New additions include riot police and nuisance parking

Image credit: MicroProse Software

Car Park Capital is a triumphantly unwholesome tycoon game in which you try to make an entire society utterly dependent on cars. You start with a relatively green-ish map, and do your best to tarmac it all over. A strange and unlikely prospect, I know!

When we first covered this motorist management sim last year, the options included putting up billboards to brainwash obstinate pedestrians, and selling people banana-mobiles. Since then, developer Hilko Janssen of Hilkojj Interactive has found a publisher in MicroProse. If you were hoping that MicroProse might persuade Janssen to give up on his visions of total automotive apocalypse, you were hoping in vain.

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Car Park Capital has oil derricks now. It has offensively jaunty golf carts, for people who can't even be bothered to walk to the other end of a parking lot. It has leaking fuel trucks, and giant plastic trees to replace all the vegetation you've murdered with those leaking fuel trucks. It has riot police to beat up the people protesting about habitat loss.

Here are some highlights from Janssen's social media and Steam devlogs. Firstly, you'll be able to build a network of drive-thru facilities - giant toilets, giant perfume dispensers, giant hamburger stands, giant Ferris Wheels – the better to ensure that people never have to leave their vehicles. To operate your fast food joints you'll of course need a beef industry, with giant open-air meat grinders. If your cows escape, you can send flying saucers to abduct them.

Yes, this is the cartoonish kind of evil. See also: you can build carparks inside the Pyramids of Giza. But it's a proper management simulation, nonetheless, and there's a core of seriousness. One of the early sparks for Car Park Capital was an old piece of real-life American car propaganda, Give Yourself The Green Light.

"Car dependency is a lot lesser here in the Netherlands than in the United States but it wasn’t always like this," Janssen explained to Parking Reform in June. "In the 60s and 70s car dependency was in fact on the rise here too. Where I live there were plans to fill in Amsterdam’s canals with concrete to make roads and highways.

"That never happened here thankfully but it did in a nearby city only to turn it back into a canal decades later," he continued, "so it went from water to highway and back to water. Living in a place where you can see both what was lost and what was recovered definitely plays into the way I think about making this game."

Some more highlights from that interview: NPCs are capable of parking badly, wasting a space. "I might also add other little annoyances, like someone parking in a place that blocks an important road, or someone endlessly circling a full parking lot and complaining," Janssen said. "I think these little details help capture the absurdity of car dependency, making the game more relatable and humorous."

The goal of enforcing car use obliges a different spin on certain city management fundamentals. You'll want to demolish those inner city apartment blocks and replace them with pricey suburban homes, for example, so that people have to drive to work.

The greatest horror is that Car Park Capital still looks gorgeous, with dorky isometric citizens and toytown buildings that remind me of 1997's comparably villainous Constructor (though the more immediate visual inspiration is RollerCoaster Tycoon). I absolutely can't wait to build a Cadillac carousel in every nature reserve and ruin the air quality for miles around.