Microsoft Train Simulator

» see microsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in june 2001 i was 17, finishing high school in ankara, walking to the internet cafe for counter-strike most evenings. microsoft train simulator was on the shelf at vatan computer in english-import boxes that cost around 80 lira when a meal was 3. nobody i knew bought one. the sim genre in turkey at that age was almost entirely fifa with some gta and need for speed in the mix, train sim looked like the kind of thing your uncle's german neighbor played in a basement.

the game was developed by kuju entertainment, a british studio in godalming with about 200 people, and published by microsoft games studio's aces team in june 2001. aces was the small group inside microsoft known for flight simulator, train sim was their attempt to extend the same patient-simulator dna into another mode of transport. six included routes. the alps in austria. the tokaido shinkansen in japan paired with the odakyu line out of tokyo. the settle-carlisle line in northern england. the marias pass on the burlington northern in montana on the us side. and a sixth out west that nobody remembers the name of. the package shipped with a route editor plus an activity editor and a small set of stock locomotives to bash together your own runs.

back then it was a hit. metacritic 84, around 192,000 copies sold in the us alone by christmas 2001, by 2005 the worldwide number was just over a million. those were strong numbers for a niche category sim, somewhere between a flight simulator add-on and a mainline ea release. for whatever reason train simulator 2 was already in development at kuju and was kanballed in 2004 when microsoft restructured aces back onto flight sim.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

train sim's hook was that it modeled the physics of a heavy locomotive accelerating and braking, which most arcade train games of the time did not. you could open the throttle on an sd40-2 hauling 60 grain cars over a 1.5% grade and watch the speed bleed when the curve came up. you could also fail your run, miss a stop, slip the wheels on wet rail. the genre was already big in japan thanks to densha de go, train sim was the first attempt at a global western take on the same loop.

the route and activity editors were what kept the game going long after microsoft stopped supporting it. the modding scene built thousands of additional routes over the next 20 years, full norfolk southern coal mainlines, full british rail intercity 125 timetables, full tokyo metro lines, hand-built and shared on sites like trainsim.com and uktrainsim. about 30,000 community mods exist for the original game today. the consumer-shelf product had no successor at microsoft, the install base just kept playing the 2001 box.

~ the long tail ~

aces studio inside microsoft was closed in january 2009 as part of the broader microsoft games studios layoff round, train simulator 2's cancellation in 2004 was effectively the end of microsoft's direct involvement. flight simulator x had shipped in 2006 and was the studio's last release, after the 2009 closure the flight sim line was eventually licensed out to dovetail games (the spin-off from rail simulator developer railsimulator.com). dovetail bought the rights to the microsoft train sim assets in 2014, re-released the original 2001 game on steam in 2016 as train simulator classic with updates for windows 10.

in 2026 train simulator classic is still on steam, the modding community has moved most of its active work onto train simulator 2024 and run 8 and the various open rails branches. open rails itself, the gpl-licensed open-source rebuild of the msts engine, is the project that probably has the most active development on the original game's content. it runs the same 2001 routes at higher resolution and frame rates that the original engine could not.

~ the funny part ~

i was not paying attention to train sim during its life. anyway, the part that interests me about it from a distance is that the actual community of train sim players got bigger every year after microsoft abandoned the product, not smaller. the box had no marketing budget, no patches, no first-party future after 2004. the route editor turned out to be the thing that mattered. for 23 years a niche of people who care a lot about specific bits of north american and european and japanese rail infrastructure have been hand-building those routes and sharing them. microsoft accidentally shipped a tool whose useful life outran the studio that wrote it by about a decade.

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