OpenTTD 20th-anniversary post

Cite as: OpenTTD 20th-anniversary post
Original: https://www.openttd.org/news/2024/03/06/happy-birthday.html
sha256: bcb0ae861c81df17bb5d769681743dcaabaca318ac1f6c59e0904efeeb05ed21
Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20260918162126/https://www.openttd.org/news/2024/03/06/happy-birthday
Accessed: 2026-10-26
Licence: © OpenTTD contributors; Wayback capture
Credit: Owen Rudge (orudge), who released OpenTTD 0.1 and has been in the Transport Tycoon community since the late 1990s, writing on the project's twentieth anniversary.
Notes: The developer's own account of OpenTTD's start: Ludvig Strigeus's 2002 project, the March 2004 release, and the versions after it. The Wayback capture is complete; the same text is reproduced in the OpenTTD news archive (capture 20260303071726) and on TT-Forums (p=1268213).

Cited on

OpenTTD

Claims (5)

Owen Rudge, who released OpenTTD, writes that Ludvig Strigeus ("Ludde") had been working on a clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe since 30 June 2002, and first told him about it by ICQ message in March 2003: a working version of the game, written in C, though incomplete.	`paragraph 2paragraph 5paragraph 7paragraph 8`	Dev blog
Rudge recalls that in 2004 the Transport Tycoon community played Transport Tycoon Deluxe with Josef Drexler's TTDPatch, which had fundamental limits: the map size couldn't change, cargo types couldn't be added, and multiplayer was hard to improve. A clone in a high-level language, he writes, "got people very excited indeed". The OpenTTD wiki gives the same reason: the patch's way of changing the game made many features near impossible.	`paragraph 9paragraph 11paragraph 12`	Dev blog
Rudge released OpenTTD 0.1 as open source on 6 March 2004, naming it himself, with a SourceForge project and a forum on TT-Forums. His release-day post calls it Ludde's "C reconstruction of TTD", 95% complete, and tells players to copy Transport Tycoon Deluxe's Windows graphics and sound file to run it.	`paragraph 15paragraph 17paragraph 18`	Dev blog
After the release, Rudge writes, a community of developers formed to fix bugs and add features, and support for TTDPatch's NewGRF format began to work four months later. The OpenTTD wiki says other developers joined Strigeus on the project.	`paragraph 20paragraph 23`	Dev blog
Rudge writes that the move to GitHub in 2018 and the release on Steam in 2021 re-energised development. Rock Paper Shotgun reported in February 2021 that OpenTTD would reach Steam on 1 April, with the 1.11 update, after it had reached the Microsoft Store; the changelog dates 1.11.0 to 1 April 2021.	`paragraph 28`	Dev blog