A Complete History of Transport Tycoon

Having created his own games for 8 bit computer systems in the 1980s, Chris began work porting Amiga games to the PC in 1988. One of the last of these was David Braben's Frontier - the first sequel of Elite, released a year before Transport Tycoon in 1993.

Factoid: advertising hoardings in Frontier's space ports announced "Coming soon... Chris Sawyer's Transport Game"!

A year after the release of Transport Tycoon, an add-on pack was launched which added a World Editor and a graphics pack allowing you to build transport networks on Mars. In the same year Chris Sawyer released Transport Tycoon Deluxe which featured three new graphics packs and many improvements over the original game. This game was ported to Windows 95 by Joe Booth of Fish(UK).

Following the release of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, Sawyer began work on a true sequel but quickly became interested in rollercoasters - a distraction which led to him reworking the Transport Tycoon 2 code to run rollercoasters instead of trains. It would be nearly a decade before he returned to the transport genre.

Ken Taylor wrote about his experience trying to establish the true owner of Transport Tycoon in the October 2005 issue of Virtual Railroader. He set about this with the intention of selling legal copies of the Windows version of the game for download.

He found that the original publisher, Microprose, has changed hands several times eventually ending up in the hands of Atari. However, the Microprose software library at some point became the property of Firaxis. When he contacted Firaxis he was informed they had a complete list of the games they owned the rights to and Transport Tycoon was not among them. Chris Sawyer has stated that he does not own Transport Tycoon. Finally, Ken contacted an Atari executive in charge of older games who stated that he did not know which old games they owned and that he felt it not worth his time to find out.

Ken's conclusion: Transport Tycoon is "about as close to abandonware as you could hope to find".

Game Design and Development
Chris Sawyer

UK Publisher - DOS
Microprose (Taken over by Hasbro, then by Infogrammes and finally by Atari)

UK Publisher - Sony Playstation Port
Ocean Software (Taken over by Infogrammes UK which also owns Atari)

Japan Publisher - Mac Port
Itochu

Japan Publiser - Sega Saturn Port
Imagineer

Japan Publiser - Sony Playstation Port
Itochu

High Score - 5/5
Coming Soon Magazine - 94/100
PC Games (Germany) - 86/100
Privat Computer PC - 4/5

[To be added: List of chart positions, sales figures if available and comments on fan projects.]

In 2005 Chris Sawyer started court proceedings against Atari claiming they had wrongfully withheld 4.8 million dollars of royalties. Details released revealed that he had been paid 30 million dollars in royalties for the Transport Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon series'. The case was settled out of court in early 2008.

After Transport Tycoon Deluxe It would be nearly a decade before Chris Sawyer made a return to the transport game genre. This opened the way for a whole series of moderately successful games like Industry Giant, Traffic Giant and Transport Giant - all from Jowood.

A german developer programmed a 3d version called 3DTT - this was released by Ubisoft as Trains & Trucks Tycoon in what seemed an incomplete state. There has since been a court battle between the developer and publisher which appears to be ongoing.

In 1997 another german developer began work on a free transport game called Simutrans. He retired from the project and handed it over for continued development to an internation team of volunteers.

Josef Drexler began work on a program called TTD Patch, which modifies the code of Transport Tycoon Deluxe as it runs, in 1999. The program was intended to correct bugs in the game but soon new features were added including making the game compatible with modern versions of Windows and the introduction of a facility to create and use new graphics, vehicles and industries.

In 2004 Transport Tycoon Deluxe was reverse engineered, creating new code in the C language from programs's executable file. This code was used to create OpenTTD - an open source clone of Transport Tycoon. The game is distributed without graphics or sound files so players must get hold of the Windows 95 game (a used version, or from a download site) before they can play. As with TTD Patch, there are many new features added as well as bugs fixed. The game now allows for up to eight players to play competitively, cooperatively, over the internet. There is now a major effort to create new graphics and sounds files so the game can be released in a ready-to-play form using no copyrighted files. An important aspect of the open source status of OpenTTD is that it can be, and has been, ported to virtually any computing platform. Versions are now available not only for Windows, Linux and OSX, but also for Pocket PC devices, Symbian powered mobile phones and the Sony PSP(modification of the hardware may be necessary).

It was in 2004 that Chris Sawyer released his own "spiritual successor" to Transport Tycoon - Chris Sawyer's Locomotion. The game world was still displayed in a 2d isometric style but with richer graphics and more animation. The game was widely criticised for having poor artificial intelligence and showing too little improvement since Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

Atari's support for this game wasn't what it might have been either. They were slow about updating the game to correct problems and made it clear they did not welcome modifications by the community.