Transport Tycoon Deluxe (TTD) has re-released on Steam and GOG after being abandonware for 25 years. Whilst it’s great that you can now legally buy the game, OpenTTD is no longer available for free on Steam. I can only see this as a cash grab by an investment holding company.
Transport Tycoon Deluxe and OpenTTD #
Transport Tycoon is a 1994 game about managing a transportation company across road, rail, air, and sea. Transport Tycoon Deluxe (TTD) is an enhanced version of Transport Tycoon with additional features. The game was released for MS-DOS and Windows 95/98. Since Windows 2000, it has not been available to play on a modern operating systemfootnote 1.
OpenTTD is a fan-made open-source re-implementation of Transport Tycoon Deluxe released in 2004. It’s available natively for a wide variety of platforms. It contains many bug fixes and additional featuresfootnote 2 over the original game, whilst remaining faithful to the original gameplay.
I’ve spent an uncountable number of hours playing OpenTTD in the last 15 years. It’s free to play and endlessly addictive, especially if you have a certain kind of brain. OpenTTD trains are especially fun; you can build out train networks with signalling and dynamic pathing on a large scale.
In 2024, the rights to Transport Tycoon were purchased by a French holding company called Atari SAfootnote 3footnote 4. This holding company is not the original Atari from the 70s-80s, but has bought the rights to the Atari brand name.
In March 2026, Atari SA re-released Transport Tycoon Deluxe on Steam and GOG. OpenTTD is no longer available for free on Steam. Due to an agreement behind closed doors between the OpenTTD developers and Atari SA, new players will now need to purchase TTD to play OpenTTD on Steam or GOGfootnote 5. Users who already have OpenTTD in their library will not need to buy TTD. OpenTTD remains free when downloaded from the official website or a package manager.
My take #
Whilst OpenTTD does not contain any code or assets from the original game, it may have been created by decompiling and reverse engineering the original gamefootnote 6. OpenTTD is also, at its core, a 1:1 recreation of TTD, which can in itself be copyright infringementfootnote 7. These problems may result in OpenTTD’s copyright being compromised. If this is the case, the new intellectual property owners of TTD would be in their legal rights to take action against the developers of OpenTTD - to seek monetary damages, to cease development, and to remove it from existence.
The terms of the arrangement between OpenTTD and Atari SA are not public. But, hopefully, as part of this agreement Atari SA has granted OpenTTD indefinite permission to continue development. Requiring users to buy the original game on Steam and GOG is a preferable compromise to keep OpenTTD alive. It’s important that the terms of this are irrevocable so that Atari SA can’t just rugpull if their TTD bundle proves to be unprofitable.
However, just because something is legal does not mean it is ethical. I see this situation as unethical. The rights holders did not develop TTD; they simply bought the rights to a game that was abandoned and forgotten for 25 years. OpenTTD is the only reason why TTD is still relevant today. Without it, TTD would have died with the release of Windows 2000. The rights holders are attempting to benefit from 22 years of unpaid volunteer labour for a game they did not create.
Whilst the terms of the arrangement are not public, it appears that OpenTTD doesn’t receive a penny from purchases of TTD. Buying the bundle does not support the development of OpenTTD.
The re-release of TTD is just an emulator wrapping the DOS game. This isn’t even an actual port, remastering, or update of any kind!
What should they have done? #
By requiring the purchase of TTD to play OpenTTD on Steam, the rights holders are attempting to capitalise on 22 years of unpaid labour. Instead, I think they should have kept TTD as a completely separate purchase. They could allow players to purchase the original TTD graphics to use with OpenTTD. This way, there is a benefit to buying TTD for OpenTTD, there’s an actual value-add. This would have been received more favourably by the community.
Conclusion #
I see this as a cash grab by an investment holding company to benefit from 22 years of unpaid labour.
This is ultimately a problem with copyright law. I think that copyright lasts far too long; the copyright for the original game should have expired sometime in the 25 years when it was abandoned and not available for purchase for a modern platform.
I feel for the OpenTTD developers. This is a pretty awkward situation to be in and I don’t blame them at all for the agreement they’ve reached with Atari SA. I hope that the agreement places OpenTTD in a much better legal situation and allows it to continue for many years to come.
I am not a lawyer. There may be inaccuracies in this post, take it as opinion rather than fact.
Comments
Interesting, I did not hear about this until now.
I was actually looking into the true origin of OpenTTD a while back out of personal curiosity and what seems to have happened was that Ludde took the raw disassembly (the game being written purely in assembly making that a lot easier to pour through than something generated from an optimising compiler), translated it into higher-level C code, wired it up to SDL for cross-platform support and then put a GPLv2 license on it. Not really a clean room reimplementation approach.
I guess this is not too dissimilar to modern game decompilation projects which have generally remained up in code form despite producing 1:1 binaries of games (there’s no way they do not look at the game’s disassembly!) from litigious companies such as Nintendo. However when I was reading old Transport Tycoon forum threads I found a funny remark about how OpenTTD is entirely legally above board because the only person who had been exposed to the original TTD disassembly was Ludde, who lives in Sweden - the magical middle land where copyright does not exist! (Not their exact words, but I have seen similar sentiment elsewhere well into today’s age. It’s not true.)
I’m glad that Principia has seen a better post-commercial fate. Things looked bleak for a while before the open source release, but now we’re truly free.