We were standing having a coffee in their crew train area, and he noticed a pool of water, about the size of an iPhone on the floor. “I can remember just chatting with the top driver, the head of trains on Virgin West Coast. And it comes through in ways you wouldn’t expect it. “It’s hard to express just how focused they are on safety, how focused they are on professionalism, and this duty to their customers, to their passengers, to get them safely home. “What they do is incredibly important, and they are almost a breed apart, train drivers, when you spend time with them,” Jackson says.
It’s the precision that creates this illusion - hitting each turn at the right speed and pulling into the station so that all the doors line up with the platform just so.
He looks at the people who drive them with reverence, noting how they hold thousands of lives in their hands every day, and how, to the passenger, the process of getting from A to B can appear automated, even though it’s very much not. Jackson is genuinely enthusiastic about trains. With technology, though, nothing is impossible. And it had gone, so it was impossible to do.” I wanted to get up at six o’clock in the morning and drive the seven o’clock to Manchester. You know, the steam trains that I wanted to drive had been only gone for probably twenty years, but they were gone. “When I was fifteen or sixteen, the trains I wanted to drive had gone. “There’s only two massive problems with my dream, and it’s still my dream,” he says. Still, even if Jackson’s dream had come true, it wouldn’t have been quite as he imagined it as a wide-eyed child looking longingly towards the tracks. The only thing that stopped him in his tracks was the fact he’s colourblind, like me and eight percent of the world’s male population. In fact, his dream job was to be an actual, honest-to-god train driver. While being the CEO of a successful company is something many would aspire to, game development wasn’t Jackson’s first career choice. But at the heart it was, ‘dolls’ house, train set’.”
#Video trainz simulator simulator#
“Certainly The Sims has gone in the direction it’s gone, and Train Simulator has become very much more about recreating, simulating in a very hard sense, the world. “They end up being very different things to that initial concept,” Jackson explains. When it came to running Dovetail, the goal was to target another niche market in train fans, while the original pitch was: “What would a virtual train set look like?” And while it might be quite loose as a “sim”, it shares a lot of lineage with traditional simulation games, expecting you to micromanage every aspect of your sims’ lives. The original pitch for The Sims was as a virtual dolls’ house. More people in Britain played it as a percentage than any other country in the world.” But we reached out to that audience, and it really worked. “I can remember being told I was nuts for advertising in those magazines, because it had just never been done before. “They were having them bought for them, and so we had a whole programme of reaching out to young women through magazines like Sugar and Bliss. “What was interesting was we were able to see that young women were playing video games, but they weren’t buying them,” Jackson tells me as we sit together in Dovetail’s conference room.
#Video trainz simulator series#
Jackson, back when he worked for EA, helped to launch the series in the UK.
The Sims was an outlier at that time - a game conceptualised by women and with women as its main target audience. All the magazines were geared towards men, all the writing about games was men writing for men, and all the games were targeting that same demographic. Paul Jackson, the CEO of Dovetail Games, developer of a range of train and fishing simulators, has previous with targeting seemingly niche audiences.īack in 2000, video games were predominantly seen as a male pastime.