By Rob Shaw
Getting a job on Trainz back in the year 2000 was a dream come true and sometimes I still can't believe my luck. And on this day 19 years ago I was one of the first people in the world to join Planet Auran.
The team was full of youthful energy and as a group we religiously went to the kitchen for tea and coffee at ten-thirsty each morning. This was a source of much amusement to the people working on other projects. As I'm sure many of you remember, they were soon calling us the Brew Crew.
That's my shoulder you can see in the center of the pic, and Windwlkr on the right hand side.
Building Trainz from the ground up was a lot of fun, we were encouraged to be playful and it was tantalising to see it evolve. An enthusiastic community quickly grew around the project and became such a great source of inspiration and encouragement.
For those around way back then, who can forget the famous F7 Hotrod!
As exciting as it was to see our work coming to life, the approach to content creation in those early days was necessarily so much simpler. Compared to what is possible today the options available to any game artist were quite limited back then.
Here's the full set of Trainz locos circa 2002:
The evolution of gaming technology has led to techniques we scarcely dared to dream about. Our software engineers have done an amazing job of keeping up to date with these advances and have provided content creators with some stunningly satisfying avenues of expression.
I'm very proud as we approach our 20th year that the saga goes on and we continue to enjoy the support of so many passionate users. You have my heart felt gratitude!
Perhaps we may now dare to dream what the future of Trainz will bring!
