Railroad Tycoon | Hacker News Reader

Railroad Tycoon

filfre.net

378 pointssmacktoward148 comments

RT2 is one of the coolest "business simulations" of all time - the goal was to make profits. The simplification was the "business" was achieved by setting the game near the dawn of the industrial age - when there was more of a relation between work vs output. The goal was to connect cities/companies so economic activity could take place. The big obstacles were set at random (i.e. train breakdowns) that added the element of fun. The game took the player through "macro" settings like recession and booms.

My deep appreciation of the game also comes from the fact that the settings were largely historically accurate. The big industrial centers (Albany, Denver (for lumber)) were accurately depicted. An extremely engaging way to learn a lot of early U.S. history, regarding how cities came into existence (answer: based on commodities trade). Also fascinating to learn about tech evolution (engines!)

Customary hyperbole: One of the best "business simulations" ever made! :)

RT3 did the series one better IMHO, since its economic model was more comprehensive and calculated the costs of everything based on alternative transport methods - building a line through the mountains could reap big rewards, and buying up the businesses you were going to expand towards even more so.

I found RT3 a bit of a miss... there was too much 'blank space' and I thought 2 really outdid it in terms of the economic model

I've never played RT2, but my understanding was that RT3 was rather difficult because they added the ability for goods to move independent of the railroad. So a lot of goods that you would have been able to make money on in the past moved down rivers, and away from rail lines, rather than sitting around waiting to be collected.

That being said, I had a lot of fun playing RT3.

I liked both of them. The 3D modelling was so much better in RT3 and alot of the economics was more "real-world". I do feel like RT2 had more of the history and charm however than RT3. Also a bit less pressure compared to some of the later maps in RT3 which were more scenario based and less open ended.

Same here, RT2 was one of my favorite games as a kid. I would love to see a modern remaster or, better yet, a new Railroad Tycoon game that preserves the simulation aspects of its predecessor.

I played RT2 as a teenager and spent hours playing every scenario. They had a few futuristic ones like colonizing Antarctica. US historical were the best.

Somewhat of a competitor, but any Sim Tower fans here? I was obsessed with everything Sim* but especially loved Sim Tower. Maxis was an amazing gaming company and actually my first entry into Macs. My friends dad had a Macintosh II, then classic, then LC, and I would spend hours playing games on them.

Interestingly, SimTower was published by Maxis but developed by OpenBook (later Vivarium), the Japanese developer that would later make Seaman for the Dreamcast.

Yoot Saito just presented a classic game postmortem of "Seaman" [1] at the recent GDC.

[1] http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/classic-game-postmortem-s...

Unfortunately I wasn't there to see it, but I saw him talk earlier about Seaman at GDC 2000, and it was fascinating to learn how he was able to pull off such an unprecedented original design, even supporting speech recognition on the Dreamcast!

Announcement: Yoot Saito is coming to GDC 2017 to present a Classic Game Postmortem of Seaman! [2]

[2] http://www.gdconf.com/news/yoot-saito-coming-gdc-2017-presen...

"Yutaka "Yoot" Saito, the talented game designer known for his idiosyncratic approach to game development, will be delivering a Classic Game Postmortem on his remarkable Dreamcast game 'Seaman' at GDC 2017! Saito's game development career took off in the early '90s when he created the game that was published by Maxis as 'SimTower', but it was after he founded his own studio Vivarium that he really came into his own. Under the Vivarium banner, Saito developed the groundbreaking virtual pet game 'Seaman' (lending his own face to the titular Seaman), its striking sequel 'Seaman 2', the pinball strategy game 'Odama', and the airport baggage management puzzle game 'Aero Porter'. Now, Saito is coming to GDC 2017 to speak at length about his work creating 'Seaman', a game that left an indelible mark on the fabric of both the game industry and pop culture at large. Don't miss it!"

I just found the video of his GDC 2017 talk: Classic Game Postmortem: 'Seaman'! [3]

[3] http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024327/Classic-Game-Postmortem...

And here's a review and summary of his talk. [4]

[4] http://www.seganerds.com/2017/03/02/yoot-saito-gives-gdc-pre...

I haven't played it, but Vivarium has a version for iOS: http://tower.tv

Give Project Highrise a try: http://store.steampowered.com/app/423580/

I loved SimTower, although there were times it felt more like Elevator Simulator.

