MicroProse put Car Park Capital into Early Access on Steam on October 9, 2026, and the job it hands you is to pave a town for Big Auto. It costs $16.99 on Windows and Linux, with 10% off until October 23. The developer, Hilkojj Interactive, is one person: Hilko Janssen, in the Netherlands, who wrote his own game and rendering engine for it. In his studio note, Janssen says the engine lets him “create games with nostalgic mechanics and retro-styled graphics.”
From oil well to drive-thru
It plays as a real-time management sim. You buy land, evict the tenants and build parking, either flat on the ground or stacked into garages. Cars sell from your own vending machines, and every car you sell needs somewhere to park. Oil comes out of the ground, goes to a refinery and ends up at your gas stations. Diners and big box stores pull in more drivers, and those drivers need more parking. The release counts hundreds of citizens and vehicles moving through linked systems of traffic, production, needs, public opinion and profit.
Public opinion is how you lose. Each citizen has needs, a happiness level and views on the car-filled town around them. Pave too much and people protest, and protesters can block your businesses and sway their neighbours. You can answer with billboards, statues and megaphone trucks, or plant plastic trees to bring Civil Unrest down. The numbers live in the Stat-o-matic, which is the game’s ledger of income, spending and citizen needs. I approve of any game that ships with its own spreadsheet.
In Cities: Skylines, or in Theos: Cities of Myth, you build for the people who live there, and the score is whether they’re happy. Here you build for Big Auto, the score is profit, and happiness counts because a happy driver pays more for parking and fuel. So it’s a tycoon game with a town attached. MicroProse also had its name on the box of Transport Tycoon in 1994. Trains and subways are your competition, and the job is to talk their riders into cars.
Early Access starts with three maps, each a scenario with its own challenge. The store page plans about 10 months before 1.0 in summer 2027, with more maps, more building options and deeper oil drilling on the list. It also says the price will go up as content lands. The launch discount ends October 23, and anyone who wants the full map list can wait for 1.0 and pay a bit more for it.
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