The game won the Original Music Composition category in the 2002 Interactive Achievement Awards. Tropico features Latin-styled Caribbean music, largely performed by Daniel Indart. This is similar to the previous 8bit Game Dictator by DK'Tronics, except in Dictator the success is measured by the amount you put away in your Swiss bank account.
The game is tongue-in-cheek in its presentation of semi-democratic banana republics, using a great deal of humor while still referencing such topics as totalitarianism, electoral fraud, and the interventions of powerful companies (United Fruit is implied) and the Cold War superpowers (the United States and Soviet Union).
The games see the player taking the role of 'El Presidente', the ruler of a fictional island country in the Caribbean during the Cold War era from the 1950s onward. Feral Interactive has developed and published a number of the games in the series for Mac OS X. Tropico is a construction and management simulation video game developed by PopTop Software and published by Gathering of Developers in April 2001.
