped with articles about climate change in it, which in 1993 was a topic a game box had no particular reason to mention. I do not read German, which means the thing this studio was famous for among its own audience has always been closed to me, and the games arrive as mechanics with the argument stripped out.

Two brothers, Albert and Martin Lasser, started the company in Schladming in 1991 with Wilfried Reiter. Their first release that same year was an economic simulation called Cash, on the Amiga. For most of the decade they were the Austrian half of a specifically German-speaking genre, the dense management simulation, running alongside Ascaron's Der Patrizier and defining between them what that kind of game looked like. The middle of the 1990s nearly finished them off: the company came close to insolvency and only just got clear of it.

~ the record ~

~ what Anno did ~

Anno 1602 was Max Design's idea and it went out in 1998 through Sunflowers in Heusenstamm. It sold two million copies by 2002 and became the most successful German or Austrian computer game released up to that point, and it started a series that is still running almost thirty years later. The deal that made it also started moving the company somewhere its founders may not have intended, because Sunflowers took its first shareholding in Max Design as part of the arrangement, and the balance of the partnership kept shifting from then on.

Anno 1503 was supposed to take two years and took four. Development began in 1998 and the game did not arrive until 2002, by which point the fan community had been speculating for a while about who was really in charge. When it did ship it sold 200,000 copies in Germany in under a fortnight. Across the two Anno titles Max Design built, sales reached 4.2 million by 2006 and 4.4 million by 2018, which is a lot of copies for a company of about a dozen people in a mountain town.

~ a pause, officially ~

On 15 April 2004, after twelve years, Max Design announced it was withdrawing from the games industry. All ten employees were dismissed. Only the founding team stayed on paper, and the statement described what was happening as a pause and a reorientation. Later the same year the company stopped operating at all.

The reasons the founders gave afterward were unglamorous and probably true. Martin Lasser said the core team was tired after twelve years of continuous development and needed time to think about something else. Wilfried Reiter, looking back in 2018, put it in staffing terms instead: during the long Anno 1503 development they kept losing young talent, because the company sat in a ski resort in the Styrian mountains and young developers would not relocate there. Carrying on meant serious investment and a move of the whole company to somewhere people already lived.

~ who kept Anno ~

The series did not pause. Sunflowers continued it with Related Designs in Mainz, and the Anno name eventually ended up inside Ubisoft, where it still is. The studio that invented it is a Wikipedia article and a MobyGames entry now, and max-design.at answers with an empty page.

~ Red Monkeys ~

In 2006 the founders turned up again with a new company called Red Monkeys, legally and financially unconnected to the old one, and told the German gaming press they were building an online role-playing game. Interviews ran through 2006 and the project was discussed in some detail. Red Monkeys released nothing, and that is where the record of all three of them in this industry stops.

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