RollerCoaster Tycoon made the rollercoaster the point of the game. Bullfrog’s Theme Park had already let players run an amusement park in 1994, but Chris Sawyer’s game, five years later, handed them the track itself: lay it piece by piece, bank the corners, add a loop, then send a test train round and see whether it makes it back to the station. Its guests are individuals with names, moods and stomachs. Sawyer wrote almost all of it in x86 assembly language. In America it outsold every other PC game that year.
Fast facts
- Designer and programmer: Chris Sawyer.
- Music: Allister Brimble. Graphics: credited in later accounts to Simon Foster.
- Publisher: Hasbro Interactive, under its MicroProse label.
- Released: spring 1999 for Windows 95 and 98, at £34.99 in Britain and $29.95 in America.
- Needed: a Pentium 90 and 16MB of RAM; PC Zone recommended a Pentium 200 with 32MB.
- Programming: in Sawyer’s words, “99% written in x86 assembler/machine code”.
- Sales: 719,635 copies in America in 1999, the most of any PC game, according to the retail tracker PC Data.
- Expansions: Added Attractions (called Corkscrew Follies in America), late 1999; Loopy Landscapes, September 2000.
Building the ride
The game begins with a park, a budget and a goal. Each of its scenarios, more than 20 of them, sets a target such as a number of guests or a park value to reach by a deadline. Players can buy ready-made rides, but Computer Gaming World saw the custom coaster as the game’s “ace-in-the-hole”. Its reviewer, Jeff Green, wrote that “Game designer Chris Sawyer clearly intended this to be as much of a coaster-building toy as it is a strategy game.” Coasters come in many types, from wooden ones to suspended coasters “in which the cars hang and dangle beneath the track”, as PC Zone put it, and “you get to build them all one section of rail at a time”.
Physics is the catch. “If the cars don’t have enough momentum to make a loop they roll back down the track,” PC Zone warned, and the track has to join up into a continuous circuit. A finished ride is rated for excitement, intensity and nausea. Make it too gentle and the guests call it dull; make it too intense and they are too scared to ride, or ride it and are sick on the path afterwards.
The guests
Every visitor is simulated. Players can click on any of them to read their thoughts, which PC Zone found the best way to tell “which rides they’re too scared to go on, how sick they’re feeling, and so on”. Guests need food, drink, somewhere to sit and toilets. The park needs handymen to sweep up, mechanics to fix breakdowns, security guards and entertainers, and the player sets the prices for admission, rides, food and gifts. Green noted that “Even watching queasy patrons vomit brings a certain, twisted satisfaction; you feel this world you’ve created is alive.”
The game’s sound helped. Allister Brimble, who composed the music, later explained that “each ride in the theme park had its own themed piece of music”, so that “as you panned around the map, different tunes would fade in and out, based on proximity” to the rides.
Reviews
Both magazines liked it and both had complaints. PC Zone’s Charlie Brooker gave it 87%, called it “insanely addictive” and “Theme Park on steroids”, and spent much of the review on how closely it followed Bullfrog’s game: “you could bung a sticker on the box saying Theme Park 2 and no one would raise an eyebrow.” He worried that once players had seen its surprises there might be little to come back for. Computer Gaming World called it “an utterly charming gem of a strategy game from MicroProse” but listed a “cluttered interface”, no scenario editor, no linked campaign, one game speed and a land tool that was “a total pain”. It wanted a free-form mode “without monetary limitations or a running scenario clock”.
Written in assembly
Sawyer had written Transport Tycoon for MicroProse in 1994, and by his own account he programmed RollerCoaster Tycoon the same way. His site’s development FAQ says the game is “99% written in x86 assembler/machine code (yes, really!), with a small amount of C code used to interface to MS Windows and DirectX”, and names the tools: Microsoft Macro Assembler 6.11c, Visual C 5 and the DirectX 5 SDK. Writing a whole game that way let Sawyer control exactly what the processor did, instruction by instruction, at the cost of code that is long, slow to change and tied to one family of processors. “I’d been programming in x86 for so long I rarely needed to look things up,” he told PCGamesN.
Sawyer programmed alone, but he did not make the game alone. Allister Brimble wrote the music, and later accounts credit the graphics to Simon Foster. The park hides some of the people behind it: the game’s FAQ lists Chris Sawyer, Simon Foster, John Wardley, Katie Brayshaw and Melanie Warn as guest names that trigger special behaviour, and magazine tip pages in 1999 and 2000 reported that a guest named Simon Foster becomes an artist who paints pictures of the park.
