Trainyard, and where it came from

Trainyard (App Store link) is a neat little casual game about making the trains run on time. And also about them, you know, not crashing. It may be a small subset of the casual-gaming crowd that likes this sort of thing, but count me among its members. A few nights ago I was reminiscing with a friend about "Railroad Tycoon," a game that inexplicably obsessed me for some months in the early 1990s. "Which one was that?" he asked me. "God, it was great," I told him. "You loaded up these old trains with lumber and livestock and stuff, and you had to get 'em from one station to the other on time, and... " And right there I realized how pathetic the gameplay sounded. In retrospect it was, and I'm sure the game would look laughably primitive to me now. But there was something hypnotic about laying the track, building the stations, loading the cars and letting them go. It was like you were winding the stem of an ever-more-complicated machine you yourself had designed and built, and standing back and watching it go.

Trainyard, and its free cousin Trainyard Express, tickles that same nerdy lobe in the brain. As is appropriate for an iPhone game, however, the graphics are minimal -- developer Matt Rix scales each train and line down to a clean, colorful schematic, and ratchets up the difficulty so subtly that by the time you realize you're hooked it's way too late to do anything about it. Rix is a clever guy and a good writer, and his lengthy blog post detailing the origins of the game is an interesting read loaded with good insights and spiky little lessons ("One of the key things I've learned is that the first project you make with any new technology will be awful"). All this fun is is bargain-priced at a buck for a short time, and well worth the miniscule investment. Go support an indie game developer. You'll have a good time doing it.

Bill Barol is the author of Thanks For Killing Me, a novel. He blogs at Extra Bonus Super Happy Funtime.

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JohnC

When will Boing Boing just come clean that they are a division of Apple computer? :)

They *are* doing “wonderful things” with pc’s and Android phones etc etc these days.
- Astragali
  
  Sigh. If you can be bothered, go to BB’s front page, and just put
  
  pc
  
  into the search engine. Prepare to be surprised.
  - JohnC
    
    Wow, thanks for suggesting that, it’s even worse than I thought.
elondaits

Railroad Tycoon was designed by Sid Meier, one of the best game designers ever. Its gameplay is neither aged nor pathetic… I played the latest revision, called “Railroads!” just a short while ago and it still is as fun and engaging as ever. Good, real games don’t age. Railroad Tycoon was contemporary of Civilization, another ageless design by Meier.
For examples of pathetic gameplay please see the FedEx quests in World of Warcraft, the 3D Tamagotchi that is The Sims, or the pointless clickfest of the latest social games such as Farmville.
Anonymous

Looks like a lot of fun. I LOVED transport tycoon.

Too bad it’s only for iphone. The iphone is sooo 2009. Where is the coverage for all the cool Droid apps?
magscanner

MacInooga Choo-Choo made me buy a Macintosh, in 1985. I saw it at the show in Las Vegas, talked to the Antipodean guys who had come to proffer it, and realized it was object-oriented graphical programming in the MacPaint environment. I paid money for it. It changed my life.

I didn’t actually play it very much, as it was a lot of work and the reward was small. But it changed my life.
jonrpatrick@hotmail.com

THANK YOU!
I love games like this, and had NO idea Trainyard existed!
benjamin bruneau

Transport Tycoon is still alive and well, with new graphics sets and so many options you would not believe. I treat it like a model train set, now. I think many others do the same.
Anonymous

Transport Tycoon Deluxe (the version many probably also remember) has a thriving Open Source Community in its successor: Open TTD. http://www.openttd.org/
scifijazznik

I picked up Trainyard about a week ago because my kid loves trains and I figured for a dollar, you can’t really go wrong. It’s quickly become my favorite iPhone game. It’s fun, challenging, and aesthetically pleasing. If you like puzzle games at all, pick it up.
spool32

I wrote the Developer to ask why there’s no android version:

“Any plans for an Android port?
If not, can you elaborate as to why not?

Thanks,
spool32″

I got this reply:

“I’d love to do an android port at some point. The game is currently written in obj-c, so it’ll require a complete rewrite, but it’s definitely something I’m aiming for.

Sent from my iPhone”

I guess that last line says it all… :)
MattF

Me too on Trainyard. And also, on supporting indie development on the iPhone.

