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Railroad Tycoon was a neat idea. It basically paved the way for Civilization, in that I got the idea of taking multiple simple systems and having them work together to create an interesting complexity. There was operating the railroad, playing the stock market, building track. It was like different things that individually are pretty simple and easy to understand and easy to get into, that when they interact, create an interesting kind of complexity.—Sid Meier
I think this was the first game with Tycoon
in the title,
though I'm not absolutely sure. It is one of Sid Meier's earlier works,
after Pirates! but before Civilisation. The PC version is the original
one, the others are—slightly later—ports.
Railroad Tycoon Deluxe was just a re-release with improved (hi-res) graphics and sound. Due to performance issues it was not all that popular. Railroad Tycoon II was a new game with completely new isometric graphics and more complex gameplay (but no tunnels).
Sid Meier's assistant for this game was Bruce Shelley, a former Avalon Hill employee who had helped design (or even was the mastermind behind) the 1830 boardgame. In the abovequoted interview, Sid Meier relates that they played that board game a lot before work on Railroad Tycoon commenced. Bruce Shelley would later found Ensemble Studios, the makers of Age of Empires.
