How Pizza Tycoon Simulates Traffic On A 25 MHz CPU

A deep dive into how the 1994 DOS game Pizza Tycoon simulated city traffic on a 25 MHz 386 CPU. The analysis, done while building an open source modern engine called Pizza Legacy, reveals a surprisingly simple algorithm: road tiles encode travel directions, cars follow one-way paths, random direction choices at intersections prevent looping, and collision detection uses a list-check with a 10-tick wait on blocks. Despite its simplicity and minor bugs, the result produces convincingly natural-looking traffic behavior.