A Colony Ship

Towards the end of August of 1999, something incomprehensible for me happened: Klaus asked me if my friends and I would like to test-play his “Starfarers” prototype. Of course we were all for it, and for a three-day period we received a handmade copy of the game.

After we had extensively tested the game, I again persuaded Klaus to give us permission to publish our gaming impressions on the Internet, together with some photos of the prototype – exactly at the same time Kosmos Verlag launched its official press release. [1]

Handmade Starfarers prototype - still with silver Mother Ships

Independently of my board game activities, my hobby of maintaining a private homepage had by this time evolved into being a self-employed web designer / web worker. Klaus found my design of the “Starfarers” pages very appealing by the standards of the time – and for the first time he noticed that, in due course, he would also need his own homepage, and that he could definitely imagine entrusting its implementation to me.

KlausTeuber.de on September 25, 2001

Prof. Easy

Around 2001, the work on the homepage klausteuber.de thus began. Fortunately for me as a service provider, this project became literally interminable: there were always new ideas to be implemented. The interactive game introductions by and with Prof. Easy, whose technical basis was inspired by my private homepage projects of those days, are surely prime examples for this. The now discontinued “Barbarossa Riddle” should also be mentioned in this context; its relaunch triggered “Klaus Teubers Spielwiese” (Klaus Teuber’s Playing Field) – which nowadays  is “PlayCatan,” since the departure from T-Online also the home of the Catan Online World.

During the game fair “Spiel ’04″ in Essen in October 2004, Klaus, Arnd, and I developed the concept for the online game “Multicatan” over a few cups of coffee, and it was my task to implement the game afterwards. Mid-2005 it went online, with great success, and at the time became the showcase for “Klaus Teubers Spielwiese.” During this period, I delved deeper and deeper into Catan projects. Deadlines for other, basically equal projects from other clients had to be carefully coordinated because they threatened to interfere with the plans for Catan’s online presence, of which I had increasingly become an integral part.

Klaus Teubers Spielwiese - in summer 2005 with Multicatan

Inspired by our collaboration on “Multicatan,” in late summer of 2005, I took heart and asked Klaus straight out if he’d like to hire me full-time instead of paying me fees for a continuously growing number of new projects with an always wider scope. After a brief, Catan-internal consultation between Klaus, Guido, and Arnd, I signed my contract with Catan GmbH on October 1st, 2005.

That’s how two of my previous hobbies – implementing websites and playing board games – were combined into my current job.  And here’s the most astounding thing: Except for the testing of company prototypes, I meanwhile hardly get around to play board games, and although my ideas for private homepage projects are somewhere in the “mental drawer,” they are rarely put into practice. Maybe we intuitively keep job and private life apart, even if our job has developed from previous hobbies.

Gero Zahn

[1] http://www.onlinepresence.de/Sternenfahrer/

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What’s probably more interesting: How do you become the person in charge of the web content in a small, family-run company like Catan GmbH? The story now dates back more than 12 years. In this first part I would like to narrate how Klaus and I met and established a personal contact.

During my university years as a student of computer science, my circle of friends was incurably infected with the “Settlers” fever ever since the game “The Settlers of Catan” was published in fall of 1995, and hardly a gaming night would go by without culminating in a game of Catan. On the other hand, back then I was already interested in HTML and also had put a private home page online. Those were the pioneering days for the “cyber exhibitionism” of the Web 1.0: “my name, my pet, my hobbies” – available for everyone who already had an Internet-capable computer at the time.

Space Settlers - Red Planet

Then, one day in summer of 1997, my good friend Markus and I were gazing into the “Settlers” box, lost in thought. Apart from many other things we have in common, both of us are huge science fiction fans: Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica – space adventures were our passion then and still are today.  As we were staring at the mountains, pastures, and fields hexes, a thought spontaneously flashed through our minds: how would the game look like if it weren’t set in the Viking milieu in medieval times but in space – and would we be able to craft something like this ourselves.

After some brainstorming, we agreed that we didn’t want to change anything regarding the concept of the game: it wasn’t our intention to manipulate the proven game mechanics; we only wanted to transfer its visual aspects and mood to outer space by renaming all objects and resources accordingly. Markus found a wonderful shareware graphics software, which I used to create the first graphic sketches of our “Space Settlers.”

Space Settlers - Blue Planet

With the respective printouts in my pocket, I presented myself at the booth of Kosmos Verlag at the “Spiel ’97″ game fair that took place in Essen in October 1997.  Even though our adaptation was merely a hobby project, I was anxious to hear Klaus Teuber’s opinion about it: had he strictly forbidden any derivative work at that moment, we would have accepted it without complaint.

Unfortunately, we missed each other, so I gave my sketches to Horst-Rainer Rösner of the Siedlerclub instead, which he pledged to forward to Klaus Teuber.  And really: soon after, I found a personal letter from him in my mailbox. Klaus (with whom I wasn’t on first-name terms at the time) assured me that he didn’t object to such a hobby project – and that he would like to see the finished version

The Space Settlers of Catan

The next year, in 1998, I showed up at the game fair “Spiel ’98″ – apart from photos from our first rounds of “Space Settlers,” I also had another copy of the game in my backpack, which I wanted to give to Klaus on this occasion. At the Kosmos booth, for the first time I met Benjamin, his youngest son, who beamed with delight when telling me that his father was working on a space adaptation too. Could it be that we unintentionally had struck a chord with our “Space Settlers?” Was Klaus’ own project identical to ours, or was it perhaps even a completely new Catan game?

He later told me that he had something bigger in mind; today, we all know the game as “The Starfarers of Catan,” which I had no way of knowing at that time.  Anyway: He gave me permission to present our “Space Settlers” to the Internet audience in the context of my private homepage. [1]

Next time, in the second part of this blog posting, I will tell you how staying loosely in touch evolved into my present job at Catan GmbH.

Gero Zahn

[1] http://www.onlinepresence.de/Space-Siedler/

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