Railroad Tycoon II

> In this reviewer’s opinion, it was a sparkling creative success as well as a commercial one, making it all the more deserving of remembrance. We’ve seen a fair number of train games built on similar premises in the years since 1998, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a comprehensively better one.

RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart. Alongside Anno 1602, it may be the oldest PC game I regularly open up and play for fun.

The gameplay is still so good. The fact that the game is so open-ended and also so cutthroat, combined with the procedurally generated maps means it always feels fresh to play, even all these years later. The UI has aged but has not gotten in the way.

And yes, as reviewer describes, it absolutely nails the theme. The sound design, the visuals, the music, the historical setting. Things feel gritty and real and tough. Just like the game's treatment of Robber Barons, the game perfectly balances romanticism with cynicism. The game made me love trains.

I still remember learning as a child how stock trading on the margin worked when I simultaneously made and then lost a massive fortune attempting to buy out a rival.

> Where to Get It: Railroad Tycoon Platinum is available as a digital purchase on Steam and GOG.com.

Sadly, for Windows only :(

It is a widely different game and theme, but manor lords is very good and has some innovations that reminded me of RRT when it came out. If you like this kind of games I suggest you look at it.

I played the Linux version the article mentions while at Goldman Sachs; a colleague on the Red Hat coverage team gave me a boxed copy of Corel Linux including the game. The port ran very well on my Red Hat Linux box at home.

In retrospect it was part of a brief flurry of Linux ports of major games. I also got to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Neverwinter Nights; in both cases the publishers made Linux clients available for download that use the retail version's assets. Despite the valiant efforts of Wine and related projects, the world would have to wait 15 more years before Proton leveraged Wine technology to bring quasi-native games to Linux, and 20 years before Steam Deck made it the norm or close to it.

I’m so glad to see this game getting some love. It’s been a constant for me ever since I found it at Dollar General when I was a kid.