(Also, tip for those starting a new game: 2x3 grid of fast food in the basement at the start of the game. You're welcome.)

I read somewhere that it was originally an elevator simulator that they built the game around.

Hah, memories of angry people waiting for the elevator are flooding back to me right now.

Yikes, here comes the VIP!

Lol, the express, service, and tuning the tweaking them to prevent angry guests and employees. I feel like Elevator Sim 2017 would still sell today.

You guys are forgetting SimAnt!

I could never figure out how to play it. Of course, it didn't help that I only had the disc, not the manual

The game had a very sharp difficulty curve, but in kind of a bad way. It was very tough to get started and to get a decent colony going, but once you did you could snowball through the rest of the yard. I could take on giant spiders and harvest food from them, and of course any other colony.

I shudder at imagining a lot of the earlier Sim* games without a manual and largely pre-web. Without the space or time to create digital help content, there was so much that was only mentioned in the manuals!

I remember the SimEarth one being a pretty hefty tome.

This was my favorite sim. Black and White back in the day. So good.

From all Peter Molyneux games, my favorite was Magic Carpet.

If you liked Magic Carpet, you might enjoy "Arcane Worlds"[1], which is like an unofficial modern remake.

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/269610/

Bullfrog should never have died.

Molyneux's new game Godus and Godus Wars wasn't as fun.

if i was ever losing, i'd use my nuclear weapon: putting rocks in all the enemy ant's nest holes

I was obsessed with 2002's SimGolf for a while, but not sure if anyone else really played it.

It was surprisingly fun! One of the best games where you try to build stuff for little virtual people, figure out how to make them happy, how to push their buttons, etc. (Also: the Sims, Theme Park / Hospital, Dungeon Keeper, etc :) )

The goal was to make a course that "looked hard but played easy."

I can't help but wonder if that was a hint at their larger philosophy of game development too...

Still play it. Still love it.

Loved that game!

/me raises hand :) Maxis games were classic. And quite complementary to Meier's work - the former being very open simulation sandboxes, and the latter more strategic and goal-oriented but with a lot of flex and slack in the rules for the player to experiment with.

But they definitely shared a similar spirit: giving the player a box full of building blocks and see what they do with it! :)

Check out Software, Inc. [0] for a actively-developed interpretation of a similar sim. It includes building and infrastructure elements in addition to markets and resources.

[0] http://store.steampowered.com/app/362620/

I love software inc but I kinda feel ashamed of getting back home and play a 'my life simulation'

I loved the first industry giant as well, best logistic and production game ever made.

Simairport is quite nice as well but beware, bugs.

There's a lot of games that would be interesting to build with this engine I think :) just building your office is a game in itself.

Indeed!

http://i.imgur.com/fUYLPFB.png http://i.imgur.com/WwUXZMd.png

There was an iOS game called Game Studio Tycoon that I played for a bit, but lost interest.

Love that game. There was a harder to find sequel by the same creator called Yoot Tower, it's pretty much the same game with a few additions.

You should also give Project Highrise a shot, very similar to Sim Tower and I have found it to be enjoyable.

Project Highrise looks fun, though mixed reviews about it being initially fun, but losing luster. 20 bucks. I'll give it a shot.

I loved SimCopter. I had so much fun playing it as a kid

Gosh yes. And SimIsle!

I'm a big fan of SimTower! But Windows 10 x64 doesn't have XP Mode, so I can't run SimTower easily. There goes my childhood...

People are still selling Windows XP machines around me secondhand for peanuts.

Now might be a good time to pick up a few on the cheap for preservation proposes.

As it doesn't use 3D acceleration it should work fine in a Windows XP VM.

Wine?

I liked SimTower, but it was very hard to lose. You could have unhappy people, but there was little impact to it. I recall it being described once as the most computationally-intensive screen saver available at the time.

SimTower FTW!

I was even briefly involved with one of the efforts to make a modern clone of it (in particular, I've partially reversed some of the file format in a text document... somewhere).

SimAnt was my favorite sim. Underrated, and quite unique.

Pizza tycoon was probably my favourite

Railroad Tycoon and SimCity had a huge influence on Factorio, the vast scope of which I can't begin to describe, but its trailer does it justice. [1]

About the game: Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories.

