There was the Commodore PET at his high school, the Sinclair ZX81 demonstration unit in a W H Smiths store, and the Texas Instruments TI99/4A one of his neighbours owned, as well as the Commodore VIC-20 a different neighbour had. The game itself had taken Chris just a year to develop, but the journey to making it had begun much earlier.Ĭhris had started programming as a teenager in 1981, largely out of curiosity, through trying to make things appear on the screen on a range of different computers he’d encountered. Transport Tycoon, the game that made Chris Sawyer into a games industry icon ( image source ) Nineteen-ninety-four was the year when his first original game was published, the year when big-name PC game publisher Microprose put his transportation-focused business simulation game Transport Tycoon, an incredible solo development effort, in a box and sold it in stores to widespread acclaim. ![]() But the idea bears repeating: the greatest accolades, the greatest achievements, the greatest games are the product of hard work built atop years of invisible labour.Īnd such it was that Chris Sawyer, like John Romero, Carol Shaw, Gunpei Yokoi, and many others before and since - such it was that in 1994 Chris Sawyer suddenly shifted from a little-known (though well-respected) figure in the games industry, a programmer who converted Amiga games to the PC, to become an industry icon. In reality the actual duration is rarely a decade - it’s five years or eight years or eighteen years, or however long it takes for the pieces to all fall into place: the talent, timing, and product. You may have heard the expression that every overnight sensation is a decade in the making - a decade of hard work, toiling in obscurity…or relative obscurity, honing a talent, perfecting a craft, optimising a skill set and envisioning whatever it is that breaks through. I'm Richard Moss, and this is episode 28, Transport Tycoon, or the tale of the great optimiser and his two greatest works. Welcome to the Life and Times of Video Games, an audio series about video games and the video game industry, as they were in the past and how they’ve come to be the way they are today. You can learn more and/or pre-order your copy from Unbound. ![]() I'm currently writing a new book called Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet. Please remember to tell other people about the show, and to leave a review by following the links at /ltvg. Or for one-off donations you can use /mossrc. If you'd like to become a supporter, for as little as $1 a month, head to my Patreon page and sign up. ![]() Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon - especially my $10+ backers Carey Clanton, Rob Eberhardt, Simon Moss, Vivek Mohan, Wade Tregaskis, and Seth Robinson. You can see a snippet of his source code in the image below: Transport Tycoon, meanwhile, lives on in open-source project OpenTTD and in a mobile port ( Android, iOS) of the original game by Chris's company 31X. The original two games are also still sold via the likes of Steam and GOG. (I have stories on many other things that do involve interviews, though, like 1990 golf game Links, Bungie's fake game Pimps at Sea, and the "Wololo" sound effect from Age of Empires.)Ĭhris was only a design consultant on 2004 game RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, but its remastered "Complete" edition has just come out on Nintendo Switch and the PC version is free on the Epic Games Store right now (until October 2). ![]() I hope you still enjoy it and learn something interesting. Chris doesn't do interviews, except via an intermediary (which doesn't really work in an audio format), so the story is based entirely on my in-depth research and analysis. Hello Hacker News readers! As of this update, the post there erroneously labels this as an interview. fade out(?) of Chris Sawyer, the genius creator of bestselling, critically-acclaimed simulation games Transport Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon - who made a career out of working at the cutting-edge, in bare metal assembly code that he wrote and optimised (and optimised again) on his own.
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