Progress: Re-reading an old game

From the file marked "obscure and tangential":

Returning to 1994's Transport Tycoon after maybe 10 years of not playing it (the things you can do when you're not rehearsing anything), I'm interested in how political it all is, the ideology. I think Brownlee and friends would enjoy it, since it behaves like their kind of world.

The game puts you in charge of some kind of privatised transport company, linking industries and towns with trains and planes, and then as time goes forward, with monorails and jets. There is, thank god, no government or citizenship on the isometric map- you're answerable to no-one but the market. Its a disturbing little window into behaviour in a world which doesn't require ethics. That church where your busstop wants to be? Bulldozer tool! Plane crash with 21 on board? Why wasn't it full to capacity?

I used to spend all day in this mindset. I was just playing trains.

This time round I've left it running for days at a stretch and its now 2500AD, I have 150 trillion dollars, the coal keeps gushing out of the mines, and the world, though more populated, is the same as it was back at the millenium. The cities will grow forever.

There are no national parks in Transport Tycoon.

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I dislike listening to CDs these days, not because they're clunky or scratch easily, but because they don't keep a playcount so it doesn't feel like I'm making any progress.

-Ralph

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