by Nathan Schmidtke

Created on: April 22, 2008   Last Updated: March 03, 2011

Transport Tycoon is a simulation based strategy introduced in 1994 that allows the user to make profits from providing a region of communities' transportation resources. The game can be setup to allow competitors, but if you are in a Bill Gates state-of-mind, you can set the options to disable any competition. The cities start off small and grow throughout time depending on the effect of nearby industries. When transportation graces the any particular city, the population tends to grow more rapidly. This allows each transportation company to serve more customers thus making higher profits. There are two basic forms of profitable transportation. The first is industrial or goods transportation and the other is passenger transportation.

Industries allow the player to setup routes from one industry to another such as a forest to a mill or a coal mine to a power plant. The basic idea is that a station is place at both the "to and from" stations. Vehicles transport the particular commodity from one station to another. The items being transported may be one commodity that feeds another industry or goods between one industry or another regardless of the natural of the industry.

Passenger transportation comes in the form of buses, passenger trains or monorails (monorails are not available until 1999 and the game begins in 1930), ships and airplanes. The closer the stations are to the epicenter of the city, the more passengers generally demand its services.

Subsidies allow the players to make extra profits by building transportation routes that are requested by the two cities that wish to connect. Unfortunately, the subsidy normally lasts one year and then profits return to their normal rate. Vehicles do upgrade as the years go by that allow players to choose faster, more efficient methods to increase their profits and service more customers.

This game is highly addictive primarily because it allows players to micro-manage every aspect to increase profits and to create more efficient routes. The soundtrack is very enjoyable and catchy, but it never seems to become annoying even after five continuous hours of game play. With the ever advancing gaming industry with beautiful graphics, superior sound and complicated AI engines, it's important to remember what really makes a game fun. The engaging, dynamic environment of Transport Tycoon will engage players for hours and can be obtained for absolutely NO cost. You heard right, no cost!

If you follow this link, the program can be easily downloaded. The above website has thousand of old programs available for download. However, since new Windows formats are unable to run the old software, these games require an emulator such as DosBox.  After downloading Transport Tycoon, run the setup. Then simply left click and hold dragging the tycoon.exe file on top of the DosBox icon and release. It will automatically run DosBox with the Transport Tycoon game or any other game.

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