Have you ever Hsat down and actually considered how a train moves itself forward? Matt Peddlesden has. As executive producer on Dovetail’s Train Sim World 4, he’s thought about it more than most people. As he tells me about the inner workings of locomotives at Dovetail’s HQ in England, one thing becomes clear: if this wasn’t his job, he’d still be satisfying his passion and curiosity for trains.
That’s not a constant across the game industry. Not everyone you talk to is truly passionate about loot rarity, or brutal melee takedown animations, or seasonal skins. But over here in the world of simulators, they march to the beat of a slightly different drum. There’s an inherent passion here. You get the sense that many developers in this space are working simply because they want to see a certain thing made and then play it, and there’s a high amount of crossover between content creators and developers as a result.
It’s still gaming, more or less, but the rules are different. There’s an ultimate realism to strive for, and performing even mundane actions in a recognizably authentic way. It’s why you spend 20 minutes going through checklists before getting airborne in . And it’s why Peddlesden’s team has thought long and hard about the exact distribution of braking pressure between carriages in ’s roster.
