Transport Tycoon Deluxe Review

If two nearby cities get big enough, they may turn into a conurbation

Quick Info
Reviewed by:	Mark Goninon
Developer:	Chris Sawyer
Publisher:	Microprose (Atari for 2026 re-release)
Release Date:	Nov 1994 (12 Mar 2026 re-release)
Time played:	78 hours

The Return of a Classic

I've been waiting a long time for the re-release of Transport Tycoon Deluxe or a worthy successor and while Train Fever is close when it comes to the latter, it's been a long wait for a Transport Tycoon release. The original came out back in November 1994 followed by an updated version in 1995 called Transport Tycoon Deluxe. The original had only one tileset, a temperate one based off the UK, not to mention all the vehicles, trains and planes in the game were named after ones in real-life. I loved the fact I could build Gresley A4s and Boeing 747s in the game but alas, it was slightly problematic on the copyright infringement front and I guess Microprose, the original publisher of the game, didn't feel it was worth coughing up the dough in order to use the real names. This was all rectified in the Deluxe release of Transport Tycoon and not only that, they included three extra tilesets (Sub-Tropical, Arctic and Toyland) and added a couple of new tunes to the soundtrack (they also revised the theme, which is still glorious as ever, but I do have a soft spot for the original).

Transport Tycoon is one of my favourite games ever. There's a reason it featured on the original Choicest Games Top 100 and when the game was originally released, it was critically acclaimed. What is even more impressive is that one man, Chris Sawyer, programmed the entire game using Assembler! Combined with the beautiful SVGA artwork by Simon Foster and jazzy soundtrack by John Broomhall, Transport Tycoon was truly something special. “But what exactly is it?" you ask. Well, let's get into the nuts and bolts, shall we?

Sometimes it's easier getting gold off a mountain peak using planes instead of trains

So How Does One Become a Transport Tycoon?

Transport Tycoon Deluxe is a business simulation game where you run a transport company for 100 years (from 1950 to 2050). The ultimate goal is to receive the highly coveted title of "Tycoon of the Century" and this is based on how much money you make, the number of vehicles and stations you have, and the amount of cargo you transport. You're able to purchase buses, lorries, trains, aircraft and ships to transport passengers or goods, and they're mostly based on real-life counterparts. Over time, new vehicles will be available for purchase that are usually faster or able to carry more cargo, but sometimes with exorbitant running costs: ferrying passengers with Concorde might seem the best solution getting your passengers around in the late 1960s and beyond but they cost a pretty penny to operate.

After purchasing a vehicle you need to assign a route. With trains, you'll have to design a railway line through the terrain which can sometimes be a challenge in itself, especially in the late-game after towns have grown into cities and there are already existing railway lines darting across the entire map. Once this is done though, it's just a matter of telling your train to travel between two stations. Buses and lorries can use existing road networks created by towns or you can build roads for where they need to go. Aircraft will find their way between airports and ships need buoys to help them navigate.

The game has a variety of supply chains that you can build routes for. They range from simple ones such as delivering coal from coal mines to power stations, or more complex ones such as providing steel goods to cities. In order to produce steel goods, this first involves transporting coal from coal mines and iron ore from iron ore mines to a steel mill which produces steel. The steel then needs to be transported to a factory and provided you have cities with large enough populations, you can then transport goods produced by the factory to these cities.

Provided you transport goods in a timely and cost-effective manner, you'll make money which you can use to invest in more transport networks across the map. You can also invest your money into city councils, whether it's an advertising campaign to drum up more business at your stations, funding local road reconstruction to annoy your enemies (seems like a rather cynical view on roadworks if that's all it's good for) or funding new commercial buildings. You can also check up on your company rating which is determined by how good your services are within its jurisdiction. One good way to get a council angry at you is levelling the terrain nearby which means building new airports can be a particularly risky gamble: if you anger the council too much they will refuse any further construction nearby. The only way around this dilemma is planting an insane number of trees and/or improving your existing services and waiting patiently.

Competitor railways and roads can sometimes get in the way meaning the need to come up with some creative route corrections

Simplicity is its Strength…

The game does have some amusing idiosyncrasies that could be considered exploits such as vehicles being really bad at judging when to drive through a level crossing, meaning if you really wanted to eliminate the competition (quite literally) you just have to ensure your train tracks crosses as many competitor roads as possible (and this only gets more effective as the game progresses as trains become faster). The notifications system is also rather annoying but despite the frequency of alerts it's entirely possible to miss critical pieces of information and this only gets worse in the end-game since there's just so many damn vehicles on the map.

