"Every lunch break, every coffee break, our room was always full of people playing the game.
"People came back to play the game after the demo," Hallikainen says, just a couple of hours after her keynote address at the Unite Europe conference. "I was thinking 300,000 copies by the end of the summer would be fantastic. At a showcase of Paradox's games that Christmas, attended by YouTubers, streamers and assorted journalists, Cities: Skylines was comfortably the biggest draw.
Officially announced in the cavernous halls of Gamescom in August 2014, Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive, the game's publisher, had both agreed on a "slow start," ensuring that the Cities in Motion faithful were on-board before turning their attention to the uninitiated. In fact, Colossal Order's CEO recalls the exact moment she realised that the studio's most ambitious game yet held an appeal that she hadn't foreseen. Mariina Hallikainen knew that Cities: Skylines was different. Given the size of its team and the extremely specialist nature of the products, a few hundred thousand sales per game was about right. Neither of those games was a million-seller, but then games about improving efficiency in traffic flow around European cities aren't expected to be. The Finnish studio had identified and served a niche market, racking up relatively strong sales and and decent review scores in the process. Colossal Order was a small company of 13 people, its reputation built on the mass-transit simulation series, Cities in Motion. Cities: Skylines was never meant to be a roaring success.
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