The missing Railroad Tycoon 2 map…

Probably the most successful title in my career was Railroad Tycoon 2. We released it in Fall of 1998, then an expansion pack and a ‘gold edition’ in 1999. We were surprised that the game continued to sell well for months, then years, and I was particularly surprised in 2001 when the publisher (and by that time, owner of PopTop), Take Two, asked for another compendium. So we took everything that we had related to Railroad Tycoon 2, added 50 new maps, and put out RT2 – Platinum Edition that summer.

But we made one (small) mistake when we assembled RT2 – Platinum. Somehow, in assembling the 50 new maps (there were 126 maps total), one file was accidentally copied over another, and so the Alaska map we were supposed to include was displaced by a second version of a fantasy map called “Tanagore Island”.

I’m pretty sure we posted the fixed version of the Alaska map on our web site shortly thereafter, but I can’t find it now. We may have fixed the problem in a later re-mastering of the disk, but at least one old/early version I checked out had the incorrect ’50th map’.

However, that map was one of a handful that we licensed from the RT2 mapmaking community that had sprung up. It was made by Steve Lorenz, and there’s still a copy of it floating around the various RT2 websites, including right here, as well as a mirror on this site.

Anyways, just in case anyone picked up an old copy of RT2 Platinum and saw the “50 new maps” on the cover and was disappointed to find only 49, or saw “over 125 scenarios” on the back (because of the Alaska omission, there were exactly 125, not “over” 125), download the Alaska map. It’s a nicely done scenario 🙂

Also, if you’re still playing RT2 after all this time, there’s a patch we made in 2003 [2017 EDIT – I had a link here to the 1.56 patch on a site called Fileshack that is no longer valid as of 2017 – it seems Fileshack as a whole is gone] that adjusts screen scrolling speed for today’s fast computers. RT2 was developed on a Pentium-Pro 200 Mhz, and so the effects of today’s 10-20X faster machines weren’t readily foreseeable or testable… The patch also adds support for using the middle mouse wheel for zooming in and out.

While you’re at it, you can check out some of the other 459 RT2 maps on the site, or the mere 49 RT3 maps (RT3 maps were harder to make, and the fan community for making them never got on board RT3 quite the way they had for RT2.)

[Some edits to this post made 5/22/2012 and 2/2/2017]

17 Responses to “The missing Railroad Tycoon 2 map…”

  1. Trent Trautman Says:

    I happily admit, I forked over my hard earned dollars for RT2 Platinum. RT3 never seemed as good, though. I can still remember many good times playing RT2.

    For me, what I loved about it was the extremely detailed simulation. I loved being able to buy shares of my train company (and competitor companies!) on the stock market, and fiddling with individual train routes, and buying up successful companies along train routes.

    Sure, the graphics were dated by the time I got it…but that didn’t matter. It was the vast and varied simulation that made the game for me.

  2. Dmitry Smirnov Says:

    Phil,
    Just want to say thank you for both rrt2 and rrt3. Especially rrt3 — where economic model was so good, complex and close to reality (no possibility to just take all passanger from big station and move them to small substantion in the forest, just to ruin the competitior).

    We are playing rrt3 game with children and they enjoy it very much.

    Thank you.

  3. Phil Steinmeyer Says:

    Glad you like it. Sometimes I wonder if the RT3 economy model was overdone – if it confused people more than RT2. But personally I liked RT3’s model a lot better. I think it’s one of the few games to model fairly realistically a complex economy.

  4. Dmitry Smirnov Says:

    >Sometimes I wonder if the RT3 economy model was overdone

    It is not easy to predict user’s perception of the game features. As for me the new economics model was one of the most important thing in the game.

    But the added complexity is often negatively accepted. Recall simcity 4 — excellent economics and so many rants in forums…

    It is still 4 favorite games on my desktop — RRT3, SimCity4, SimGolf and SpaceRangers (made by local developer in Vladivostok, Russia) — all with the compex model and strategy. But I guess this copmlexity doesn’t spur the sales.

  5. Winter Wolves Games Says:

    Oh well… I didn’t even know you made THAT game!!!
    I wish to congratulate and thank you for that one (RT2 in particular). I spent so much time playing it when was younger!!
    Just a question… how come that after such great simulation/strategy titles you are now making casual games? 🙂

    (I know it’s an evil question!)

  6. Phil Steinmeyer Says:

    Lots of factors. Among them:

    The market for all kinds of ‘hard-core’, retail-oriented PC games, including tycoon games and sim-like games like Tropico, has pretty much dried up, excepting for a few of the mega-IPs that are 6-10 years old where people reliably buy sequels (i.e. SimCity, RollerCoaster Tycoon, The Sims).

    Also, creating a competitive title in that arena requires a really big team these days, and several years of development. I’m not interested in projects that big – I enjoy simpler stuff.