And also, there are several original ideas in Trainyard’s gameplay that distinguish it from the current flood of physics-based ‘sorta-like Angry Birds’ games. For example, Trainyard levels have many correct solutions and there’s a database of solutions contributed by players. So buy it. I mean, for heaven’s sake, the guy’s Canadian.
BookGuy

I’m also a fan–it’s a very well done game, with enough twists and turns (no puns intended) to keep it interesting. Rix lets people post solutions on the website, and the solutions for some of the harder puzzles are as visually fascinating as the puzzles themselves. I got stuck on a few of the very hard ones, and I was consistently amazed at how people came up with some of the more elaborate solutions.
Samurai Gratz

Holy Cornelius Vanderbilt, did I love Railroad Tycoon. I too obsessed over laying those tracks and delivering that cargo. I got embarrassingly excited when a new version of the game was announced in 2003, but it was overly complicated and lost much of the simple design that had made the first two incarnations of Railroad Tycoon so incredibly satisfying to play.

Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, and Civilization: I’ve spent a great many hours of my life playing Sid Meier’s amazing games.
- sarah lacy
  
  I’m also a fan–it’s a very well done game, with enough twists and turns (no puns intended) to keep it interesting. Rix lets people post solutions on the website, and the solutions for some of the harder puzzles are as visually fascinating as the puzzles themselves. I got stuck on a few of the very hard ones, and I was consistently amazed at how people came up with some of the more elaborate solutions.
  google
Samurai Gratz

The post got me surfing: for fans of the original Railroad Tycoon, you can download the game for free on the site for Sid Meier’s Railroads!

http://www.2kgames.com/railroads/railroads.html

There goes my evening. (And possibly my weekend.)

I’ll definitely check out the App too. Sounds great.
- Mark Frauenfelder
  
  Windoze-only :(
  - JohnC
    
    “Windoze” seriously? Ironically I saw this post after my mini rant below about all the Apple-centricness of Boing Boing.
kostia

Railroad Tycoon was one of those games where you looked at the clock, played a few minutes, looked at the clock again, and six hours had passed. I dug it up a while back and can again play it on a DOS emulator on my Mac. Loved it then, love it now. I still have the original manuals and reference cards, too; I could never bear to toss them.

My point being, people have been trying to get me to try Trainyard all year and it turns out all I needed to hear was the two magic words, Railroad Tycoon. Off to the app store!
spool32

Seriously… Droid please! Aren’t we supposed to be all about the OSS around here? Bill, I wish you’d asked the dev why he only wrote the game for such a closed platform.
fnc

“It was like you were winding the stem of an ever-more-complicated machine you yourself had designed and built, and standing back and watching it go.”

I consider this to be a perfectly valid form of gameplay, and refer to these as “tinkerer” games. They can layer whatever form of scoring they like on top, but the game is actually about optimizing functions and systems to maximize something. Transport Tycoon was my fave along these lines.

And I hope this shows up on Android too.
- dccarles
  
  More love here for Railroad Tycoon. I always thought of Railroad Tycoon as more gamelike than, say, SimCity, which was more toylike, in that the player could make up their own objectives for SimCity. (What player of SimCity /hasn’t/ tried to reduce their city to complete rubble at least once?)
  - Scuba SM
    
    That’s how all my SimCity games ended… trying to reduce the city to rubble.
Robert

“Trainyard is a neat little casual game about making the trains run on time.”

Is there a Mussolini option?

…

What, too soon?
Bill Barol

Damn it — There goes my evening too. (And holy cow– the whole game clocks in at 15 mb.)
while1dan

This reminds me of a DOS “game” that consisted only of lines for tracks and character boxes for train cars. There was no objective I could discern: no levels or cargo or anything. Just make them go and don’t let them crash. If you’re going for longest time without a crash, you’d better have a stopwatch. But it was fun. Wish I could find its name. Google images is no help.
Bill Barol

Yeah, just noticed that. Maybe it’s just as well — seems like a lot of times when I look back at things I used to love, I no longer do. I call this “The Doobie Brothers Rule.”
- Mark Frauenfelder
  
  I call it the Kamandi Rule.
Anonymous

If they ever port Railroad Tycoon to iOS my whole life is wasted. I played every edition of that game. Trying Trainyard now…
Anonymous

Hey it’s Matt (the Trainyard guy) here. Thanks for the article, glad you enjoyed the game.

I was a HUGE Roller Coaster Tycoon player back in the day, so I love that comparison. They used to have those awesome roller coaster building contests on the RCT site. I tried to compete every month by making the most optimized/exciting coasters… I don’t think I ever won one though.
- Anonymous
  
  Matt here again… I’m dumb. Somehow I read Railroad Tycoon but thought of Roller Coaster Tycoon. I loved Railroad Tycoon waaaay too much when I was young, so doubt that this game has some of that influence in it. I remember the sheer joy when your stock price split or when you got the TGV