After reading an article on RPS about Sid Meier’s Colonisation (Link) and seeing how Alec Meer recalled his formative PC gaming years as being shaped not by simply buying games but by the limited choice of pirated titles at his disposal, leading to the playing of games that would have otherwise slipped on by and it struck a chord with me.
While I didn’t really partake in the pirating scene (tho it was rampant on the acorn machines I used to play with at my first secondary school!), I was limited by my hardware instead – a rather sloth like 486SX2/50 (back when DX’s were all the rage) and its’ puny 4mb of ram.

No, that wasn’t a typo… I did mean MB!

I can sense you all recoiling with pained expressions and feelings of horror, all it’s missing is the dramatic prairie dog music blast ;)

Hey, it was back in the misty days of 1994 – yeah, it was under powered even then, and was the last time I would let my parents buy a PC without my permission! Packard Bell my arse…

Anyway, due to my woefully under spec’d machine, I had to do plenty of autoexec.bat file gymnastics in order to get games like simcity 2000 to even run and found myself very limited in what I could play – many were pure dross (mega race) but many were simply hidden gems (Stars!, UFO Enemy Unknown, Civ..) and subsequent RAM upgrades opened up even more of these amazing titles.

One such title was Microprose’s time evaporator known as Transport Tycoon.

This game was released back in 1994 and immediately tapped into my unnatural addiction to sc2k by giving me a management game with a competitive twist… It had AI competitors for me to play with against.
Sadly, the AI was massively inept at designing track layout and had too much of a fondness for using road vehicles for my liking. And when I say massive, I mean on a Donald the alliance PVP’er scale! (Link for the uninitiated)




To give them some credit, they did have a small amount of design advantage over your single station per track layouts that everyone always starts off with. An advantage that soon finds itself overturned when you initially learn to imitate and then vastly improve upon with your own spider like webs of track.



Yes, the AI was terminally stupid but they were great to toy with after you made your first million and you could employ numerous underhanded tricks to force them into bankruptcy.

Such shining examples of fair play as putting some of your rail track over their road and then nuking that one spot, severing their road vehicles from their money making destination. You could even build your own maze of a road on the end of the stump you created, taking the hapless vehicle on a scenic route that takes in the entire length of the map and back, causing his cargo to become worthless and ruins his reputation, or worse causing the industry to shut down. Or paying for 6 months of road chaos in one of the towns, creating a traffic jam that made the M25 look like speedy motoring!

If the AI had managed to make some cash, you could always be incredibly evil and put together a small section of railway that crossed a busy section of road. Slowing down your competitors’ trucks and occasionally blowing them up if you were lucky enough to have one break down or be just too slow to get across before your train comes ploughing through, resulting in a satisfying mini mushroom cloud.



The only problem, aside from my system grinding to a glacial pace after I reached a certain number of vehicles that were active in the game, was that the AI often left you thirsting for some real competition and the game only supported the connection between 2 PCs using a serial port and eventually the ancient IPX/SPX protocol (you young un’s have no idea how lucky you are now that it’s tcp/ip all the way ;P ), which pretty much meant few of us could have multiplayer games.
It was all a moot point anyway since no-one that I knew was interested in the game anyway, so the multiplayer side of it passed me by.

This left me stuck playing this game on my own and having to suffer the numerous limitations that can often get in the way of your fun (4 track station limits, poor pathing for road vehicles, simplistic signalling…) as well as getting bored with the easily subdued and frankly retarded computer opponents. Forever feeling that hunger for some real competition… you know, the fun you can only ever have against another human. While other games would take my attention (and occasionally my soul, Diablo 2 has a *lot* to answer for!) over time, I still had the emptiness of never having competed against a challenge worthy opponent.

That is, until I stumbled across an open source rewrite of Transport Tycoon called Open TTD!

Open TTD is a great example of how a community can take a classic game and fix the limitations it once had and breathe a fresh life into it. While its’ origins is certainly less than legal (it was created by picking apart the old code rather than completely writing it from scratch, and even requires the original games graphics files in order to run) you can’t deny that the people who worked on it have done it out of their love for the game and has since been ported to many other platforms including the PSP!



It, apparently, takes in numerous community made patches that addresses the failings of the original game and adds in even more features such as upgrading of rail tracks rather than having to rip everything up and re-lay them (never a fun task when you have a massive network running), support for truly massive maps (2048×2048!), marginally improved AI, new graphics loading tools and most crucial of all… multiplayer across the internet! And with a very clean interface for finding and hosting games.. Oh yes, the world was gonna experience alphaxion’s “shitshifter transit corp” in all of it’s’ attention starved glory.



The problem here is that, having honed my skills in seclusion, my building techniques were prehistoric in comparison to the leviathans crafted by the still vibrant and numerous player base.
Rail networks that simply embarrass my puny efforts in comparison, and the humiliation of having some of them turn charitable, and give me chunks of their cash out of pity so that I might be of some amusement to them.




After a few disastrously poor games and some examining of the truly gifted players network structure, I manage to pick up the changes in the ways of using signals and I’m off creating great networks of my own that put Network Rail to shame (not really difficult, the average 3 year olds Thomas the Tank Engine set can put them to shame!).
The first game where I comfortably sail above my competition fills me with a belated joy… 13 years after I first picked up the game do I get to experience the satisfaction of playing against a wily and very much human opponent and somehow triumph against them.

Like Alec before me, I attained a little bit of closure on a long distant part of my own life… now, where did I put that demo of descent?! ;)