Buried in my computer gaming past is a game which may have been the starting point of my interest in city building games. Interestingly enough, the game which I suspect kindled that passion actually isn't a city building game. I have a suspicion that I may have started building cities and developing regions on a railway company management game. I have a vague recollection of having owned a copy of the original Simcity and Simcity 2000 but I don't have any screen shots documenting my time spent on those games. On the other hand, I have a few screen shots of A-Train, as it was branded by Maxis when they re-branded the original Japanese game "Take the A-Train" (A列車でいこう).
I spent a fair bit of time playing A-Train and was quite intrigued by the essay included in the user manual. I learned a few tricks to give myself somewhat immense amounts of game cash to basically do whatever I wanted to do in the game. But initially, I followed the proscribed route for playing the game and challenged the risk of going bankrupt and thus crashing out of a scenario.
On my virtual hard disk for my Mac OS9 emulator I have about a dozen scenarios I had played to some degree or another. The basic premise was to take a cash seed and build a thriving economy based on a railway. One could dabble in the real estate market (including some simplistic form of land speculation) and the stock market to expand the corporation. Another source of capital was bank loans. The machine I used to play this game when I first purchased it was a Mac iivi.
Anyways, here is a look at one city/region I dug up in my game screen shot archive.
This little city was named Briarton. The goal of the game was to build up the city, and thus the customer base, for the railway. In this screen shot, the dock in the bottom right is where a constant supply of building materials arrives. Freight trains transport those materials to other stations, serviced by commuter trains, where hopefully construction of buildings will take place. In this particular screen shot we can see that the city has experienced a decent amount of growth.
This particular city has a ways to go. I have a vauge recollection that it eventually became a decent sized metropolis. In this screen shot you can spot hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartment buildings, and an amusement park. Other busineses which can appear or be built in this game are golf courses, ski slopes, and sports arenas. In addition to the docks, one can add an airport to a city. A small point to make note of is that there aren't many roads in this game. Roads only appear when there is sufficient development near a large station. Another feature which requires sufficient development to spur its arrival is a shinkansen line. Oddly enough, the game doesn't provide a station which can be built to take advantage of that type of rail line. Of course, being a railway management system, there was a tool to manage train routing and scheduling.
One charming point about this game is that it has night and day cycles coupled with seasonal cycles. And if one keeps an eye out for it, one can spot Santa Claus and his sleigh on Christmas Eve night.
I did play this game's Japanese successor, A-Train 4, for a short while, That one was an expansion of its predecessor. Added to it were subterranean views, subway stations, subterranean building development, buses, variations in business types such as inns and restaurants; modular stations, and a simplistic road/highway sytem. In addition, the train scheduling system was moderately enhanced. I ran the game in Windows XP emulation on Windows 7, That may explain my lack of screen shots. To the best of my knowledge, I only played two scenarios in the game. Here's the only screen shot I have left of the game in action.
The skills I learned to manage a virtual railway company and its subsidiaries probably came in handy when I transitioned to virtual city management and development. The sad thing is that as the A-Train series transitioned to 3D graphics I lost interest. The move to 3D brought in the additional component of managing a camera to view what one is doing. I suppose someday I may get over that learning curve and find myself once again enjoying the role of a railway company CEO.
