A tycoon game promises a fortune to anyone who can build one. The player starts with a small company and not much money, and grows it into an empire of railways, bus routes, rollercoasters or elephant enclosures, while the program’s customers decide whether the empire pays. The word came from one MicroProse game, Railroad Tycoon, in 1990. Nine years later Chris Sawyer’s RollerCoaster Tycoon sold so well that publishers put “Tycoon” on everything from golf courses to fast food. By Christmas 2001 PC Gamer was calling it “the most over-used word in the history of computer games”.
Tycoon games are one branch of the wider management game, which covers football clubs, cities and airlines as well. The tycoon line is the part that grew from railways into parks, and it is mostly a PC story.
Fast facts
- Named after: Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley’s Railroad Tycoon (MicroProse, 1990).
- The core: build a network or a park, set prices, keep customers happy, and grow a company from its profits.
- Main line: Railroad Tycoon (1990), Transport Tycoon (1994), RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999), Zoo Tycoon (2001).
- The boom: after RollerCoaster Tycoon, many games took the name, including Monopoly Tycoon, Fast Food Tycoon, Golf Resort Tycoon, Ski Resort Tycoon and Mall Tycoon.
Railroad Tycoon
Railroad Tycoon gave the player a million dollars and an empty map. There were four to choose from: the eastern United States in 1830, the western United States in 1866, England in 1828 and Europe in 1900. The player surveyed routes, bridged rivers, bought period locomotives and matched cargo to demand, carrying coal to a city that turned it into steel and steel to another that turned it into manufactured goods. Three computer-controlled railways, headed by real railway barons of the period, competed for the same towns. A player could start a rate war by pushing track into a rival’s station, or buy enough of its stock to take it over, and lose the job in the same way. The landscape changed with each game, so that Chicago might be “a broad-shouldered metropolis in one game and just a burg near a lake in another”.
Compute!’s Gregg Keizer called it “a capitalist’s dream” and praised an interface that productivity software “could learn a thing or two from”, though he wanted an undo command for the track he laid by mistake. In Britain The One gave the PC version 93% and compared it with SimCity: both challenged the player “to create a better, more efficient system every time you play”. The game sold for $59.95 in America and £34.99 in Britain, and came to the Amiga the next year.
MicroProse later let other studios revisit it. Railroad Tycoon II (1998) was made by PopTop Software, whose Phil Steinmeyer, Computer Gaming World reported, “jumped at the chance to remake one of his favorite games” when MicroProse started shopping its old titles around.
Transport Tycoon
The next tycoon was named to match. Chris Sawyer’s transport business game started life as Chris Sawyer’s Transport Game, and MicroProse, which published it in November 1994, renamed it Transport Tycoon “to tie in with their own Railroad Tycoon”. It added roads, docks and airports to the railway, gave the player a century from 1930 to 2030, and let towns grow when they were served well. Edge called it “utterly riveting” and decided that “Railroad Tycoon was a mere rehearsal”. Sawyer wrote it by himself in x86 assembly language, using Microsoft’s Macro Assembler, and it came out for PCs, the Macintosh and the PlayStation, but never for the Amiga.
Other publishers were already borrowing the word. In the same month PC Gamer previewed Pizza Tycoon, a German game from Software 2000 that MicroProse was translating for Britain. Players designed pizzas from over 70 ingredients and could pay the Mafia to bomb rival restaurants.
RollerCoaster Tycoon
RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999) turned the name into a trend. Sawyer’s theme park game let players build their own coasters piece by piece and watch individual guests enjoy them or be sick. In his own words it is “99% written in x86 assembler/machine code”, and he programmed it alone, with music by Allister Brimble and graphics by Simon Foster. It was the best-selling PC game of 1999 in America, with 719,635 copies according to the retail tracker PC Data, and it sold another 1,251,770 copies there in 2000.
Imitators followed quickly. Reviewing Zoo Tycoon in 2002, Computer Gaming World’s Jeff Green observed that “everybody and their grandma has decided to make a Tycoon game this year”, and called RollerCoaster Tycoon “the game that started this whole dumb trend”. In 2003 the magazine said it had “started a barrage of clones both good and bad”, from SimGolf and Monopoly Tycoon to Mall Tycoon. PC Gamer’s Christmas 2001 issue reviewed Fast Food Tycoon, Golf Resort Tycoon, Ski Resort Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon together, and had already given Monopoly Tycoon 88% the month before. Its Golf Resort Tycoon review found the game “an unnaturally close sibling to Theme Park, Rollercoaster Tycoon and their ilk”.
