I couldn't understand why someone would want to reimplement Pizza Tycoon, until I realized I played it's sequel as a child, which is much maligned compared to the original.

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.