Game:

OpenTTD (2004)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 1:05:06

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After the collapse of Microprose in 1998, diehard fans of Railroad Tycoon and Transport Tycoon were left without their favorite games being supported. This posed a particular problem for Transport Tycoon fans, as they had, in many cases, spent the previous three years building add-ons and scenarios. I was an avid Railroad Tycoon 2 add-on developer myself.


Given the growing popularity of open source software, a number of developers tried to keep Transport Tycoon alive by building open source clones of it. The first of these was Simutrans, developed originally by Hansjörg Malthaner in 1999, and ultimately a far more sophisticated game than Transport Tycoon that (I would argue) must have inspired Transport Fever, with its simulation of individual passengers and their habits. Simutrans, however, remains today a niche, cult, game, whereas Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, or OpenTTD, is by far the more popular of the Transport Tycoon clones. Developed by Ludvig Strigeus in 2004, and programmed in C (surprisingly, the original Transport Tycoon was supposedly programmed in assembly), OpenTTD much more closely resembles Transport Tycoon and Transport Tycoon Deluxe than anything that has followed, including Chris Sawyer's Locomotion and the new Transport Tycoon for Android. However, it is packed full of features that no "official" Transport Tycoon variant has ever supported, such as powerlines (for profit as well as powering trains), telecommunications lines (also for the player's profit), canals and locks, maglev lines, and sponsored industries. I'm barely scratching the surface here, and I'll get into more detail in the video.


When I did this playthrough, I was running the very latest development release of OpenTTD, version 1.11.0-RC1, released on March 14th, 2021, and ended up playing the game for 45 minutes. As you'll see, I ran into a few glitches along the way, but still I would consider this game to be well supported by the standards of open source software built by hobbyists. It is possible to run OpenTTD on almost any popular platform, and I had originally planned to do this playthrough on some version of Linux, but ended up being lazy and running the Windows 10 version. Maybe I'll do a Linux playthrough in the future, and maybe not, but if you want to try it in Linux, Android, or Mac OS X, it's easy to find versions for these operating systems and several others.


In any case, I hope you find this latest playthrough interesting. If possible, I'm also going to attempt a playthrough of Simutrans, but I haven't decided when yet.

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