You will be mining resources, researching technologies, building infrastructure, automating production and fighting enemies. Use your imagination to design your factory, combine simple elements into ingenious structures, apply management skills to keep it working and finally protect it from the creatures who don't really like you.

[1] https://www.factorio.com/

"This game is like crack for programmers." -kentonv [2]

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11266471

It was crazy to see a Factorio tournament at PAX. I never would have expected that that game would lend itself to a tournament setting, but they did it!

From what I understood, everyone was loaded into identically seeded areas. No combat, basic research already completed, first to a certain late game tech (rocket?) won.

You know, that sounds amazing and I would totally enjoy watching that!

> Factorio

Is there a good* technological civilization bootstrapping handbook? (For a real person stranded on some random Earth-like planet.)

*intentionally ambiguous

Closest thing I can think of is this mostly silly poster: http://rebuildingcivilization.com/sites/default/files/travel...

Meh. How does knowing atomic theory while neglecting basic ore --> refined product chemistries useful?

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch by Lewis Dartnell http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114087-the-knowledge

The Gingery books will at least get you a working machine shop from scratch

I kept getting a "410 Gone" nginx error when trying to download the latest build's Linux demo. Had to keep refreshing to get the download to initialize - got it now but FYI, maybe it's something you need to check out.

Railroad Tycoon was amazing because as a kid I had access to higher quality, more timely metrics of my simulated company than many real life companies do.

To be fair, real life companies also aren't wholly contained in one computers RAM :)

That's only true if user [meta] data is a key asset or if one had one too many SAP-koolaids. In reality, most real life companies can be wholly contained in any $20 printer's memory.

Real life companies deal with ambiguous contracts, negotiations, networking, quality control, delayed payments, brand perception, employee satisfaction, trust, law and many other facets which are not easily simulated.

(Disclaimer: Developer on the project)

We recently release SimAirport via Steam's Early Access program. The game was initially riddled with bugs, probably released about 2+ weeks or so too early, but after >= daily patching over the last 2 weeks it's finally yielding pretty solid gameplay.

If you enjoyed the old Bullfrog games, the Roller Coaster Tycoon series, or Prison Architect in modern times (huge inspiration), then you'd probably SimAirport too.

We're in Early Access, so go easy on us! You'll still hit bugs for sure, but we [hopefully] don't have any major game stoppers at this point. There's no tutorial, some so experience with similar games is helpful, but we've got a lot of players with 20, 30, and way upwards of 40 hours in just the short <2 weeks since we initially released.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/598330

Have you considered listing it on GOG? I am more likely to buy games there than deal with Steam's clunky UI & DRM.

To be honest, we haven't considered it yet. We probably will eventually, but for right now -- releasing patches almost daily, and planning to release content/feature continuously for the next year or two -- staying on one ecosystem is just a lot easier.

It may change in the future (probably not) but we don't have any/special DRM right now -- we just deploy our vanilla EXE/.App game executable.

Just curious, but did you run the name past a lawyer before using it? Sim<Noun> strikes me as perhaps a little too close to the Maxis series.

Looks neat either way though. I've put it on my list of games to [p]review once I get back to writing stuff up (been on an extended break due to illness).

Oh yes, of course! Quite a while back, and certainly well prior to registering the trademark. Can't discuss it publicly beyond that, however. :)

£19 for a probably bug-ridden, no documentation or tutorials game, where I am largely acting as a bug-finder for the game seems excessively expensive.

We've been advising those who have expressed a similar sentiment that, if you're unsure, then just wait a bit.

If you think you'll be unhappy with it in it's current state, then you probably will be; unless you're really into tycoon games or aviation. If you're hesitant then yes, we'd suggest it best to wait a few weeks or months. Even if it means paying a slightly higher price later, you'll probably be happier with a more complete & bug free game for the slightly higher price at that point in time.

I, personally, don't mind paying to support indie devs who try to get their title off the ground.

Agreed, I have bought probably a dozen games in beta, but usually in the £5-15 range and more than likely, further in the release cycle. Usually the more raw the game, the cheaper the price - I would have expected a game like this that has been subject to recent, major bugs to be closer to the £5-10 level.

