Sid Meier Retrospective - Page 3 of 5

Sid Meier Retrospective

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Sid’s Been Workin’ on the Railroad

After Pirates!, Meier returned to what he knew best, releasing F-19 Stealth Fighter in 1988,

F-15 Strike Eagle II (the sequel to – you guessed it – 1985’s F-15 Strike Eagle in 1989, and Covert Action in 1990.

Pirates!, however, had Meier’s Sim-juices yearning to seek out new territory and those wishes were realized with 1990’s Railroad Tycoon,

the game most directly responsible for the Tycoon explosion in low-cost software we see today. Meier’s game, however, is completely unrelated to the likes of Zoo Tycoon and Hospital Tycoon and even the MicroProse published Roller Coaster Tycoon and Transport Tycoon.

There may be umpteen Tycoon games on the market today, but Meier’s game was the first and, arguably, the best to attempt an economic simulator of its kind. In Railroad Tycoon players were tasked with the management of a railroad company and oversaw every aspect of the business from laying track to building stations to scheduling train routes based on the needs of the traveling consumer.

Of course what fun would it be to stake one’s claim in the railroad biz unopposed? Railroad Tycoon pitted several competing rail companies against the player as well, forcing him to try and compete with them for the travelers’ dollars. Opposing companies would attempt to engage in hostile takeovers by means of the in-game stock exchange and try to win passengers away from the player’s company by initiating fare wars between the railroads. The gameplay was simple to learn but incredibly complex to master, the mark of nearly any good game. It was also highly addictive.

Like Pirates! before it, Railroad Tycoon was followed by several sequels. 1993 saw Railroad Tycoon Deluxe, a lackluster update to the original which was fraught with technical problems that resulted in poor sales. Later the company Pop Top Software (completely unrelated to Meier or MicroProse) acquired the rights to the Railroad Tycoon name and released the first true sequel, the inventively titled Railroad Tycoon II in 1998.

This release was available on the short-lived Sega Dreamcast as well as PC platforms and the PC version was followed by an expansion pack known as Railroad Tycoon II: Second Century a few months later. Milking the title further, the sequel and expansion were released in one set called the Railroad Tycoon II: Gold Edition and again (with the addition of user created scenarios) as the Platinum Edition. Still not satisfied with the mileage earned by Railroad Tycoon II Pop Top and Gathering of Developers released the budget version Millennium Edition in 2000.

In 2003, Pop Top developed Railroad Tycoon 3,

the first game in the series to feature fully rendered 3D graphics. A freebie downloadable expansion called Coast to Coast soon followed. This second sequel changed gameplay quite a bit and brought back the ability to construct tunnels (a feature that was in the original game but absent from Railroad Tycoon II in all its iterations).

This year will see the railroad game return to its roots as Firaxis (Meier’s new company, formed after the closure of MicroProse) is set to publish Sid Meier’s Railroads in October 2006.

Ironically, Pop Top Software was shut down by parent company Take 2 (publisher of the modern Grand Theft Auto series) and its properties were handed over to Firaxis, giving the rights to the familiar Railroad Tycoon name back to their “rightful” owner, Meier. Sid Meier’s Railroads may be the official title, but the game is commonly referred to as Railroad Tycoon 4 by fans of the series and Meier himself. This newest title will be the first actually developed by Meier since the original Railroad Tycoon.

Railroad Tycoon is the clear inspiration for several lesser econosim titles (all with “Tycoon” in their names) and a few excellent ones, including KOEI’s stellar but often overlooked Aerobiz (think Railroad Tycoon with airplanes) from 1992.

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