ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON 2
Chris Sawyer
2000

I can’t remember how exactly I wound up playing Rollercoaster Tycoon, the independently developed first entry aimed at Scholastic Book Sales and cereal boxes – if it came into the house through the intended method, or if my dad (who was a PC gamer unlike me) had read about it and decided to take a crack at it himself. I loved Disneyland at that age but hadn’t been old or tall enough to really ride rollercoasters or most rides scarier than Dumbo. When I finally did get a season pass to Six Flags about four years later, I was terrified of each impending step up the rollercoaster intensity ladder. My motivation to keep going came from a love of the damn rides (I’m thankful I still enjoy them now!) and memories of playing so much RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2 as a kid.

I came back to the management sim as an adult after picking up RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 in a Steam sale during the pandemic. I often struggle with sim games and creativity canvas games – RollerCoaster Tycoon combines the two. Each park template comes with a scenario goal, such as attracting a target number of guests before a certain date, or to achieve a certain park value in fixed assets built into the park. As a kid, I found many of the more difficult goals arcane, unbelievably high, too distant to achieve. Now, the goals are almost ancillary to just designing a park I’d enjoy spending time at for a day.

While the game’s many “flat rides” (here meaning rides without tracks, such as a ferris wheel, merry-go-round, or swinging ship) offer some prefab parts you can slot together to get started, designing a fun, profitable park involves building some damn roller coasters. When I’m designing a ride, I spend time mentally imagining how it would feel to ride. I have enough sense memory of certain top speeds and G-forces to be able to consider (even if probably not 100% accurately) how the turns, rattles, airtime, and inclines are for the passengers. The game’s evaluation of whether or not a ride is fun is pretty smart, but I’m only really satisfied when I make something that I think I’d enjoy.

I follow a couple of different YouTube channels that produce really high quality RollerCoaster Tycoon content to this day. The first, Deurklink, is focused on using in-game scenery, rides, and shops to create beautiful, detailed parks, the way people build scale model backdrops for their model railroad kits. The second, Marcel Vos, is an expert of the game’s programming and design, testing the absolute limits of what the game can simulate – rides that last simulated eons, theme parks with no rides that can attract thousands of guests, parks that occupy two in-game squares. This degree of expertise partly comes out of the fan-made OpenRCT2 app, which basically operates as an enhanced version of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 you can only run with a proper installation of the game. RCT2 has an extremely dedicated fanbase I’d been unaware of for twenty years, and I’m blown away by all the work they’ve done and continue to do.

I remember listening to the Idle Thumbs podcast, a show run by game developers, discussing the intentional “game design” of theme parks. They talked about visiting Disneyland with a lot of attention toward “the intended experience.” This is, to some extent, true of all architecture, but unlike more purely functional landscapes or buildings, the theme park is meant to provoke the broadest, most directly accessible form of “fun.” Unlike Disneyland, RCT2 is at its most fun when you honor the natural landscape to guide the design experience rather than flattening everything to match your design, so simulating the economics only better facilitates the play.

I imagine most people learning the game focus first on just learning the mechanics of making a profitable park which can complete the game’s goals. But you don’t have to become a wizard at exploiting the game mechanics to reach the point where it’s more rewarding to turn the game into a canvas. I haven’t been able to get into more abstract creative games like Minecraft or SimCity – it helps me a lot to have the sound of a roller coaster chain lift, the screams of joy from guests getting soaked on a log flume, imagining adolescent summers where I learned to conquer the Raging Bull’s 208 foot drop.