It all started off in 1994 with an indie simulation game called Transport Tycoon. The idea behind it was simple. You are the owner of a transport company, and have to make a living and earn profit by building up an empire of transport routes, using trains, planes, trucks, buses and ships, and whatever smart way you can think of to combine them. While small in scale, it captured somewhat of a following due to its iconic gameplay and wide array of possibilities.

This led to the release of Transport Tycoon Deluxe a year or so afterwards. Transport Tycoon Deluxe (TTD) was a big hit, and rightly so. It offered a lot of improvements, and also several new terrain types which allowed the player to tackle not just European settings, but arctic and subtropical themes as well. The single biggest change however was probably the inclusion of one-way railway signals. These allowed the player to build huge rail networks and complicated interchanges for trains. The culture of elaborate rail infrastructure was born.

Fast forward to the year 2004. DOS has become obsolete, and the Windows version of TTD is showing its age as well. Motivated by the desire to improve upon a game that was abandoned by its developers long ago, a few volunteers decompiled the original game engine code and started rewriting parts of the code, piece by piece. Whenever they saw room for improvement, they added an extra optional feature. That way, players could decide exactly how they wanted the game to work, whether it was the original TTD style or a completely new style that suited them. The new project was released under the free GNU General Public Licence, and named 'OpenTTD'.

As OpenTTD matured, more features were added. It was ported to the cross-platform SDL library, which allowed it to be played on a wide variety of platforms, including Linux, Mac and Windows. A multiplayer component was added, which allowed players to play against each other with large megacorporations. Support for the NewGRF format was also added, which allowed anyone to develop new custom content for the game. A huge amount of modifications was the result, some even surpassing the original game in quality.

However, one nagging problem was still the fact that you needed the original TTD game content to be able to play OpenTTD at all. This led to the creation of the sound and graphics replacement projects. These projects aimed to completely replace all the game content with freely licenced alternatives, so that the original content would no longer be needed.

And now, at long last, the replacements are finally finished. The latest release, OpenTTD 1.0, includes everything you need to play. You don't need the original TTD anymore, and the game is finally freely available for everyone. Even if you've never heard of it, and even if you never play simulation games, you should really give it a go. The sheer amount of possibilities will keep you occupied for weeks. There are plenty of OpenTTD players here on Fallout Studios, myself included, so I guarantee that you won't get bored easily.

OpenTTD main site