A long bank holiday weekend is a good time to tackle a project. Maybe think about putting up some shelves, organising your drawers, cleaning the tent you’d left festering since summer, or building networks of road, rail, water, and air transport to shunt people and products around the world for fun and profit. Friend, if the last idea tickles your fancy, you’re in luck. OpenTTD, the excellent open-source remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, is now available free on Steam too.
A Steam release is mostly a convenience (and to fend off undersupported unofficial releases) but hey, maybe it’ll introduce more folks to the game too. We have called it one of the best building games as well as one of the best management games. Would those categories combine to make it one of the best gaffer games?
While the official word is that “OpenTTD is not an abbreviation of anything”, the Steam page is quite open that it “is an open-source remake and expansion of the 1995 Chris Sawyer video game Transport Tycoon Deluxe.” I guess that lingustic shrug is sufficient to avoid the ire of lawyers? As well as supporting modern systems, OpenTTD improves upon the original with larger maps, more building options, expanded multiplayer, and loads of handy new features and quality-of-life improvements.
You can download OpenTTD free from Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Or from its website, same as ever. And the source code is on GitHub.
OpenTTD did originally require a copy of Transport Tycoon Deluxe to import its art and sound, but the project now has its own non-copyrighted alternatives. So yep, just download and play – though you can import the original art from TTD if you have it.
Alongside the Steam launch, the devs have released a new update. Version 1.11 boosts performance, improves the Mac version, and generally fixes and tweaks lots of things. See the v1.11 changelog for more.