PopTop Software

~ the goodbye ~

I remember Railroad Tycoon II from the dial-up years, which in Turkey meant a connection billed by the minute like a phone call and a firm ceiling on anything you wanted to do with other people. A deep single-player strategy game was the better purchase under that arithmetic. You installed it once and it never asked for the line again.

The studio behind it was founded in 1993 in Fenton, Missouri by Phil Steinmeyer, and it spent its first years doing exactly the work a small strategy house did then. Iron Cross, a wargame, came out in 1994 and went nowhere in particular. After that came contract programming for New World Computing on the Windows releases of the first two Heroes of Might and Magic games, which is how a Missouri operation with almost no staff ended up with credits on one of the defining fantasy strategy series.

In January 1998 PopTop became one of the five development houses that founded Gathering of Developers, the publisher owned by the studios it published. That arrangement has its own grave here. What matters for this one is that the label shipped Railroad Tycoon II in its first year, and it was the game that made the experiment look like it might work.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the rails ~

Sid Meier built the original Railroad Tycoon at MicroProse in 1990 and moved on. The license drifted for most of a decade before it reached Missouri, and Steinmeyer did the bulk of the programming on the sequel himself. Railroad Tycoon II arrived in November 1998 as a bigger and considerably more legible game than its ancestor: isometric track you laid by hand, and a stock market underneath it that could bankrupt you faster than any bad route ever would.

It sold past every projection anyone had attached to it. The Second Century expansion followed in 1999, and Loki ported the game to Linux during the brief window when that was a business somebody was trying to run. Railroad Tycoon 3 came in 2003, rebuilt on a fully 3D map.

~ el presidente ~

Tropico shipped in April 2001 and was the other thing PopTop got right. You ran a Caribbean island as its dictator, balancing a treasury against a population that tracked its own happiness across a long list of separate needs, and rigging the elections when those numbers went bad. There was a Swiss account if you wanted one. The satire was broad enough to be funny and precise enough to sting, and the city builder underneath it was solid work.

The series outlived its authors comfortably. It passed through other developers after PopTop went and eventually settled with Kalypso in Germany. Tropico 6 came out in 2019, built by a studio that had nothing to do with Missouri.

~ folded into firaxis ~

Take-Two announced the PopTop acquisition on 24 July 2000, valued at roughly 5.8 million dollars, two months after it had bought Gathering of Developers outright. The studio was reorganized under the 2K Games label in January 2005 and shipped Shattered Union that year, a near-future American civil war strategy game that landed quietly. On 8 March 2006 Take-Two announced that PopTop had been merged into Firaxis. The Railroad Tycoon studio was absorbed into the company founded by the man who made Railroad Tycoon.

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