Website www.colossalorder.fi Headquarters Tampere Type Limited company | Founded 2009 Number of employees 15 | |
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Industry Computer and video game industry Key people Mariina Hallikainen (CEO)
Antti-Ilmari Lehto (board chairman)
Antti Juhani Isosomppi (art director and board member)
Karoliina Korppoo (game designer)
Damien Morello (graphics and gameplay programmer and board member) Products Cities in Motion series
Cities: Skylines Video games Cities: Skylines, Cities in Motion, Cities in Motion 2 | ||
Colossal Order is a Finnish video game development company known for its business simulation game series Cities in Motion and for its city builder Cities: Skylines. The company was founded in Tampere, Finland in 2009. Its publisher is Paradox Interactive. Paradox tests, markets, sells and distributes all games by Colossal Order. The CEO of Colossal Order is Mariina Hallikainen.
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History
Colossal Order was founded in the summer of 2009 by a group of game developers of the mobile game company Universomo. Mariina Hallikainen was hired from outside of Universomo as the CEO of the new company.
At first, Colossal Order had difficulties obtaining funding for its first game, the business simulation game Cities in Motion, that was already in development when the company was founded. Investors thought that Cities in Motion would not attract a large enough clientele. Instead of big investors, the first steps of the company were funded by Finnish public instruments – Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment, Tekes, and DigiDemo finance of the Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture – as well as small private investors.
In its early phase, the company was coached by the Yritystalli program of the Tampere University of Technology, but advice was sought directly from experienced Finnish game development companies as well, specifically Remedy Entertainment and Frozenbyte. Upon being founded, Colossal Order compared dozens of publishers and ended up signing a publishing agreement with Paradox Interactive after over a year's worth of negotiations.
In October 2015, Colossal Order was awarded the Finnish Game Developer of the Year (Finnish: Vuoden suomalainen pelinkehittäjä) award at the DixiExpo convention. The judges thanked Colossal Order for focusing: "from its inception ... on – in addition to developing games – also developing its business model".
Games
The relationship between Colossal Order and its publisher Paradox Interactive has been characterized as constructive. Colossal Order has the freedom to create games without limitations set by the publisher, bar those on schedules.
Unlike the game developers that founded it, Colossal Order does not develop mobile games. Instead, the company focuses on PC games. Employees of the company have their own internal wiki platform for developing games. Games by Colossal Order are known for their active modding communities. One of the programmers at the company works full-time on modding tools.
The best-known game of the company is the city-building game Cities: Skylines published in March 2015. It competes with games of the SimCity and Cities XL series. Cities: Skylines got its first expansion pack, Cities: Skylines – After Dark, in September 2015. Its second expansion pack came out in February 2016, called Cities Skylines - Snowfall. A third expansion pack, Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters, was announced in August 2016.