The Legacy of Transport Tycoon
gaming·@sebi99p·
0.000 HBDThe Legacy of Transport Tycoon
<center>[](http://www.appynation.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/tt_banner.jpg) </br><strong>Transport Tycoon</strong> is a 2D management game developed by <strong>Chris Sawyer</strong> and published by <strong>MicroProse</strong> way back in 1994 for PC, with an expanded version called <strong>Transport Tycoon Deluxe</strong> released in 1995. Nowadays, there are also an <strong>Android</strong> and </strong>iOS</strong> versions. <h1>The Original</h1></center> The original game was created in the <strong>x86 Assembly</strong> programming language, a very low level one that only feature very basic commands, that one wonders how he achieved such complexity with the bare minimum of tools available. On top of the difficulty of the language chosen for the project, only one person worked on the every mechanic the game employed. The only Chris Sawyer had was for the 2D graphics, that were provided by <strong>Simon Foster</strong>, and the music that is comprised mostly of MIDI renditions of original compositions by <strong>John Broomhall</strong> and it consists mostly blues and jazz. He also provided musical scores to another favourite game of mine, the original XCOM. In Transport Tycoon, players assume control of the CEO of a transport company, odd huh? They initially start off with a loan in order to get started on building infrastructure, buying a vehicles and building a headquarters and stations. In the beginning only trucks, trains, and tankers are available, as the game starts off in 1930. But as time goes by, new technology is introduced, and steam trains are replaced by diesel or electric engines and ferries being replaced by hovercraft, planes are introduced, and towards the end of the campaign, in 2030, monorail and maglev trains are invented, along with high tech trucks and buses and supersonic aircraft. The goal is to ferry cargo from businesses that produce raw materials, such as coal mines, farms or forests, to factories that process them into goods, such as steel factories, power plants or sawmills, to the people that that eventually consume or use these products in the cities dotted across the map. Players could also choose to connect these cities by road or rail and transport passengers and mail between them, or, of course use a combination of the transport options to create a composite line such as using truck to move logs to the sawmill, and use a train to carry the planks to different cities that required them. Bellow you have the industries and the chains they made for the players to transport in order to gain profit: <center>[](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9d/OpenTTD_industry-commodity_flow_chart_-_Temperate.svg/512px-OpenTTD_industry-commodity_flow_chart_-_Temperate.svg.png)</center> In order to transport these goods, one would have to build the infrastructure, or use the already existing one put in place by the cities or by rival companies. To do this, the player could lay down roads, rail, construct ports, airports and helipads(later in the game). Adjacent to these transport lines, depots would have to be constructed, where the relevant vehicles would be built. Once they were out into the world, every one of them would need to be assigned a route, each station having been specified and connected to said depot. The profit would depend on the distance between stations, price per unit, price fall-off (some goods would degrade faster than others thus reducing profit), and the efficiency rating the company had to the cities those stations belonged to. Each city assigned each company operating in their administrative area a rating that they could influence by completing "quests", subsidies offered by the cities for a specific transport route for a specific type of goods. Additionally, the effectiveness at which the companies operated would influence this, on top of marketing campaigns or infrastructure modernisation done by companies in those cities to appease the local authorities. If this rating would go too low, say after deforesting too much of the are or demolishing too many homes, any building activity would be prohibited. In order to keep track of all the vehicles and city relationships, there were multiple tools to help the player. With them you would be able to keep track of any asset you had at your disposal or your finances. And you'd need to, as the loans you made at the start, or any subsequent ones, would gather interest, or the vehicles you'd bought would degrade over time, clogging up the routs, or worse, would cause fatal accidents that would decrease the rating you'd worked hard on raising. <center><h1>Expansions and rereleases</h1> [](http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/64050-transport-tycoon-deluxe-windows-screenshot-main-menu.png)</center> After the launch of the original, a map editor had been released for the game. However, it did not stay in the spotlight for long, as in 1995 <strong>Transport Tycoon Deluxe</strong> launched, that included it, though not quite like the original, as a martian theme was no longer available. But while the new version removed the sci fie theme, it made sure to add plenty of content, among them three new themes, two of them still realistic and another toy version. These came with their own set of challenges the player would need to overcome. For example, in the arctic, towns would need a steady supply of food in order to grow, while the tropical towns also needed water. As you might have noticed, these goods to not exist on the standard temperate theme, as the new ones came with their own industry chains. One massive improvement to the game was the addition of new signals to control traffic, both on rail or road. This allowed for the creation of one way lines, and junctions could be more closely controlled to achieve a better efficiency. Another major change was the time period the game was set in. Instead of ranging from 1930 to 2030, now players would face challenges up to 2050, but started in 1950 to avoid the slow start and have access to both steam and diesel locomotives right out the bat. Unfortunately, licencing could not be acquired, thus all the vehicles in the game now have fictional names, but since every item in the game can be renamed, players could change them to their real life counterparts if they wished. This is the game I'd waste plenty of nights as a child. I have no idea