Transport Tycoon | Code Like It's 198x

Transport Tycoon hands the player an empty, randomly generated country in 1930 and a hundred years in which to connect it. Coal goes by rail to the power station, passengers by bus into town, oil by ship and mail by air, and every route has to pay for itself. Its landscape was unusually alive for 1994: towns grew when they were served well, industries opened and closed, trees grew back, and the aircraft got faster as the decades passed. Chris Sawyer wrote all of the program himself, in x86 assembly language. Thirty years later a free re-creation of it, OpenTTD, is still being developed.

Fast facts

Designer and programmer: Chris Sawyer.
Graphics: Simon Foster. Music: John Broomhall.
Publisher: MicroProse.
Released: November 1994 for MS-DOS, at £45 in Britain; Computer Gaming World listed it at $47.95 in America.
Needed: 4MB of RAM and SVGA graphics, on floppy disks or CD-ROM, according to Computer Gaming World, which found that a fast 486 or a Pentium ran it best.
Programming: x86 assembly language, written with Microsoft’s Macro Assembler.
Later versions: the World Editor add-on (1995), Transport Tycoon Deluxe (end of 1995), and versions for the Macintosh, the PlayStation and, in Japan, the Sega Saturn.
Re-creation: OpenTTD (2004 onwards), free software under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

Playing it

The game starts in 1930 and runs, in Computer Gaming World’s words, “over the course of a full century (from 1930 to 2030)”. The player lays track and roads, builds stations, docks and airports, and buys trains, lorries, buses, ships and aircraft. Up to seven computer-controlled companies compete for the same towns and industries.

Money comes from chains of supply. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer, Robert L. Hayes, Jr., described wood carried by rail “from a forest preserve to a sawmill”, where it becomes goods that “might then be trucked to a small port and loaded onto an ocean liner” for a distant city “with an insatiable demand for toilet paper, notebooks and newsprint”. Cargo pays more the further it travels but less the longer it takes, and each kind of cargo loses value at its own rate. Industries fed with raw materials boom; neglected ones produce “only a pittance”. Coal mines close, leaving expensive railways with nothing to carry. Towns rate each company on its service, and a town that has been ignored can refuse it permission to build.

Edge was taken with the detail. “Flatten some land and the grass grows back after a while. Plant some trees and they grow over the years. Vehicles get rickety and depreciate.” Even the style of new buildings “reflects the architecture of the age”. The sound, Hayes wrote, changed with the zoom level, so that at close range lorries sounded “like they are in the same room”, and he played for over 100 hours without wanting to turn off the music.

The music is by John Broomhall, MicroProse’s in-house composer, who wrote what Sawyer remembered as “20-something original pieces of jazz”; Hayes counted “over 20 jazz and R&B tunes with transport themes”. Simon Foster drew the graphics in Deluxe Paint on an Amiga, and many of the buildings are real ones. One of them is the Livingstone Tower in Glasgow, where Sawyer studied, and a small house in the game is the one he lived and worked in while writing it.

How it was made

Sawyer began with an isometric landscape he had been building for his own interest. “One day I decided it would be fun to try having little trains running around in my 3D isometric game world,” he said. He worked on it through 1993 between PC conversions of other people’s games, and full-time from the end of that year, once Frontier: Elite II and Goal were finished. His estimate was “about a year’s worth of work, but spread over a year and a half”. Asked whether anybody else worked on the code, he said: “No, just me.”

He wrote it in “x86 processor assembler”, using Microsoft’s Macro Assembler, because in those days, he said, “it was necessary. It was something that you just had to do to get the computer to move things around the screen fast enough.” The approach left its mark on the game’s limits. The number of vehicles and stations is fixed when the program is assembled, and Sawyer later explained that some of its data pointers are only a certain number of bits wide, so the station limit “cannot be increased without extensive work on other parts of the game”. Edge noticed those limits in play: things “get clunky around 40 years in”, when “you’re pushing the game’s limit of vehicles and loading stations”.

The early version was called “I.T.S.”, for “Interactive Transport Simulation”, and then Chris Sawyer’s Transport Game, which is what the billboards in Sawyer’s PC conversion of Frontier: Elite II advertised. Sawyer paid for the development himself, and Foster agreed to be paid once the game found a publisher. MicroProse, which had published Sawyer’s Elite Plus, took it, and the name became Transport Tycoon “to tie in with their own Railroad Tycoon”.

Reviews

Edge called it “totally non-linear, incredibly flexible, superbly detailed and utterly riveting”, and decided that “Railroad Tycoon was a mere rehearsal”. Computer Gaming World praised its depth and “beautiful production values”, but found the computer companies weak. They built “extremely convoluted and inefficient” lines, trains sometimes wandered on to other parts of the network, and saving with the music on could crash the game. On a fast 486, Hayes timed it at about “three years per real hour” once a network grew. The magazine’s verdict was that fans of “software toys” would find “plenty to do”, but that “the competitive element is limp-wristed”.

It sold best at home. “It sold really well in the UK, it sold really well in Europe, didn’t sell as well in America,” Sawyer recalled.