Obviously the game is old, and the graphics reflect this (despite me quite enjoying the SVGA pixelart) but what really hasn't aged well and could do with an update is the future of transportation as depicted by the game. The game was after all made in the 1990s, and with that comes 1990s predictions of the future. As a typical game spans from 1950 to 2050, we're only 24 years off from when the game ends. The game believes that we'd almost exclusively be using maglev trains by 2050, planes are similar but just look wackier, and ships and road vehicles more or less don't change. Sure, we do have high speed trains but it's not like existing rail locomotives are dropping in reliability which is what occurs in the game, forcing you to upgrade your networks. Planes don't look like wacky spaceships from the Jetsons as they do in the game and are simply more fuel efficient versions of existing planes. And diesel vehicles are transitioning to EVs.

It's hard to predict the future, even only 20-30 years in the future, but that's why this game is sorely in need of a remake. Playing the game, it's as addictive as before (which my 78 hours of playtime can attest to across three playthroughs), and while there have been many imitators and successors such as Transport Fever and OpenTTD, there's something special about the original isometric view and the simplicity of its gameplay. Sure, there was Locomotion back in 2004 (and more about that in a future review), but that was more a Rollercoaster Tycoon with trains. Bring back the real vehicle names, the live band version of John Broomhall's excellent soundtrack and more realistic vehicles for the 21st century. It would also get rid of any problems encountered through emulation such as an annoying bug I encountered where you'd experience audio lag after playing for a while.

You'll find that it won't take long to eventually reach the road vehicle cap in the game, especially considering AI opponents seem to prefer road vehicle routes over other modes of transport

... But it's Also its Weakness

While the game's simplicity is its strength, it's also its Achilles Heel. This becomes apparent later in the game where you're in for a whole lot of micromanagement pain.

A lot of the pain revolves around obsolescence. Vehicles in the game get old and the older they get the more often they breakdown. The more often they breakdown, the less money you're earning. Towards the end of the game, when you're bound to have many vehicles, you'll end up spending most of your time replacing old ones. Thankfully, replacing old vehicles is usually a simple process of sending them to the nearest depot, selling the old vehicle and replacing it with a new one. Routes assigned to the old vehicle will automatically be transferred to the new vehicle (within a set amount of time). However, the game has a hidden "population" cap which means only a certain number of vehicles are allowed in the game at any given time. This appears to be shared across companies which means if your AI opponents have been busy buying new vehicles you can get into situations where you sell a vehicle and are unable to replace them! It would be nice if there was a counter somewhere that showed the population cap or a warning when selling a vehicle if the population cap had been exceeded by the AI somehow. This means you sometimes have to retire a route, as you're unable to purchase a new vehicle to service it.

Trains are extra painful to replace in later years as not only do the trains become obsolete but so do the tracks they travel on: eventually you'll find yourself removing your railway tracks and replacing them with monorails, which is time-consuming, costly and very disruptive. This becomes extra painful if you have stations that service multiple routes as demolishing the station puts all of them out of commission while you spend time laying new tracks (and you can't pause the game to build tracks either). Oh, and you won't be doing this once, but twice, since monorals are eventually made obsolete by maglevs! A great time for your competitors to get the upper hand.

Finally, having more vehicles and routes on the map seems to confuse the pathing AI for your vehicles resulting in, yes, you guessed it, MOAR MICROMANAGING! In larger cities, sometimes you'll find your buses or lorries driving in circles, never making their way to their destination. When this occurs, you'll need to return the vehicles to their depots to reset their behaviour, but there is no guarantee it won't happen again. Using trains can help resolve this issue, but trains have their own pathing problems. Although the game allows you to build tunnels and bridges which allows tracks to cross over each other, sometimes trains think the tracks are somehow connected and when this occurs, they will refuse to leave depots unless you micromanage them and tell them to ignore the signals and go for it.

8

Transport Tycoon Deluxe suffers from many curious idiosyncrasies, pathing issues and a ridiculous amount of micromanagement, especially in the late-game, but its simplicity, cute SVGA pixelart and jazzy soundtrack by John Broomhall are what made it such a hit back in the 90s and still an addictive and worthwhile game to play today.

If you like this game, you might like…

• Cities in Motion (2011)
• Cities in Motion 2 (2013)
• Train Fever (2014)