That the Trainz forum is now 25 years old today?
They went live on the 01/08/2000 to promote what was Trainz Community Edition. I joined the forums on the 14/08/2000 looking for a train simulator that was more engaging than what I was using, that’s when I discovered after many hours of trawling through search engines (I can’t remember which one I used, Yahoo maybe? Google wasn’t on the horizon). For those in Trainz, if you noticed, my KUID author number (Koolthingz Unique IDentification) is actually a very low 30051. Yep, that low.
Auran as it was back then, had a LOT of big plans for Trainz, digital downloadable content was thought of way back in 2002, but didn’t happen until much later. Despite being in the community for a long time, I’ve also only met 2 employees from Auran, I wonder what they are doing now? Ironically, that was in London Victoria way back in 2004. I should really visit n3v, but getting to Australia is a bit more difficult and possibly requires a long stay.
One other thing, I was actually 14 when I joined, I’m now nearly 40! How time flies.
Of interest, I’ve got a draft blog post as I write this of a very rare version of Trainz that I plan to update in the future, let’s just say this, its rare as it never was released. The NDA has long expired, so I don’t think I’ll come to any disrepute over it. All I will say is, that you will be surprised, it was talked about, it exists but never made it to market, it was abandoned almost just before it was released.
I think it’s because the Apple Mac’s were going through their second transitioning stage, I can’t remember the exact reason why the plug was pulled. I also still retain the computer I was testing it on as well, it’s on the shelf of shame in my room,
untouched from when I played with it years ago in 2 forms. Again, if I get a chance to talk about it and spend some time in my really packed diary to finish the post, I’ll explain more.
Hopefully, I’ll finish it before Trainz turns 25 and it will be interesting to see if n3v still has the original source code, I don’t think they do.