[a_d]

One of my favorite games of all time is Railroad Tycoon 2: Platinum Edition. While Sid Meier didn’t directly make it, but he spawned the franchise with RRT-1. I found a pirated version selling on the street-side in the capital city of India. (Later on, when I had a job, I did buy a proper copy - which was much harder to get than the pirated copy).

Many sid Meier games have a remarkable sense of “time and place” - and Railroad Tycoon (imho) takes it to the next level. You really feel you are in early 1818, on the east coast of USA, getting your “little startup” off the ground. Even the blues and bluegrass music is designed to transport you there. The game captures a sense of adventure - that almost isn’t supposed to be the case in a rail road sim - but all the gameplay mechanics aside, this game captures an amazing sense of adventure ... and education. You learn a lot after exploring the continents, tackling terrains of continents, learning about cities, gaining a sense of scale and the thrill of making ideas come to life... it’s really cool how a game (a piece of software) can capture all this!

Upon repeat playing, I have come to admire the graphic design, sound design and interaction design (“the UI”) so much more. There are small but significant - even beautiful, decisions made that make the game fun to play and good to look at eg Train cars will change appearance through different eras..

A part of HN is entrepreneurship driven - I think those folks will also get an immense kick out of beating JP Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The campaign is the thing to play — travel the globe and connect places! Make economy happen.

Game also allows simple surprises like being able to buy businesses outright - that you have merely connected (and made to prosper) - shows you clearly how far monopoly can go :). I guess today it will be called a “full stack” railroad company.

I have dismissed my own love of the game to - “I am just nostalgic” — but I played it again recently, and I have happy to report that it remains as engaging as ever!

It’s available here: https://www.gog.com/game/railroad_tycoon_2

You can play on macOS using parallels.

A bunch of videos come up on Google and they can quickly give a glimpse of the gameplay - although I will suggest diving it without the trailer (https://www.google.com/search?q=railroad+tycoon+2)

The game is classified as a business sim - its not. It’s a railroad sim - the amount of details (eg every engine has a real world counter part) about railroads makes it a railroad game and not a business game...