Europa Universalis wasn't always a household name in strategy gaming. Like the company behind it, EU has had a fraught journey over the years—and as EU lead Johan Andersson explained in an interview with PC Gamer news writer Joshua Wolens, the early days were spent trying to keep the lights on.
Europa Universalis 2, for instance, was conceived under brutal time constraints. Andersson explained, "We came up with a bunch of ideas for what we should be doing. I think we, in two or three meetings, wrote down, like, three pages of ideas, and it's 'Okay, we need to get this game out quickly, and it needs to be done so it's sold in the US market before Christmas, because we need the money [or] else we cannot pay people.'"
That didn't curb the team's ambitions, mind you. Players had already tinkered with EU1—wherein you selected from a small batch of scenarios, each with a designated playable nation—to make any country accessible from the get. The mod maker behind that feature, named Henrik Fåhraeus, was hired as content designer for the sequel, which aimed to have every country playable in the base game; today, Fåhraeus is Paradox's chief creative officer.
"So, that's a good hire. Like, what's that? 25 years ago," Andersson chuckled.
EU2 launched to "pretty good reviews," Andersson said, but noted "I didn't think too much about the 'shot in the arm' or something, because we knew the game was good." It was still a bit of a rough patch for the team as it only had the connections to distribute the game in Germany until the following year, which hamstrung its reach.
Still, Andersson took solace in EU's burgeoning, passionate community of players: "Back in the day of Usenet and all that stuff, we had people that were not good at German that ordered the game from the German distributor just so that they could play the game. It was a little bit of a different time."