how many hours I dumped into it, but I regret none. They were pure joy. Finding the best routes, while still satisfying quests towns would give you, while battling rival companies for land and exclusivity rights was a blast. At some point I even made my own maps, once trying to recreate my country, Romania, as accurately as I could, along with the industries placed where they actually are in real life. Needless to say I am no cartographer, so the maps weren't that good, but alas, I had fun trying to make sense of the mess of a map I had created. I remember quite vividly, making my way in MS-DOS, as it did not run on modern systems, to play this whenever I had the chance. Most of my friends would be playing CounterStrike or The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Warcraft III or Hitman 2, but I just couldn't get enough of managing a virtual business. Not to say I didn't enjoy those games as well, just that they never truly captured my imagination as much as Transport Tycoon Deluxe. <center>[](https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/yogscast/images/b/b5/OpenTTD.jpeg/revision/latest?cb=20160705064458)</center> Apparently I wasn't the only one. Since there were no official sequels to the game, as Chris Sawyer moved on to other projects, such as the immensely successful <strong>RollerCoaster Tycoon</strong> series, people across the world began creating their own adaptation of the game for modern systems in the form of <strong>Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe</strong>(OTTD). Thus, in 2003, <strong>Ludvig Strigeus</strong> announced an attempt to port the original game do the </strong>C</strong> programming language in order to reverse engineer it. This was accomplished by 2004 and OTTD was released to the public. It was an open free game, however it was still using copyrighted material from the original game, thus players would need that in order to play. But by 2007, a large community had gathered around the project and started creating new graphics and music to replace the original sprites. And in three short years, they had achieved just that, with the launch of OTTD v1.0.0 in 2010. But of course work was not over with just creating a stand alone game with an added multiplayer mode, so the team began improving the formula to better reflect the vision of an generalist transport management game. Thus in 2011, Mac support was added along with improved loading times with version 1.1.x. By next year, for v1.2.0 the game had fully 32bit graphics along with 2x and 4x zoom levels. This update also introduces a random map generator, scripts for modders to use in order to create scenarios, and added various tweaks to airports and added maintenance costs for built infrastructure. It also added the ability to communicate with external websites. Probably to facilitate hardcore fans to create workstations like the one below. <center>[](http://ocs-pl.oktawave.com/v1/AUTH_2887234e-384a-4873-8bc5-405211db13a2/spidersweb/2012/05/Openttd_transport_tycoon-terabass.jpg)</center> Version 1.3.0 brought about some spring cleaning. Unsupported function calls and file types had been removed from the code, along with heavy UI optimisation. The last major update would be 1.4.0 where the map size increased to a whopping 4096 by 4096 squares, and the ability to ad 64000 object types with 16 million instances. Later versions would include optimisations, support for more obscure operating systems and UI improvements along with various tweaks. The game is still heavily updated and as of the time of writing this post, it is up to version 1.7.1 RC1 (release candidate 1). This open version of the game, adapted to run on pretty much any system one would wish, is the pinnacle of its development, having added new graphics and sounds, expanded vehicles and infrastructure, multiplayer support of up to 255 players controlling 15 companies, along with even more mod support. Thus players can create private servers with their own rule set and objectives, and add whatever vehicles, industries and cargo they wish in order to compete and/or cooperate. In 2013, an official Android and iOS version of TTD had released under Chris Sawyer's new company, <strong>31X Ltd</strong>. He originally was just overseeing funding, but eventually ended up helping with debugging and oversaw the design team. This version of the game also uses UI assets and graphics from a previous game he had developed, <strong>Chris Sawyer's Locomotion</strong>, which was released in September 2004 and was intended as a spiritual successor to Transport Tycoon. This game had received poor reviews and didn't sell well, but nonetheless, there is an active community modding this game as well. <center><h1>Conclusions</h1> [](http://cdn04.androidauthority.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/transport-tycoon-logo.jpg)</center> In its day, <strong>Transport Tycoon</strong>, and especially its successor, <strong>Transport Tycoon Deluxe</strong>, definitely made a mark on the gaming industry. It can be argued that it, along with the first <em>Railroad Tycoon</em> and <em>SimCity 2000</em> popularised the management simulation genre. This let to a whole slew of games attempting to catch on the glory, or recreate it. Among them are of course these respective series sequels, <em>Industry Giant</em>, </em>Sid Meyer's Railroads</em>, <em>Zoo Tycoon</em> and maybe even, on a more personal level, <em>The Sims</em>. In the late 2000s though, this genre fell from grace though, probably due to the rise of console gaming, where such games are almost impossible to play properly, or maybe there were just too many clones. In any case, up until recently, it was basically dead, but now it is seeing a resurgence, with the launch of a game in the same vein as the <em>good old games</em>, by the name of <em>Parkitect</em>, which has a 3D rival in <em>Planet Coaster</em>, along with excellent city builder <em>Cities: Skylines</em> and all its add-ons. I certainly hope all the best for this genre, as it is possibly my favourite, meanwhile I will enjoy these new gems, along with the old (or maybe the revisited and improved open version of it). <center><h2>What are your thoughts? Have you played any iteration of the game? If so, what are your experiences with it/them? Share them, along with your feedback below, it is greatly appreciated!</h2> <h1>Thank you for reading, and keep on steemin'!</h1> (clicking on any image will take you to its source)</center>