Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon

1001 Video Games

Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

1830

Railroad Tycoon was inspired by the Avalon Hill boardgame 1830. SimTex later adapted 1830 for Avalon Hill. Not long after, SimTex was acquired by MicroProse, and became MicroProse Texas.

Deluxe edition

In 1993 MicroProse released a Deluxe version, which added higher resolution screen, support for more trains, and more scenarios.

Freeware release

The entire game was released for a download to promote Railroad Tycoon 3. The link. http://www.2kgames.com/railroads/railroads.html.

Keypad

The Amiga version was one of the few non-Flight-Sim games to use the Numeric Keypad significantly - which unfortunately meant that it couldn't be played on the Amiga 600 model, which was launched in the UK in 1992 (one of three entry-level Amigas launched in little over a year!), and had no keypad in the interest of saving space and cost. Subsequent budget reissues of the game did not resolve this issue.

Title

The game was originally titled Golden Age of Railroads. Then MicroProse decided it doesn't emphasize the business aspects, and changed the name to the present form.

Awards

• Computer Gaming World
  • September 1990 (Issue #74) – Overall Game of the Year
  • April 1992 (Issue #93) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
  • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #41 overall in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
• EMAP Image's Golden Joystick 1991
  • April 1991: PC Game of the Year
• GameStar (Germany)
  • Issue 12/1999 - #27 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
• Power Play
  • Issue 01/1991 - Best Computer Game in 1990 (DOS version)
  • Issue 01/1991 - Best Strategy Game in 1990 (DOS version)
  • Issue 01/1991 - Best Game Idea in 1990
• ST Format
  • January 1993 (issue #42) - #50 in '50 finest Atari ST games of all time' list

Information also contributed by Kasey Chang, Martin Smith, PCGamer77 and Scott Monster