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After nine years, two months, and one day, it's finally happening: American Truck Simulator is about to reach Missouri. The devs have confirmed that my home state's DLC pack is set to launch on April 3, 2025, and I'm ready to give it the GOTY crown right here and now.
American Truck Simulator launched back in February 2016, and while I've never logged the hours that the game's biggest superfans have managed, it's a terrifically relaxing thing that I try to dive back into every time a new DLC state launches. Czech developer SCS Software had humble beginnings as a purveyor of budget hunting and trucking games – the kinds you'd see in the discount PC gaming section at Walmart in the '00s – but through Euro Truck Simulator 2 and then ATS the studio has proven it's bigger than bargain software.
Plenty of video games depict real-world locations with a great attention to detail, especially places in the US, but those are almost invariably depictions of major cities. The spaces in between rarely get that same treatment. In all the years I've spent playing video games, ATS is the only I've found that even really attempts to capture the real texture of the rural spaces that make up the vast majority of the geographical US.
That's why I've been anticipating ATS's Missouri DLC for so long. From the first trailer, the details have been right – even down to the way our interstates bend through the hills and are often walled by rough-hewn rock. When they revealed the first screenshots of Cape Girardeau, the closest thing I've got to a hometown, I was stunned that they'd captured the likeness of a 200-year-old state champion beech tree whose death was by my entire university. Heck, this new trailer shows a parking lot that I've literally parked my own car in.
There's something magical about seeing little pieces of your home in a video game, especially when it's the kind of place the wider world pays so little attention to. I've been waiting for ATS to reach this point for 3,348 days. That's longer than it's been since the Hollow Knight Silksong reveal. Longer, even, than it's been since The Elder Scrolls 6 reveal. We all have those special games whose release means a little extra to us, and mine just happens to be a piece of American Truck Simulator DLC.
Be right back, gotta go filibuster the office to get ATS on our list of the best simulator games.
