Car Park Capital turns car dependency into a tycoon sim

Pave paradise, they said and charge admission! I live in Los Angeles and the one thing we love is a parking lot. So in Car Park Capital you are hired by Big Auto to release quiet towns from their slumber—buying land, destroy homes for asphalt, drilling for oil, and sloganeer pro-car catch phrases from megaphones until every resident becomes what the game cheerfully calls a carbrain. There is a Ferris wheel for cars, for when traffic gets bad enough that people need distracting. The announcement reel set Steam Early Access for October 9.

The solo developer is Hilko Janssen of Hilkojj Interactive, in the Netherlands, (a legendarily bike-friendly country) and the project’s origin is perfect: he had a university assignment to simulate a parking garage, as Janssen told the Parking Reform Network. The publisher is the relaunched MicroProse, which lands somewhere between irony and homecoming: that's the label that taught a generation to read cities as systems but isn't shipping a sim that treats cars as violence. You can read any citizen’s thoughts, stage-manage anti-car protests into irrelevance, and deliberately rival public transport, because, as the Steam page puts it, “You don’t want trains or walkable towns.”

Management games have always smuggled ideology in their spreadsheets. We made that case when MultipliCITY called SimCity capitalist hogwash in 2014, and the original SimCity manual read like a textbook on urban development. What is newer is a tycoon game whose satire is central to the game's design, not a sideshow.

Early Access runs roughly ten months, with 1.0 planned for summer 2027. Three scenarios at launch: an American city, Florida with boat-cars, and the Pyramids of Giza.