This Game Lets You Build the Transit System of Your Dreams in the Real World
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7mx93/this-game-lets-you-build-the-transit-system-of-your-dreams-in-the-real-world
About two years ago, a Barcelona-based video game developer named Carlos Carrasco had an idea that he now calls "very, very, very crazy." He had been playing an open-sourced descendant of Transport Tycoon Deluxe called Open TTD. But something about it wasn't satisfying to him. What if, Carrasco wondered, instead of having artificial maps or limited geographic areas, the game had only one map. You know, the map? Of Earth?
That game, cheekily called NIMBY Rails—NIMBY being an acronym for "Not In My Back Yard," a term for people opposed to transportation or housing development in their area—is possibly the most complicated transit-development game ever devised. It allows users to build a transit system anywhere in the world, or even across the world if so desired, on a version of Open Street Maps, an open source version of Google Maps. Users build stations, set ticket prices, train speed based in part on the curvature of the tracks, schedules, and countless other variables.