> In this reviewer’s opinion, it was a sparkling creative success as well as a commercial one, making it all the more deserving of remembrance. We’ve seen a fair number of train games built on similar premises in the years since 1998, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a comprehensively better one.<p>RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart. Alongside Anno 1602, it may be the oldest PC game I regularly open up and play for fun.<p>The gameplay is still so good. The fact that the game is so open-ended and also so cutthroat, combined with the procedurally generated maps means it always feels fresh to play, even all these years later. The UI has aged but has not gotten in the way.<p>And yes, as reviewer describes, it absolutely nails the theme. The sound design, the visuals, the music, the historical setting. Things feel gritty and real and tough. Just like the game's treatment of Robber Barons, the game perfectly balances romanticism with cynicism. The game made me love trains.<p>I still remember learning as a child how stock trading on the margin worked when I simultaneously made and then lost a massive fortune attempting to buy out a rival.
I played the Linux version the article mentions while at Goldman Sachs; a colleague on the Red Hat coverage team gave me a boxed copy of Corel Linux including the game. The port ran very well on my Red Hat Linux box at home.<p>In retrospect it was part of a brief flurry of Linux ports of major games. I also got to play <i>Return to Castle Wolfenstein</i> and <i>Neverwinter Nights</i>; in both cases the publishers made Linux clients available for download that use the retail version's assets. Despite the valiant efforts of Wine and related projects, the world would have to wait 15 more years before Proton leveraged Wine technology to bring quasi-native games to Linux, and 20 years before Steam Deck made it the norm or close to it.
Still keep this on my box and crack it open now and again. I also pulled the music out of the distro and put it into my listening rotation while working. You have to add your own hawk screech sounds though :-)<p>I’m a total sucker for network optimization train games though. Love the crayon rails games which I wrote about here:<p><a href="https://dave.org/posts/20221206_trains/" rel="nofollow">https://dave.org/posts/20221206_trains/</a>
> Indeed, in some of the most difficult scenarios, the efficient operation of your railroad provides no more than the seed capital for the real key to victory, your shenanigans on the stock market.<p>This is in fact what I don't like about RR2. The stock market had too much of a big part in my opinion, and I never enjoyed it.<p>I liked much more Transport Tycoon (and its open source version OpenTTD) which had much more focus on the mechanics of transportation. Too bad, because I really loved the graphics and some of the mechanics of the game.
I've been playing a bit of Open Transport Tycoon recently, the trains are by far my favourite aspect and probably the most detailed in the game too. Getting all the track layouts and signalling to be efficient is a challenge under ever increasing demand. <a href="https://www.openttd.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.openttd.org/</a>
I also really love this game. It's what originally taught me a lot about the workings of trains, different capabilities of locomotives, the need for sidings due to monetary cost of double-tracking everywhere, etc.<p>The article mentions the existence of the PSX and Dreamcast ports but does not mention that the DC version is actually re-done in a fully-3D engine as opposed to the traditional approach of the PC version where the 3D models were pre-rendered to 2D graphics covering the multiple angles of rotation. It's one of the Windows CE based Dreamcast games! <a href="https://segaretro.org/Windows_CE" rel="nofollow">https://segaretro.org/Windows_CE</a><p>Here's a longplay where you can see it: <a href="https://youtu.be/a7tgccUpPAc" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/a7tgccUpPAc</a>
One of the best games I have ever played! I still open it sometimes and wonder why I could never find another strategy game that would hook me just as much.<p>Also learned as a kid about stock and dividends, which proved quite useful later on. There was a bit o geography and history in it as well, plus the music! Why were our parents complaining about us gaming so much!?
So many fond memories of this game - it was a really fun blend of railroad sim and economic sim that I haven't really found since. I'll never forget the "ding ding ding" sound that goes off when a train pulls into a station and earns you a bit of cash!
I absolutely loved this game growing up. It scratched a similar itch for me as SimCity. The corporate layer wasn't particularly sophisticated, but it did give me some early insight into finance.<p>The soundtrack was also incredible, and I wish it were available independently.
About the only game from the 90s which I still play regularly, IMHO it's pretty close to the perfect computer game since it strikes just the right balance between simulation and 'arcade-y' fun - and all the modern 're-enactments' I tried so far somehow don't manage to capture the essential of what makes Railroad Tycoon 2 so much fun (the Platinum version runs great on modern computers btw: <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_Platinum/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P...</a>).
Not it is the free software or open source version of this game, but OpenLoco <a href="https://openloco.io/" rel="nofollow">https://openloco.io/</a> is great, and I hope that this game in near future will have a free assets like as OpenTTD <a href="https://www.openttd.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.openttd.org/</a> .
There doesn't seem to be any mention of 2006's Sid Meier's Railroads! which seems to be an evolution of Railroad Tycoon.<p>I've played "Railroads!" for countless hours - it's an incredible game, especially when LAN'ing with others.<p>Any reason why this game might be left out?
Was it Railroad Tycoon II which played Robert Johnson music in the background.<p>Playing the game I developed an appreciation of it. At least I think it was this game that I can't forget...
The way the author talked about the feeling of if a sequel could live up to the original, and how it had been mostly forgotten, reminded me of Warlords, which together with civilization and rail road tycoon was the main turn based strategy games of my youth. I remember there was a sequel, but it would always freeze up on our computer.<p>... And I don't think I've stumbled on anyone on the internet talk its praise.<p>Was it just an oddity in my games library, or did other people place it along side the classic turn based strategy games of the 90s?
It just kind of sucks I wasn't born 80 years earlier. I ran a simulation once. With my business brain and only a $20k loan in 1920 I'd have been a multi-millionaire within 10 years.