I will be keeping an eye on this one in any case.

Interesting story - love reading more of the stories behind some of the games I loved growing up, especially the people behind them.

Railroad Tycoon II is still one of my favorite games - the economic simulation side of it was a lot of fun, and you could sort of decide how much of it you wanted to bite off. I haven't really found anything quite like it since.

In some ways, it is kind of a shame - tablets/phones would make great platforms for economic sim games, but every single one I've tried has been disappointing for the same reason - the mechanism they use to funnel you into buying things makes the game really un-fun and repetitive very quickly. I wouldn't mind paying $10-$20 for a good economic sim that didn't act like this, but I guess not enough other people would.

Have you tried OpenTTD?

https://www.openttd.org/

With the right group of friends, OpenTTD is a great way to spend a day building a massive rail project.

The OpenTTD Coop Wiki[1] is also very very good when it comes to advanced designs, signalling etc.

[1]: https://wiki.openttdcoop.org/Main_Page

I haven't - will have to give it a shot.

Thanks for telling me about it.

Transport Tycoon (that this was based on) was also published by MicroPose. I don't know if Meier had any influence on the game though. Pretty interesting how much graphics improved in 3 years.

IIRC - Chris had been promoting the project that became TT for a while. He main work at the time was as a truly awesome 68k to PC porter. I remember a colleague telling me something along the lines of 'Chris should stick to doing ports, that is what he is good at. If he shows you some wierd thing with numbers and simulation, just ignore it'

Um.

I don't believe Meier had any influence in it. Chris Sawyer built the entire game by himself in assembly language.

Regarding the stories - check out GDC channel on youtube, they have a series of post-mortem talks about the most popular games.

Soren Johnson's Designer Notes podcast[1] mentioned in the article is excellent and I've learned quite a lot from the long interviews, especially Bruce Shelley's, Louis Castle's and Amy Hennig's. Currently he's releasing his interview with Sid Meier, which looks like it'll end up being 5-6 hours in length and is great so far. I really enjoy when in-depth discussions of niche topics give me ideas about other things and that's happened many times while listening to this show.

Those interested in the market/economic simulations in Railroad Tycoon might enjoy playing Soren's game, Offworld Trading Company[2]. I'll just mention that entire games rarely take more than 30 minutes, they are almost always interesting ones, and it is fun without triggering compulsive play (for me.)

[1] https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes

[2] http://www.offworldgame.com

My favourite Sid's game of all time is still the original Colonization. So much depth, replayability, and overall fun. To me it's always been superior to Civ because it's a clear road to independence.

Credit where it's due: while the original Colonization (which I agree was brilliant) was sold under the "Sid Meier's" label, its lead designer was actually a colleague of Meier who would go on to become a celebrated designer in his own right, Brian Reynolds (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reynolds_(game_designe...).

Brian Reynolds doesn't seem to quite get the credit for the impact he had on the PC gaming scene. He was the lead designer of Civ 2 (in my opinion, the best one), created Alpha Centauri, and later made Rise of Nations. I wish he stuck to deep, strategic computer games instead of working for Zynga after he left Big Huge Games (Mark Pincus was such a big fan of Rise of Nations he hired Reynolds as Chief Game Designer).

Really love the guy's work, he has a lot of credits. What really saddens me is that Rise of Nations had such a bad follow-up that they never continued the series. RTS games always seem to have a tough time it seems, but I'm really loving that turn-based strategy games have made a huge comeback in recent years.

I was playing Civ IV: Colonization just today (through Wine). It is not the same, but better than nothing.

You can get the original (running in dosbox) from gog.com for a couple of bucks. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I preferred the original too.

There is also freecol

http://www.freecol.org/screenshots.html

You can run it in an emulator in-browser from Archive.org for free: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Sid_Meiers_Colonization_19...

Although it's a 300MB download, so I haven't tried. Not all of their emulations work perfectly.

By the way, filfre is probably the highest quality VG and possibly computer history writer I've read. His archives are gold. He mostly focuses on interactive storytelling, but that was most of gaming in the early days of computing, so his histories amount to histories of computing.

Could you recommend some specific articles of theirs worth reading?

Yes!

Though it's not his domain and is a one-off like Railroad Tycoon, I love the article on Sim City: http://www.filfre.net/2016/06/simcity-part-1-will-wrights-ci...

