JoWooD was a public company listed in the ATX for more than ten years. But hardly anyone apart from journalists and game developers now remembers the names of these developers, despite the fact that JoWooD’s building game Der Industriegigant (1997) sold over 750,000 copies at the time (APA0231-5-WI-0234-WB/CI) and Anno 1602 (Max Design 1998) over two million copies worldwide (OTS0015-5-WA-0271-EUN0001-CA).
#Anno 1503 lag windows 10 software#
In Austria, three studios dominated the scene until the 2000s: Max Design, Neo Software and JoWooD.
Rather, some of today’s most popular game genres originated in Austria and Germany: building games and business simulations. In addition, Austria, Germany and Switzerland could also hardly be described as gaming deserts at the time (Pfister & Rochat 2021). This omission has only recently been remedied, for instance by the work of Graeme Kirkpatrick on British gaming culture (2015), Alexis Blanchet and Guillaume Montagnon on the French history of games (2020) and most recently the extremely well-researched book by Jaroslav Švelch on game development in the CSSR in the 1980s (2018) and Tom Lenting on the Netherlands (2019). Computer platforms such as the IBM-PC, the C64, the Commodore Amiga, the Atari ST, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Schneider CPC dominated Europe in the 1990s but were often neglected by researchers in favour of the history of the console wars between Nintendo and Sega, later by Sony and Microsoft in the US. In the early 1970s, for example, a chess program was developed at the Technical University of Graz: Frantz (Fritz Königshofer & Gerhard Wolf 1974), which like so many other game programs has never made it into the official canon of game history. For example, there is not the one first chess program to which all later ones can be traced back, but many different projects, which partly influenced each other and partly went their own ways. The history of video games is not a simple line from A to B but a dynamic network of countless transnational transfer processes and the simultaneous emergence of extremely dynamic video game cultures occurring in many different places. At the same time, they ignore the highly dynamic developer scene that was flourishing in nearly all European countries during the 1980s and the 1990s.
Such chronicles accordingly focus mainly on the console platforms that were successful in the US and Japan.
In much-cited books like Steven Kent’s “Ultimate History of Videogames” (2001), the history of digital games is most often presented in an almost teleological way as a continuous line of progress from Tennis for Two (William Higinbotham 1958) over Spacewar! (Steve Russell 1962) and Pac-Man (Namco 1980) to Call of Duty (infinity Ward 2003). At this point I would like to thank Tobias Winnerling and Felix Zimmermann for their corrections, help and advice! 1. With the kind permission of the editors, I am publishing it here as a blog post. The following text is based on my keynote at the 2020 FROG conference and is expected to be published this summer in the anthology “Denk N., Pfeiffer A., Serada A., Wernbacher T.