Lookin’ Back #26 – Transport Tycoon
After a short break, Lookin’ Back has returned.
Brutal Gamer once again trawls the oceans of gaming’s past to fish up some great gems. This time, a look back at a classic business simulation game from days gone by, Transport Tycoon.
The original version of Transport Tycoon was released back in 1994 and was developed by a man named Chris Sawyer and published by MicroProse. As the name may suggest, you are in charge of your own transport company, and you have to ferry passengers and cargo from place to place, trying to make money and trying to outperform your competitors.
The game features four types of transport, these being road, rail, sea and air. You start the game in 1930 and have to build transport routes. As the years advance, faster and higher capacity vehicles are made available to you to enable you to transport more goods faster.
Local government also plays a part in the finance of the game. Each town’s local authority has a reputation level for each transport company. If you have a good enough service reputation with a town, they will allow you to knock down buildings in order to build stations and roads. In addition, they will offer subsidies to a company for being the first to transport a certain good to their town.
As well as more advanced vehicles, certain towns will grow in size depending on the economic conditions, and the towns will demand goods they never previously demanded. Also, new industries will appear giving you more supplies of resources and goods to transport around the world.
There was only one main type of landscape to build one, with randomly generated maps. The following year, Transport Tycoon Deluxe was released. This version was largely unchanged gameplay wise. There was just a change to the signalling on the trains. There were also 3 other environments added to the standard one from the original game, these being arctic, tropical and Toy Town, each one having different resource types and other changed to conditions.
I lost many hours playing these games, as well as playing their spiritual successor Locomotion, which had improved graphics and ditched the free flow of the previous game in place of a bunch of scenarios with differing difficulty levels, in the same vein as Rollercoaster Tycoon. It’s a shame that this game wasn’t as well received, though.
The original games are so fondly remembered that a team has been developing an open source clone of them known as Open Transport Tycoon. If you love a good thinking game and your PC has the capability to run DOS, you should check these games out. If not, get Locomotion instead.
0 votes
Related posts:
- Lookin’ Back #22 – SimCity Build a city and choke it with smog. Good times....
- Lookin’ Back #18 – Sony PlayStation The machine that started it all for Sony’s gaming empire....