The history of the TRS-80, whose place in PC history I did not appreciate before reading: http://www.filfre.net/2011/06/the-trash-80-part-1/

There are many more interesting articles he lists on his own best-of list: http://www.filfre.net/hall-of-fame/

If your into Retro gaming, I highly recommend reading it as he has written it http://www.filfre.net/sitemap.

His writing his amazing and I'm always interested in how pieces of gaming history fit together.

Another way to read it, is as I have come across a theme I'm interested in I just follow that tag for a while e.g. http://www.filfre.net/tag/sierra

All in all, this blog is amazing and well worth supporting IMHO.

He also wrote "The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga", part of the MIT Press "Platform Studies" series. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here

If you're looking to learn the basics of the stock market, play Railroad Tycoon 2 -- I can't speak for the original (didn't play it), but the sequel at least can teach you quite a bit.

The stock market aspects of the Railroad Tycoon franchise were what set it apart from all the other "Tycoon" games to follow. It allowed you to play the game on a variety of different levels. You could just focus on building a railroad network. You could focus on building a successful business. Or my person favorite, you could focus on building a personal fortune without any regard for the other two objectives. I spent many an hour as a kid trying to build a fortune be strategically destroying my virtual businesses.

It's a great illustration of why insider trading can be so damaging. There were so many ways to be extremely destructive overall, but which you could turn into huge amounts of money for yourself by trading your own stock appropriately.

Can you give an example? Would you do something like, short your stock and then tank your business?

Exactly like that. And you could usually arrange it so the tanking was temporary, so you could then cover your short, buy a bunch of extra stock, and then bring the business back to life. For example, you could stop all your trains for a while, let the lack of revenue cause massive losses, then once your stock price was sufficiently low, restart the trains and resume business.

Oh, absolutely! In some scenarios you could enrich yourself by driving the business into the ground and manipulating the stock, and then let one of your hapless competitors merge with the failing railroad while you founded a new one.

Railroad Tycoon 2 had an interesting story by itself: It was originally not named Railroad Tycoon at all, as it was built by a very different company, PopTop Software, based in a St Louis suburb. Close to release they managed to get the license, and IMO the name recognition really helped a very good game.

The same team moved on to make Tropico and Railroad Tycoon 3, both of which made plenty of money. They didn't do quite so well after that, and what was left of the studio was relocated and eaten by Firaxis.

Good game :) I played this about a year ago. Brought back good memories. I remember thinking sod it and laid a track straight across the map. The huge risk paid off. I love these types of games.

Capitalism II is also an interesting one with a stock market component.

Soundtrack in RR Tycoon II and 3 was also amazing. I still have it in my go-to playlist.

I'm astounded by the amount of content on this site: http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/

If your into retro gaming or even just gaming history its well worth investing time in it. He's done an amazing job and I find myself looking at the blog notes for magazines and articles to do further reading on.

it's great, and lovingly being recreated: http://www.openttd.org/

Having played both Railroad Tycoon II and OpenTTD, I must say that I prefer RT2 immensely more. (I've not played the original, so I can't comment on its quality).

Some of the advantages of RT2:

- Less tedious micromanagement without need for signals (although it does mean there's no way to build a 4-track mainline in RT2 that works like you can in OpenTTD).

- The stock market and competitive play is more fun. I never found the AI of OpenTTD fun, except when I was bored and wanted to watch their cars get plowed by my trains.

- The economic aspects of RT2 were more enjoyable. You can buy industries, for example. It's also laid out more clearly how the economy works (you can turn off these features to make the game easier, but it's much less fun). There's also lots more type of cargo (ship iron and coal to a steel mill to make steel, rubber to a tire factory for tires, the steel and the tires to an auto plant to make cars which go to the cities).

- Also, all the locomotives! Just so much more in depth.

^ You can install GRF sets for OpenTTD that have even more locomotives than railroad tycoon. NARS or UKRS2 have extremely expansive sets of trains compared to the small selections of bland name trains the base game comes with. Also NUTS has a set optimised for gameplay over realism, if you want to go the other direction.

The AI is poor, but OpenTTD is online multiplayer, so you can play against real people instead.

