How OGame Began[]
In 2002, a certain guy called Alexander Rösner, the later famous Legor, wasn't really satisfied about how another similar browsergame was made. So he started testing around and wrote a code of a browsergame - OGame was born, having taken about two months to develop. He simply wanted to have some fun. A few friends helped him, but it was merely a project. Some people stopped by and played. In the beginning, it was quite frequent all had to be restarted and that nothing worked as it should. Death Stars for example came in quite late, and couldn't even fly. There was also no word about a company or anything commercial back then.
It was a surprise that OGame was liked by so many people. It was far from perfect and many times there were problems. Alex even had to shut off servers because his bandwidth was used up. Still, it grew and many changes were made and in 2003 he met Klaas Kersting who also was involved into a browsergame project. These two then thought about making a company. As a background information: both had been quite experienced on the field of business already, Legor was part of the 1&1 board, one of the biggest ISPs in Germany, and Klaas has a business degree.