Railroad Tycoon II

About Railroad Tycoon II

Railroad Tycoon II (1998) is PopTop Software's business simulation in which the player chairs a railway company across the whole history of the railroad, laying track, running trains and playing the stock market.

Railroad Tycoon II in Depth

The game covers the history of railways from their beginnings to the present and beyond. The player picks a map and becomes chairman of a railroad company, trying to earn profits for investors and meet scenario objectives while rivals, breakdowns, train robbers, economic swings and scripted events get in the way. Most of the work is building track, stations and trains to carry passengers and freight. Revenue depends on time, distance, demand, cargo, the economy, station improvements and difficulty, while fuel, maintenance and overheads eat into it. Rival companies can share track and stations, splitting the revenue, and the view is now dimetric rather than the top-down view of the original.

Industries form production chains: coal and iron mines feed steel mills that turn one load of each into two loads of steel, so a well-planned line hauls raw materials one way and finished goods back. Locomotives differ in speed, fuel, preferred cargo and ability to climb grades, and grow more prone to breakdowns with age, while a wreck destroys engine and cargo alike. Players can also buy industries, though idle ones lose money. The financial side covers bonds, share buybacks, stock issues, dividends, mergers and bankruptcy, and the economy swings between booming, prosperity, normal, recession and depression, affecting revenue, share prices and interest rates.

Making Railroad Tycoon II

In late 1997 Bruce Shelley said he would happily work on such a game but doubted it could sell in a blockbuster market. PopTop made it and Gathering of Developers published it, hoping for 250,000 sales in the 1998 holiday season; it passed 500,000 by February 1999, and the computer version sold more than 1.5 million copies by August 2001. PopTop's Franz J. Felsl said it did better in Europe than in the US, and Phil Steinmeyer credited its many editions, with the Gold edition and The Second Century expansion making up about a third of sales and the PlayStation version unsuccessful. It won Computer Games Strategy Plus's and CNET Gamecenter's 1998 Strategy Game of the Year awards, the former saying it captured almost everything gamers loved about the original.