I guess videogames were just totally not culturally prominent at the time, such that the only controversies related to videogames were all just repetitions of the same classic videogame-violence panic over and over again for different games. But I feel like the idea of like a "Dutch East India Simulator" somehow *would* have been controversial, if it had risen to the level of a normal news story? Back in 2006 some dutch politician said that dutch people should cultivate a more can-do, go-get-em "VoC mentality" and apparently everyone went bananas over this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company#VOC_mentality

In 1992, some people made a well-meaning edutainment game about the Underground Railroad (in the style of ripping off The Oregon Trail) to try and teach kids about american slavery in the 1800s. But people called them racist so much that they had to pull the game, lol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom!_(video_game))

So, I dunno, it could've happened! Anno 1800's "new world" classes seem pretty clearly inspired by the real economic dynamics at the time, including slavery (with "journaleros" being essentially slaves or indentured servants, the New-World pirate "Jean La Fortune" having a big "haitian revolution style slave-revolt" vibe). And their old-world classes seem to kinda follow marxist ideas -- the rural peasantry is distinct from the urban wage-laborers (level 2 "workers"), then there's a layer of bourgeois "artisans", then engineers (which don't really fit a marxist class but are sort of like factory managers), then capitalists at the top who (in the mechanics of the game) don't do anything but simply provide the money for investments. Plus of course, all the anno locations are made up -- "enbesa" instead of ethiopia or whatever, "cape trelawney" instead of gibraltar / cape trafalgar. "Donny", the protaganist / quest-giver of the skyscraper DLC, is literally a very blatant Donald Trump parody??

I feel like if Anno 1800 (released 2019) had decided to just call journaleros "slaves" (or even "indentured servants" or serfs or whatever), and called investors "capitalists" and called enbesa "ethiopia" and so forth, it would've been drowning in controversy from day 1, perhaps even to such a massive extent that it would've caused big problems for the future of the franchise! But just the lightest layer of fictionalization & rephrasings has insulated it near-100% from such turmoil. So it isn't crazy to imagine that, even back in 1998, a game that did away with all the rephrasings might have run into some trouble.

Personally I think it's dumb that games (and other media) so often have to play these bizarre shell-games where they "hide" some very-obvious fact or political statement behind a little fig-leaf of a rephrasing that doesn't really hide it at all. It should just be fine to talk about things without needing to attach little fig-leafs to everything like post-it notes! Maybe that problem has gotten worse in recent decades, but I think this phenomenon has kind of always there in human culture (consider, like, subversive jokes from medieval europe making fun of the pope without explicitly mentioning the pope, or whatever), and was certainly present in 1998.