What is Railroad Tycoon?
Microprose released the original Railroad Tycoon in 1990. It was an enormous success for its designers, Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley, who wanted to add more gameplay and a greater sense of entertainment to the strategic challenge of earlier text-based “build America during the Industrial Revolution” simulations. Unfortunately, Microprose was long on creativity, but short on marketing skills, and few games they developed ever received a second release with upgraded features. (Railroad Tycoon Gold fell laughably short.) This was Railroad Tycoon’s fate until PopTop Software appeared a number of years later. It’s development team consisted largely of gamers who truly enjoyed the original Railroad Tycoon, and wanted to create a fully updated version. This, they did, in 1998, with Railroad Tycoon 2. It was a graphically attractive game on isometric landscapes, in which the player, controlling a public company, connected cities and resources by rail. Covering a timespan from the early 1830s th
