30 Years of The Settlers II: Five Days of Mastering, Four Hours of Sleep
“The Settlers II: Veni, Vidi, Vici” came out in April 1996. I was 25, its project lead, game designer and main programmer. A look back, with an interview from those days, an old photo and what I still remember.
This is the English version of a post I wrote in German: 30 Jahre Die Siedler II.
My old friend and colleague Thomas Friedmann sent me an old photo the other day.
Long hair, glasses, a tube monitor, a Settlers poster on the wall. The screen shows the game I had just spent about a year on: The Settlers II. I was 25, “an old hand in the software business despite his 25 years”, as the German magazine PC Player wrote below another photo of me at the time. That was not entirely wrong: I had been with Blue Byte since the end of 1988, first while still at school, and after school and military service as one of its first permanent employees. The photo is 30 years old now.
Thirty years are a long time, and I am writing all this down from memory. Memories can be imprecise: if a date is slightly off or a name is missing, please bear with me. Where I could look things up, I did, above all in an interview I gave PC Player in 1996. It is in German; the quotes from it below are my own translations.
It started with a list
I did not develop the first game: “The Settlers” is the work of Volker Wertich. It came out for the Amiga in 1993 and for the PC in 1994. My other game was just done at the time, and nobody else was free, so I tested the Amiga version and took over its QA. Along the way a list came together of everything that could be done better. For the first game it came too late, because that was almost finished.
I took this list to Thomas Hertzler, the head of Blue Byte. That is more or less how I got the go to work on “The Settlers II”, and the list became the plan.
It did not start right away: some time passed between the master of the first game and the kickoff of the second. What fits my memory best is that we slowly got going on “The Settlers II” after a prototype for the Super Nintendo. That would have been in the spring of 1995, almost two years later. I am not entirely sure about it any more.
What made it from the list into the game? Basically everything: the PC as the platform from the start, better controls, a story, even if less of that remained in the end than planned. Road building is a good example. In the first game it was cumbersome; in the second you only set the start and the end, and the game does the rest.
Three people, twelve in the end
The team was small. At its core, three of us developed most of the game: Peter Ohlmann, the second programmer, Christoph Werner, who did the graphics, and me. Another colleague was with us at the beginning, and Adam Sprys joined later. When PC Player asked me in 1996 how big the core of the team had been, I answered:
“Three people; towards the end, artists, level designers and testers joined. That brought us to about twelve people.”
I led the project myself, designed the game and wrote most of its code: the base, the game logic and the graphics engine, all in C++. And I had to hold the whole thing together. The interview has a sentence about that, too:
“If you have no goal in front of you, you cannot bring a project like this to an end.”
What did not make it into the game
Not everything made it into the game. Much more story was planned, for example, but we took it back again, because fixed sequences did not suit this game:
“Everybody plays differently: if you build two sawmills at the start instead of one, the game already runs completely differently.”
Controlling soldiers directly was out of the question as well: it would have broken a basic principle that the whole system of carriers depended on. There was no network game either, because whoever has 2,000 settlers walking around has to shovel enormous amounts of data back and forth. What we did have was the classic split screen: two players at one computer. The reviews of the time still complained that you could neither control soldiers directly nor play over a network.
Five days of mastering
Blue Byte had meant to release another game first, “Schleichfahrt” (known abroad as “Archimedean Dynasty”), and “The Settlers II” after it. Because “Schleichfahrt” was delayed, we had to move our release forward to the spring. Otherwise things would have become difficult for Blue Byte.
We worked in the old Blue Byte offices on Aktienstraße in Mülheim an der Ruhr, above the supermarket. I described to PC Player what my days there looked like in the final phase:
“I came to the office around eight or nine and stayed until one at night. That was quite stressful.”
Then came the master: the version that goes to the pressing plant. It must have been around Easter 1996. Mastering meant, in those days: fixing the last bugs, testing, burning the master CD. It took five days, and in those five days I slept for maybe four hours. Thomas Friedmann and Thorsten Knop (Kneisel today) were there with me.
Shortly before the end I even had to go back into the memory management, because the RAM was running short. How exactly I solved that, I no longer know. It all fits the calendar: Easter Sunday was 7 April, and on 17 April the game was in the shops.
It became a huge success for Blue Byte: by May 1998, “The Settlers II” had sold about 600,000 copies worldwide, according to Wikipedia.
“A holiday first”
The last question of the interview was what I would do next:
“A holiday first. Get the motorbike out of the cellar. Watch ‘Toy Story’. Then comes the data CD for Settlers 2.”
The data CD did come out in the same year, as the Mission CD with a second campaign, new maps and a map editor. In 1997 the Gold Edition followed, which put both into one box.
In 1998 I left Blue Byte together with Thomas Friedmann and Thorsten Knop to found Funatics. There the game came back to us ten years after the original: in 2006 we developed “The Settlers II: 10th Anniversary” for Blue Byte, and in 2008 “The Settlers: Awakening of Cultures” followed. But that is another story ;)
And the Ferrari?
PC Player also wanted to know in 1996 what you earn with game design, and whether I drove a Ferrari.
“That would be nice. I drive a car, I have a motorbike, and I can pay for my flat. I don’t live badly.”
There is no Ferrari to this day. There is an electric car that charges with the power from our own roof. But that, too, is another story (in German).
And today?
People still talk to me about “The Settlers II”. The game seems to have shaped many of them: my contact at the insurance company and people from my party have told me that they spent hours settling as children, and it happens to me at Gamescom as well. Last year we were even invited to the release of the Amiga version, almost thirty years after the original.
For this post I read the interview once more. It is still on point. You can tell from it how committed I was and how much time we spent there. We were young, after all :)
Sources and more
- PC Player 6/96: Interview mit einem Siedler: Jörg Langer talking to me, as a scan at Kultboy.com (in German). All quotes in this post are from it, translated by me
- Rock Paper Shotgun: Making Of: Settlers II (Veni Vidi Vici) by Kieron Gillen, 12 October 2007
- Retro Gamer (Germany): Interview with Thomas Häuser and Thomas Friedmann, a video for subscribers, 10 November 2025 (in German)
- Wikipedia: The Settlers II
- This website: all the games I have worked on