Following a period of financial turmoil in which the company neared bankruptcy, the team began Anno as a spiritual sequel to its earlier title 1869 – Hart am Wind!, a competitor of The Patrician. The team at Max Design numbered only four members: designer Wilfried Reiter, brothers Martin and Albert Lasser and artist Ulli Koller. Anno 1602s design occurred gradually. From December 17-22, 2018, the game was given away to Uplay users for free on PC. Distribution and commercial performance Debut Anno 1602 was a commercial hit. In the German market, the title debuted in first place on Media Control's computer game sales rankings for the second half of April 1998, and held the position after six weeks on the charts. By that time, it had sold 200,000 units. Der Spiegel reported in June that this performance made Anno the title with "the best chance to become the German number one this year". The game subsequently received a "Platinum" award from the Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland (VUD), for sales of at least 200,000 units throughout the German-speaking world: Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Anno 1602s streak at #1 ended in the latter half of June when Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines captured the spot, which it maintained for 16 weeks. Sunflowers' game remained at second on the Media Control charts for the last two weeks of June, July, August and September. Accruing 360,000 domestic sales by September, Anno 1602 was the German market's best-selling game during the first nine months of 1998. PC Games Petra Maueröder wrote that Germany was "plagued by the Anno 1602 fever" in the half-year following its release, while Max Falkenstern likened it to a "pandemic" in . The game's sales for the period resulted in a 300% increase in Sunflowers' year-over-year revenue, to DM 20 million. Remarking on this success at the time, Eva Müller and Hans-Peter Canibol of Focus noted that Sunflowers had become "one of the few German companies that [has] asserted itself in the American-dominated [computer game] market". Sunflowers forecast sales of 600,000 units for Anno by the end of 1998, based on its performance earlier in the year. The game claimed second on Media Control's charts during the last two weeks of October, below Need for Speed 3, and then dropped to #3 for the second halves of November and December. Sales had risen to 400,000 units after six months of availability, and