Yeah the DOS version was called Pizza Tycoon everywhere. The Amiga version was in German and was called Pizza Connection. Only for the digital re-release in 2017 did they go with Pizza Connection, but all the assets of the DOS version (including that re-release) call it Pizza Tycoon.
There are some rules where in their collision detection they basically don't check; for example cars going east will never intersect with cars going south so just drive through them. I'm not sure if this was an optimisation to just speed up collision detection by checking fewer cases or they were trying to prevent too many traffic jams by having better collision detection. Probably a bit of both :)
I'm writing the engine from scratch (not re-creating the original engine) so it definitely won't have the original bug. Of course I'll have my own bugs but at least its open source now so it's fixable by more people :D
That's true! In the original if you don't have at least 3 of the pizza recipes from the "cook book" that shipped with the game your restaurant popularity stat gets divided by 8, which makes it really difficult to make any profit :)
I tried the sequels and they never clicked for me either. Probably also due to the missing nostalgia factor :)
As to why I did this; when I had some time between university and starting a job many years ago I was looking for a hobby coding project and was inspired by TTDPatch and OpenTTD so I figured I'd do the same but for Pizza Tycoon. No specific reason other than that I played the game a lot as a teenager and there were some small things that I found annoying, so I saw some room for quality of life improvements. Fully aware that not many people care about this game (also didn't really expect to really get very far tbh), but still I had (and have) a lot of fun and learned a lot in the process of writing a modern engine for this.
Pizza Tycoon, while not the most famous game, is still very well regarded! I've only played Pizza Tycoon/Connection 2, and so I don't think nostalgia is why I didn't love it. That said, something about it stuck with me over all these years (I ended up purchasing it again as an adult on GOG, long having lost the disk).
Good luck! It's not always about the destination :P