There are a lot of custom patches adding more types of cargo, more vehicles, and more intricate economic routes.

But I haven't played RT2, so that might not be enough to make any difference to you.

That is a recreation of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, a different game than Railroad Tycoon.

It's a different game than RT, but if you play OpenTTD there's a community on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/openttd/ with a couple of dedicated servers.

Server 1 is a vanilla multiplayer, games last ~2 real days.

Server 2 is a custom client with a lot of community patches, games last ~5 real days (IIRC):

- https://www.reddit.com/r/openttd/wiki/server2#wiki_joining_i...

It has transport load overlays, a city building challenge mode, way more types of transport and types of trains, much lower margins on routes meaning compound routes are more necessary, easier UI tools for laying and routing track, heaps more trains and buildings.

And the in-game chat from both servers merges with their IRC channel.

Different game but quite similar and very good! There is also a commercial remake of transport tycoon for mobile :)

If you're a fan of Chris Sawyer's games, Roller Coaster Tycoon is also getting a remake via OpenRCT2: https://openrct2.org/

And "Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic" was just released by Atari to iOS and Android, which is a port of the original games modified for touch. (It's a fantastic port, btw, I highly recommend it.)

The original RCT becomes even more impressive when you find out Sawyer coded the vast majority of it in assembly language: http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm

> The game was written and compiled using MS Macro Assembler V6.11c, MS Visual C V5, MS DirectX 5 SDK, plus assorted custom-written tools... It's 99% written in x86 assembler/machine code (yes, really!), with a small amount of C code used to interface to MS Windows and DirectX.

One thing I worry about wrt OpenRCT2 is that after a quick browse through the history it looks heavily based on a disassembly of the original exe, which was then manually deobfuscated to standard C. I'm worried if Sawyer et al. would send it a ceasw and desist.

Yes, RCT was my first Chris Sawyer game :)

Omg, I will. I was thinking when posting the above "they should remake RCT for mobile". Perhaps a perfect moment for nostalgia as my daughter turns 3 tomorrow and we can build a theme park together :) thank you!

What is the name of it? There seem to be several apps using the name so I can't tell which one you are referring to.

Here's a link: http://www.transporttycoon.com

Did anyone else play A-Train (looks like it was actually A-train III)? I loved it but have never found anyone else who has even heard of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-Train

Just logged in to comment on this game which brings back so many memories: transporting materials and passengers, crafting a complex network of railroad while also purchasing long term investments like apartments etc. And it required you to be patient, but when that first road appears it's like magic!! :)

Loved that game, probably didn't understand everything as a teen playing this, but i loved it so much. Interestingly I never met anyone else who played that game! :)

Cheers!

Ah, that first road! I had forgotten all about that feeling :-)! I can still vividly remember the tick-tick-ti-ti-ti-tick-tiiick noise of the trains.

I was probably a bit too young to understand all the complexities but have such happy memories of it too. Happy that you had the same experience :-)!

I loved A-Train, it was a great alternative to SimCity and Settlers (two other of my favorites in the early 90s not to mention Civ)

I do seem to remember that it was relatively easy to make a killing in the stock market/real estate development on A-Train to finance the railroads.

I loved Atrain too. Years later I would discover that many sequels to it were made, although some came out in Japanese (http://www.artdink.co.jp/company/english/history.html).

Thanks to Steam, A-Train 9 came out circa 2010 in English quite recently (http://store.steampowered.com/app/278550/)

Yep, played it! Although I preferred Railroad Tycoon, and when Transport Tycoon finally came out, I was totally hooked to it and quickly abandoned everything else.

If there was ever a game that encouraged me to become a developer during my youth it was definitely Railroad Tycoon. I remember being so curious how everything might have worked within the game with out knowing a thing about programming and it was definitely an inspiration to me in so many aspects. Games were my avenue for learning DOS and later my learning to write Software. I can't imagine what my life would have been like with out so many great early game developers.

We build planning and scheduling software for railroads and I continually think back to playing this game as a kid. The concerns are unsurprisingly similar but the level of detail you go to in managing a real railroad is obviously far greater.

For example we delivered a piece of software to manage where to park trains during storms so they don't blow over.

http://biarrirail.com/ btw.

I hope you are using Ruby on Rails for your backend.

Unfortunately not!