Deluxe and other versions

MicroProse added a World Editor in 1995, with a landscape editor, a two-player game by modem and an alternative Martian set of graphics. Transport Tycoon Deluxe followed for Christmas 1995. It added four “climates”, including a toy land where the demo on PC Zone’s cover disc replaced coal mines and steel mills with lollipop trees and candy floss factories, along with network play, new vehicles and company buy-outs. PC Player in Germany reported that owners of the original could buy it as an update for about 70 marks, against 120 for new buyers. There was also a Windows 95 edition of Deluxe.

Sawyer’s website lists versions for the Macintosh and the PlayStation. Ocean published the PlayStation version in Britain, and the Official UK PlayStation Magazine gave it 6/10, calling it “marginally more fun than it sounds”. In Japan, Imagineer released it on the Sega Saturn in 1997. No Amiga version was released, although Amiga Format readers wrote in to ask for one in 1995 and 1997.

OpenTTD

OpenTTD, begun by Ludvig Strigeus and first released in 2004, is a re-creation of Transport Tycoon Deluxe written in C and since rewritten in C++. The German magazine Amiga Insider reviewed its Amiga port in November 2004, describing a group “with sufficient C knowledge” who had rewritten the game “from the ground up” and added features from the fan-made TTDPatch. The project describes itself as a game that “attempts to mimic the original game as closely as possible while extending it with new features”. It is licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. It can use the graphics, sound and music files from an original copy of Deluxe, or free replacement sets.

Sawyer has not released the game’s source code. The rights to the game returned to him from MicroProse, and his company 31X worked with the developer Origin8 on a new version for iOS and Android in 2013. Because the original was written in assembly language, it could not simply be recompiled and was rewritten. On 1 November 2024 Atari announced that it had acquired Transport Tycoon from Sawyer.

Sources

PC Gamer (UK), September 1994, p. 24: preview (the 100-year span, randomly generated isometric landscape, road, rail, sea and air).
PC Gamer (UK), November 1994: MicroProse advertisement, “AVAILABLE NOW”.
Edge issue 17, February 1995, pp. 76–77: review (£45, “Out now”, the detail, the slowdown at around 40 years, “utterly riveting”).
Computer Gaming World issue 128, March 1995, pp. 146–150: Robert L. Hayes, Jr., “Move It Or Lose It” (1930 to 2030, seven rivals, the supply chains, the town ratings, the sound and music, the weak computer players, the save bug, the speed, $47.95, system requirements, floppy and CD-ROM).
Amiga Format issue 72, June 1995, and issue 101, September 1997: readers asking for an Amiga version.
PC Gamer (UK), June 1995: mail-order listings for the Transport Tycoon World Editor.
PC Player (Germany), December 1995: Transport Tycoon Deluxe rereleased for Christmas 1995; update and full prices.
PC Zone issue 34, January 1996: cover-disc demo of Transport Tycoon Deluxe and MicroProse advertisement listing its new features.
Official UK PlayStation Magazine issue 48, August 1999: buyers’ guide (Ocean, 6/10, first reviewed in issue 20).
Amiga Insider issue 3, November 2004, pp. 33–34: OpenTTD review (in German), noting that Transport Tycoon and Deluxe never appeared on the Amiga.
“An exclusive interview with Chris Sawyer and the development team of Transport Tycoon mobile”, transporttycoon.com, 2014 (web, secondary): the development time, “just me”, the assembler, the funding, Simon Foster, John Broomhall, MicroProse, the sales. https://www.transporttycoon.com/anniversary
“Chris Sawyer (Transport Tycoon/RollerCoaster Tycoon) – Interview”, Arcade Attack, August 2018 (web, secondary): the origin in an isometric game world. https://www.arcadeattack.co.uk/chris-sawyer-interview/
Chris Sawyer, “…about Transport Tycoon” FAQ and “10 things you (probably) never knew about Chris Sawyer’s Tycoon games”, chrissawyergames.com (web, secondary): the vehicle and station limits, the Windows 95 edition, “I.T.S.”, the Railroad Tycoon tie-in, the real buildings. https://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq2.htm and https://www.chrissawyergames.com/feature1.htm
Chris Sawyer Games, information page (web, secondary): the World Editor and Deluxe, and the Macintosh and PlayStation versions. https://www.chrissawyergames.com/info.htm
“Transport Tycoon”, Sega Retro (web, secondary): the Saturn version, published by Imagineer in Japan in 1997. https://segaretro.org/Transport_Tycoon
Mike Rose, “Chris Sawyer on his reentry back into video games”, Gamasutra, 19 July 2013 (web, secondary): the rights returned from MicroProse, 31X, Origin8, the rewrite for phones. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/chris-sawyer-on-his-reentry-back-into-video-games
OpenTTD README and CREDITS files, GitHub (web, secondary): what OpenTTD is, its licence (GPL version 2), the original data files, Ludvig Strigeus as original author. https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD
“OpenTTD”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): first release in March 2004; C, then C++. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenTTD
Atari, “Atari Acquires Chris Sawyers’ Transport Tycoon”, press release, 1 November 2024 (web, secondary). https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/11/01/2973467/0/en/Atari-Acquires-Chris-Sawyers-Transport-Tycoon.html