I was not prepared for the emotional jolt I got from seeing SCS Software post a video titled "American Truck Simulator - Reaching The End," but take heart, friends - American Truck Simulator has not been canceled. Instead, the developers are merely reaching the end of Route 66.
The brief teaser video shows a truck move from a dirt roadside stop area beside what appears to be a corn field. Behind the truck, a sign for US Route 66 is revealed. The obvious implication here is that Illinois - which hosts the final stretch of Route 66 not yet in the game - will be the next DLC state, after the respective releases of the previously-announced Missouri, Iowa, and Louisiana.
As an icon of the US road system, Route 66 represents a major milestone for American Truck Simulator. The game originally launched in 2016 with the states of Nevada and California, the latter of which featured the western end of Route 66. Over the years, more and more pieces of the road got added alongside further state DLC packs - first with the free Arizona DLC later in 2016, then with New Mexico in 2017, Texas in 2022, and Oklahoma and Kansas in 2023.
- I've waited 8 years for American Truck Simulator to recreate my hometown and I wasn't prepared to see the 200-year-old tree my entire university mourned brought back to life
- Two friends spent years making this open-world road trip RPG that's gotten over 170k Steam wishlists and 70k demo downloads, and it's finally out this week
Route 66 will continue with the Missouri DLC sometime in the hopefully near future before reaching its end point in Chicago. We're now nine years out from the game's original launch, and Illinois will likely mark its 18th state DLC, by which point the total cost of those DLC packs is certain to stretch past $200.
That'll be an eye-watering number for anybody just getting curious about ATS here in 2025, but for those of us who've been picking it all up piecemeal over the past decade, this is just another major milestone in the game's continued eastward expansion, though certainly a big one.
By now, the game's covered nearly two-thirds of the geographical US, and while it once seemed impossible that this little simulator from a small Czech studio would actually make good on the dream of covering all 48 contiguous states, it now feels almost inevitable.