A really sweet one is Transport Fever. It is however more like of an electronic model railway and less of a game - there is no competition, scenarios (pretty much a tutorial actually) are very straight forward and it is difficult to go under. However, the beautiful part is modelling the transport network and the detail of it, however I was mostly fascinated by the city growth and development.

A great board game with a train theme is Steam, it's available for iOS and Android and next week for OSX, Windows and Linux as well. The good thing is that you can play it as a boardgame as we, competing with others face to face as to who can lay the tracks and transport goods most efficiently. http://store.steampowered.com/app/595930/

Is it longer or shorter then a quick game of 1830?

Shorter, as it doesn't include a stock market, but 1830 (msdos) is a good one as well (you probably know the java 18xx). For other train board games with a pc adaptation, see Eurorails (crayon type) and Wabash Canonball (aka Chicago Express). There's also American Rails (which imo is better) which I'd wish there was an AI implementation for. http://www.railgamefans.com/ebp/ https://www.engadget.com/2010/10/07/app-review-wabash-cannon...

If you find this interesting, the interview with him at idlethumbs is really good: https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/sid-meier-... (looks like its one of the sources for this post). I think the portion related to railroad tycoon is in the second part but its worth listening to all of it.

All this love of microprose games and no mention of Silent Service? This was the first "choose your own path" kind of game I ever really got into.

Oh, Railroad Tycoon! The first game that really hooked me. I still remember the feeling of utter betrayal when I first tried cutthroat competition and lost a station in a rate war. Then the absolute glee of stealing a valuable station from another line on my next play through. I could go on for hours, but instead I'm going to fire up DosBox now.

Absolutely love this game. I found a dosbox image that runs on mac, and still guiltily play it on occasion. :)

Building railways is kind of like visual programming.

The Railway orientated programming comes to mind http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/recipe-part2/

For anyone interested in a minimalist track laying game, I've had a lot of fun with Mini Metro. It's available on both iOS and Android.

The goal is to transport as many passengers as possible, so it has a little competitiveness in it.

I don't what version I had, but this game was my introduction to Jazz.

Are you sure you are not thinking about Transport Tycoon?

Erm - why yes, that is exactly what I am talking about. :|

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW5MP4DFcYg

Amusingly, I was going to comment that RT2 worked as my personal introduction to the blues – I remember my dad walking by and commenting on just how good the soundtrack was.

Someone please please please make a modern refresh of transport tycoon. I still love that game but would love to see it brought up to date in the style of cities in motion and with more depth added.

OpenTTD is basically Transport Tycoon, with added support for plugins/mods etc. Its actively maintained with a good community following.

Not quite a modern refresh, but theres enough new stuff to keep you going if you haven't played it yet.

My early 20s were heavily Microprose. Silent Service, Red Storm Rising, various flight sims, and Railroad Tycoon consumed huge blocks of time. This article was a great look back.

I don't know if it is just the MIDI, but the intro tune reminds me of the intro music to M.U.L.E., one of my favorite games of all time!

Très Grande Vitesse

Additionally to RT2, I have found memories of Industry Giant 2. Does anyone remember this 2002 game?

What are Bruce Shelley (RT, Age of Empire), Rick Goodman (Age of Empire, Empire Earth), Chris Sawyer (Transport Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon, etc) and Geoff Crammond (Sentinel, Grand Prix 1-4) doing lately?

Bruce Shelley was working for BonusXP on The Incorruptibles until it released in December 2015 [1]

Rick Goodman's last game was in 2006 (though apparently he was prototyping one in 2012 [5]), and the only thing I can obviously find is that he was on the board of (and co-founded?) 8D World, a virtual world for Chinese children to learn English, but their site doesn't load. [2][4]

Chris Sawyer appears to have been working to port RCT to mobile (came out December 2016) [3]

Geoff Crammond hasn't apparently been associated with a game since 2010. [6]

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3w9vkr/i_am_bruce_she...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Goodman

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Sawyer

[4] - http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?...

[5] - http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/what-is-ric...

[6] - http://www.virtualr.net/catching-geoff-crammond-interview

> Additionally to RT2, I have found memories of Industry Giant 2. Does anyone remember this 2002 game?

Apparently someone did - it was ported to PS4 and Xbox One last year.

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