Railroad Tycoon

Let’s talk about Sid Meier’s truly great game. Not Civilization, because everyone knows about Civilization. No, for older gamers, the name that springs to mind is Railroad Tycoon.

Railroad Tycoon is a sandbox game in which you take the role of an entrepreneur in the 19th century. You try to build a thriving railroad company, and hopefully get rich while doing so. The game shows many of Meier’s trademarks as a simple game set in a game world that feels nearly limitless.

To promote their recent game, Sid Meier’s Railroads, Activision is now distributing Railroad Tycoon Deluxe on the Internet, for free. They’ve even bundled it with DOSBox, so you can run it on your modern Windows or Mac machine.
I find I can spend hours just surveying the game map of Railroad Tycoon. You select one of several maps (Eastern US, Western US, or the entire US, England, Continental Europe, South America, or South Africa) and one of several eras. Era selection determines the level of industrialization, population density, and the types of locomotives available. The land of Railroad Tycoon – if you choose to play with the “complex economy” – is a land of supply and demand. Natural resources are spread across the randomly-generated map. Processing and manufacturing facilities tend to cluster around towns and cities.

There are three basic steps in running a railroad: build stations, schedule trains, and decide what those trains should haul. There’s a fourth, optional task, which is investing in the stock market.

Some stations can convert the goods you haul into other goods. For example, if you send a train with a wood hopper into a station near a paper mill, not only do you get paid for hauling the wood, but you also receive a load of paper that can be hauled elsewhere. The Holy Grail of Railroad Tycoon is running one train that makes a huge profit along each leg. Pick up coal in Johnstown, deliver it to a steel mill in Pittsburgh, take the steel to Erie, and then deliver manufactured goods back to Johnstown. Since “raw” resources such as coal are often out in the middle of nowhere, such routes can be tricky to set up.

Periodically, the opportunity arises to deliver a “priority consist,” a special train with single mission. The faster you deliver the goods, the higher your pay. These missions don’t really change the pastoral nature and relaxed pace of the game. At least, not for me; most of my games are spent simply watching the trains roll on.

While the core game mechanics have aged well, the UI has not. Players may be aghast at how primitive DOS mouse-based games were in 1993. If you can see past this, however, you’ll enjoy a title that defined the modern strategy game.