Max design

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MAX DESIGN Lasser & Reiter OEG
legal form Open acquisition (OEG)
founding 1991
resolution 2004
Seat Schladming , AustriaAustriaAustria 
management Albert Lasser
Martin Lasser
Wilfried Reiter
Website max-design.at ( Memento from December 17, 2003 in the Internet Archive )

Max Design was an Austrian game developer based in Schladming who produced some computer games with cult status, especially in German-speaking countries. The company became known for its sophisticated business simulations from the Erlebte Geschichte series and the Anno series, which have a large fan base to this day and which in the 1990s played a decisive role in the image of the typical German economic simulation at the same time as titles such as Der Patrizier from competitor Ascon / Ascaron influenced. Max Design stopped its activities in 2004.

After the closure in 2004, the founders took a break and were briefly active again in the games industry in 2006 with the new, but legally or economically unrelated company Red Monkeys , but no further game was published under the new name.

Company history

Max Design was founded in 1991 by the brothers Albert and Martin Lasser together with Wilfried Reiter. The first game was the business simulation Cash for the Commodore Amiga , which appeared in the same year.

Max Design became known for the comprehensive instructions with background information on the actual game theme. To 1869 - Close to the Wind (1992) included a historical summary of imperialism the years 1854-1880 and an encyclopedia seafaring terms , at Burn Time (1993) were items to climate change included and vintage (1994) to the history of the automobile to the global economic crisis .

In the mid-1990s, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy and was only just able to save itself.

The game Anno 1602 , initiated by Max Design and published in 1998 together with Sunflowers , marked an important boundary in two respects. On the one hand, with 2 million copies sold by 2002, it became the most successful German / Austrian computer game to date and it laid the foundation for the Anno series. On the other hand, Sunflowers guaranteed in the context of cooperation first shares of the company Max Design. With the appearance of Anno 1503 in 2002, there was speculation in the fan base about a continuous shift in the balance of power in the direction of Sunflowers within the framework of the cooperation . Its development began in 1998 and was originally scheduled for two years. The game was sold 200,000 times in Germany in less than two weeks of its appearance. Of the two titles in the Anno series developed by Max Design, a total of 4.2 million copies were sold by 2006; in 2018, sales were 4.4 million copies.

After twelve years, Max Design retired from the game industry on April 15, 2004. According to the press release, it was a "break and reorientation". All ten employees were fired, only the founding team stayed with the company. In the same year, Max Design stopped its activities. The Anno series was continued by Sunflowers in cooperation with Related Designs .

In an interview, the company founder Martin Lasser later stated that after a total of 12 years of development work, the core team was "tired" and needed time to reorient. Wilfried Reiter declared in 2018 that in the development years of Anno 1503 many young talents had been lost due to the rural location of the company's headquarters in Schladming. The founders therefore saw a great need for investment and a move of the company as necessary prerequisites for continued existence.

Well-known games

  • Cash (1991) - business simulation
  • Think Cross (1991) - Puzzle
  • Osiris (1992) - Puzzle
  • 1869 - Hart am Wind (1992) - economic simulation
  • Burntime (1993) - strategy game
  • The highlight! (1994) - Adventure game (as publisher, developer: Neo Software )
    • English name The Clue!
  • Oldtimer (1994/95) - economic simulation
    • English name Motor City
  • Albert Lasser's Clearing House (1995) - stock market simulation
  • Prototype (1995) - (as publisher, developer: Neo Software and Surprise! Productions)
  • Strike Base (1996) - space action
  • Anno 1602 (1998) - economic simulation / strategy (development partner / publisher: Sunflowers )
  • Anno 1503 (2002) - Business simulation / strategy (Developer / Publisher: Sunflowers )

Others

For the game music from 1869 and Burntime was Hannes Seifert , one of the later founder and CEO of Neo Software , responsible. Max Design also acted as a publisher for their games .

With Petko , Max Design also wanted to place a title in the adventure area in the mid-1990s . A playable demo has yet to be released, but the project has never been completed.

literature

Web links

credentials

  1. ↑ Justin Stolzenberg: Anno inventors develop online role-playing game. In: PC Games . April 12, 2006, accessed August 16, 2020 .
  2. ^ A b c d e Daniel Koller: Max Design: When the most successful games came from Austria. In: The Standard . October 7, 2018, accessed August 16, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Tomas Binder: Anno 1602 - The longseller par excellence. In: spieleflut.de. February 12, 2002, accessed August 16, 2020 .
  4. ↑ a b The Anno makers are developing an MMO: We were able to elicit the first information from project manager Martin Lasser! Interview. In: Gamona . April 20, 2006, archived from the original on April 21, 2015 ; accessed on August 16, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Max Design - mass layoffs among Anno programmers. In: Gamestar . April 16, 2004, accessed August 16, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Rare screenshots of the game project Petko ( Memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) on TheLegacy