OpenTTD is an open source simulation game based upon Transport Tycoon Deluxe

I guess the reason it's been posted today is that it was recently Transport Tycoon's 30th birthday.

What made OpenTTD a great success that it's playable out of the box. Most open source game remakes [0] are engine-only and you still need the graphics, arts, sound, and music assets to make it a 100%, and actual playable experience. OpenTTD started like that too but from the very beginning it was a goal to "detach" the game from the original as quickly as possible. It was released in 2004, the actual graphics replacement project started in 2007 and by 2009 100% of the sprites were finished so the original game files were not needed anymore [1]

And actually there are now 5 different basesets on top of the original TTD one [2]

It also made possible things like releasing the game on Steam and GOG.

0, https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes

1, https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Archive/Community/Graphics%20Rep...

2, https://bananas.openttd.org/package/base-graphics

I hosted a multi-player server for my friends and it was a blast. The Docker image makes it so easy: https://github.com/bateau84/openttd

Its an awesome game.

It triggered my entrepreneurial journey as a kid, and one of the first "open world" experiences I had from games. I would spend weeks trying to figure out what the right strategy was for a specific map.

In many ways, an entrepreneur and VC today, I am still playing that same game, and as the technological landscapes changes, so do the strategies I get to dream up.

I have posted this before, but I’ve been working on a wrapper for OpenTTD to turn it from a game to a (slightly!) more serious system for research/experimentation, especially using its AI system:

https://github.com/michalc/OpenTTDLab