Zoo Tycoon
Zoo Tycoon, developed by Blue Fang Games and published by Microsoft in October 2001, swapped the park’s rides for animals. Players built enclosures, matched each animal’s terrain, plants and companions to its needs, and kept visitors, keepers and animals happy, either in 13 scenarios or in a freeform mode. Green found that it followed the RollerCoaster Tycoon formula “to the letter, just substituting a zoo environment for an amusement park”. He thought it too tame, and some habitats tedious to get right: he and his seven-year-old spent 20 minutes hunting for “the one tile of sand that was dragging down our lion’s happiness rating”. Still, he called it “the rare family game that doesn’t bore parents to death”. PC Gamer’s review, by Richard Cobbett, was harder on it. It complained that the game had brought back the “hideously blocky graphics” of 1999, and ended: “buy Rollercoaster Tycoon and get a pet instead.”
It kept selling all the same. Expansions added dinosaurs (Dinosaur Digs, 2002) and sea creatures (Marine Mania), the original was still in Computer Gaming World’s top 20 chart in January 2003, and Zoo Tycoon 2 followed in 2004. In 2013 Frontier Developments, which had already taken over RollerCoaster Tycoon, made a new Zoo Tycoon for Microsoft, released on the Xbox 360 and Xbox One in November 2013.
What came after
The two Sawyer games have outlived their publishers. The rights to Transport Tycoon returned to Sawyer, who sold them to Atari in 2024, and fan re-creations, OpenTTD and OpenRCT2, keep Transport Tycoon Deluxe and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 running on modern computers. Frontier’s Planet Coaster (2016), which Wireframe called “a fantastic spiritual sequel to the likes of Theme Park and RollerCoaster Tycoon”, carried the idea on without the name.
Sources
- The One issue 21, June 1990: Kati Hamza’s review of Railroad Tycoon on the PC (MicroProse, £34.99, 93%, the comparison with SimCity, Amiga and ST versions to come).
- Compute!, October 1990, pp. 70–72: Gregg Keizer’s review of Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon (the four territories, the million dollars, the rival barons, rate wars and takeovers, the interface, $59.95).
- Amiga Joker (Germany), April 1991, p. 62: review of the Amiga version.
- Computer Gaming World issue 173, December 1998: Terry Coleman’s preview of Railroad Tycoon II (PopTop Software, Phil Steinmeyer).
- Chris Sawyer, “10 things you (probably) never knew about Chris Sawyer’s Tycoon games”, chrissawyergames.com (web, secondary; the author’s own site): Chris Sawyer’s Transport Game and the tie-in with Railroad Tycoon. https://www.chrissawyergames.com/feature1.htm
- Edge issue 17, February 1995, pp. 76–77: Transport Tycoon review.
- “An exclusive interview with Chris Sawyer and the development team of Transport Tycoon mobile”, transporttycoon.com, 2014 (web, secondary): November 1994, “just me”, the assembler. https://www.transporttycoon.com/anniversary
- Amiga Insider issue 3, November 2004, pp. 33–34: Transport Tycoon never released for the Amiga.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 12, November 1994, p. 24: Pizza Tycoon preview (Software 2000, MicroProse, the ingredients, the Mafia).
- Chris Sawyer, “Chris Sawyer / Game Development FAQ”, chrissawyergames.com (web, secondary; the author’s own words): RollerCoaster Tycoon’s assembly language. https://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm
- Computer Gaming World issue 189, April 2000, p. 34, and issue 201, April 2001, p. 38: PC Data sales figures for 1999 and 2000.
- Computer Gaming World issue 211, February 2002, p. 98: Jeff Green’s review of Zoo Tycoon (Microsoft, Blue Fang Games, $34.95, 13 scenarios, the lion’s sand, “the game that started this whole dumb trend”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 222, January 2003, p. 112: RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 review (“a barrage of clones”). Same issue: CGW Top 20 chart with Zoo Tycoon.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 104, Christmas 2001: reviews of Zoo Tycoon (Richard Cobbett, £30), Golf Resort Tycoon (“the most over-used word”), Ski Resort Tycoon and Fast Food Tycoon; Monopoly Tycoon listed as reviewed in issue 103 with 88%.
- Computer Gaming World issue 218, September 2002: Zoo Tycoon: Dinosaur Digs review (the original released “last October”). Issue 224, March 2003: Zoo Tycoon: Marine Mania review.
- Computer Gaming World issue 242, September 2004: Zoo Tycoon 2 preview.
- “Zoo Tycoon (2013 video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Frontier Developments, Microsoft Studios, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, 22 November 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_Tycoon_(2013_video_game)
- 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
- Wireframe issue 14, May 2019, pp. 52–53: “Developer Profile: Frontier Developments” (Planet Coaster).