  7. Winter Wolves Games Says:

    Well yes, seems quite hard to make a top hit game working alone (I’m still surprised about Democracy success being a one man game). A pity though, I would like to play RT4 🙂

  8. North Says:

    > Sometimes I wonder if the RT3 economy model was overdone

    Hi Phil, just wanted to say I love the RT3 economy model, it’s outstanding and has made RT3 as a game for me. I never was much one for micro-managing trains – love the high level strategy, only wish it could make be even more complex, e.g. running for political office, doling out pork etc.

    Incidentally I was one of the guys who worked on the RT3 promo minigame at

    http://www.railroadtycoon3.com/rt3/us/downloads/game.html

    – that was fun, but not RT3 by any means 😉

  9. Jeff Says:

    Hello Phil, I loved RRT2 and RRT3 equally. You did eveything you could in RRT2, and then made a new game in RRT3. It was good, unique, and different. I still remember the challenge of getting a proftable route made through/around the mountains in the Swiss Alps scenario of RRT3. That was a lot of fun 🙂

  10. Hambone Says:

    Hey Phil
    Thank you for taking your time to make such a wonderful game! I am in my late 30s and still playing pc games like a kid. Time after time, I go back to RRT2 because of its outstanding playability. Game quality is not based on graphics, like most of today’s “eye candy” games but on easy playability, background, mechanics and expandibility. The ability to adjust the economy difficulty is an awesome feature. Some players like to micromanagement and some do not want to or are not ready too. RRT3 demo did not do it for me and the new renditions offered today do not meet the standards RRT2 has set. I would ask that RRT2 be brought back to take advantage of today’s machines…RRT4? Oh…please add more locomotives, double locomotive/cars, custom paint/real world railroad skins, rail bridges to cross competing railroad’s rails, triple tracks, smaller airports, semi truck warehouses and improved sea port trading.

    Thanks again
    Hambone

  11. RTplayer Says:

    Howdy! My dad is a jr. high/high school teacher and uses RT2 in his business survey class for junior highers. Through it several of his students have gotten bitten by the “business bug” and I would be surprised if when all is said and done your game has inspired some young people to become entrepreneurs. I have three comments to make regarding RT3, which I also enjoy. The first is that I like how passengers and mail actually care where they are hauled (this is much, much more realstic than RT2 was in this area). The second is that I liked “drop-shipping” or “cargo depoting” and I’d like it if they were added (perhaps by way of a patch?) to RT3. I found this quite useful in RT2-Platinum (the version that first introduced me to Railroad Tycoon), but I’m not quite sure how this would be implemented in the RT3 economic . The third comment I have is that I have discovered a unique glitch in RT3, although I’m not sure whether this appears on computers other than mine. Having played through the whole campaign with the exception of the last 15-20 years of the final scenario (which I am currently working on), I couldn’t help but notice that the ground color slowly changes over the game years. It starts out realistic, but slowly changes as time progresses. I’m not sure whether the speed I run the game at (I spend most of my time on “very slow” because it gives me time to have creative solutions occur to me while it’s still early enough in the game to implement them). All I know is that after the first 15-20 game years, the ground has patches of all sorts of color, and after 30 years the ground is mostly white with scattered green and yellow “splotches”, and the surfaces of the lakes/oceans have become covered in blotches of many colors ranging from blue to pink. I’d appreciate any advice that could help me solve this problem. Just in case my description of the problem wasn’t clear enough, I have also documented this “chromatic evolution”, if you will, with screenshots designed to highlight the nature of this problem I’m having.

  12. RTplayer Says:

    I made a little typo when I said that “I would be surprised if when all is said and done your game has inspired some young people to become entrepreneurs.” What I meant to say is, “I would NOT be surprised…”

  13. Phil Steinmeyer Says:

    RTPlayer – I’m glad you liked them.

    The color blotch thing is probably some sort of interaction with your video card – it’s conceivable that updating your video drivers would help, and somewhat more likely that a new video card might address it, but I certainly can’t guarantee that either would work.

  14. Chuck Castleberry Says:

    RRT 2nd ED ‘Mother Russia’ Campaign is programed to lose at least one territory at the end of the first day even if sufficient number of loads are delivered. I’m trying for Gold without any territories lost and am in need of a patch to correct this. Chuck, age 76

  15. Phil Steinmeyer Says:

    Sorry, I don’t even have RT2 installed anymore, so I can’t really take a look at this.

  16. Chuck Castleberry Says:

    Thank you for your reply. Since sending my comment, I have solved it. Chuck

  17. Venkat Koduru Says:

    I got RT3 as a birthday gift a few years ago. It was awsome to say the least. And just a few weeks ago I tried out Tropico (the demo) :)… how I wish you’d get back into making those kind of games. I suppose you’re right though; I’m a minority; there’s not much of market for those any longer.

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