A best-seller
RollerCoaster Tycoon kept selling. It sat at number 10 in the British full-price chart in November 1999, seven months after release. In America Computer Gaming World reported that “The biggest surprise was the top-seller itself”: in a year of action, strategy and role-playing hits, “a simulation about building rollercoasters outsold everything”. PC Data’s figures put it at 719,635 copies in 1999, ahead of SimCity 3000 at 657,513. In 2000 it sold another 1,251,770 copies in America, second only to The Sims, and the two expansion packs sold 370,121 and 325,210 between them. Magazines soon counted the imitators: Computer Gaming World in 2003 said the game “started a barrage of clones both good and bad”, from SimGolf and Monopoly Tycoon to Mall Tycoon.
Sequels
Sawyer wrote RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 on his own as well. It came out in 2002 through Infogrames, which had bought Hasbro Interactive, and added a scenario editor, a coaster designer and licensed Six Flags parks. Computer Gaming World found it “pretty similar to its predecessor”, with the same clumsy tools.
The series then passed to Frontier Developments, David Braben’s studio. Frontier converted the first game to the Xbox in 2003, which, according to Wireframe, earned it work on expansion packs for the PC game and then the whole of RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (2004). That game, published by Atari, the new name of Infogrames, moved the parks into full 3D and let players ride their own coasters; Sawyer gave “input and advice”. Frontier later made its own park game, Planet Coaster (2016), which Wireframe called “a fantastic spiritual sequel to the likes of Theme Park and RollerCoaster Tycoon”.
Sawyer came back to the series in 2016 with RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, made with the studio Origin8 for iOS and Android and released on Windows and macOS in 2017. It combined the first two games, and its developers reworked the assembly code of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 into C++.
OpenRCT2
Sawyer has not released the games’ source code. Fans rebuilt them instead. OpenRCT2, a project begun on GitHub in 2014, is an open-source re-implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License. It needs the data files from a copy of the original game, runs on modern Windows, macOS and Linux, and adds cooperative multiplayer, larger limits and more editing tools. It can also load the scenarios and data of the first RollerCoaster Tycoon and brings back some of its features that the sequel dropped. Transport Tycoon Deluxe has its own equivalent, OpenTTD, under version 2 of the same licence.
Sources
- PC Zone issue 75, April 1999, pp. 90–91: Charlie Brooker’s review (price, publisher, system requirements, coaster types, momentum and loops, guests’ thoughts, the comparison with Theme Park, “insanely addictive”).
- PC Zone issue 82, November 1999, p. 30: UK full-price chart compiled by Chart-Track/ELSPA (number 10; review score 87%).
- Computer Gaming World issue 180, July 1999, p. 163: Jeff Green’s review (20-plus scenarios, the coaster-building “toy”, the drawbacks, publisher MicroProse/Hasbro Interactive, $29.95, Pentium 90 and 16MB).
- Computer Gaming World issue 189, April 2000, p. 34: “Top-Selling Games of 1999”, PC Data figures.
- Computer Gaming World issue 201, April 2001, p. 38: top 20 PC games of 2000 in America, PC Data figures.
- Computer Gaming World issue 222, January 2003, p. 112: RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 review (the clones, “developed solely by Chris Sawyer”, the scenario editor and Six Flags parks).
- Computer Gaming World issue 240, July 2004, p. 50: RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 preview (Frontier, Atari, 3D, Sawyer’s “input and advice”).
- Wireframe issue 14, May 2019, pp. 52–53: “Developer Profile: Frontier Developments” (the Xbox conversion, the expansion packs, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, Planet Coaster).
- Allister Brimble, “Brimble’s Best”, in Code the Classics, Volume I (Raspberry Pi Trading, 2019), p. 221: the ride music.
- PC Zone issue 78, July 1999, p. 120, and issue 88, April 2000, p. 117: tips pages listing the special guest names, including Simon Foster as an artist guest.
- Chris Sawyer, “Chris Sawyer / Game Development FAQ” and “RollerCoaster Tycoon FAQ”, chrissawyergames.com (web, secondary; the author’s own words): the assembly language, the development tools and the special guest names. https://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm and https://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq1.htm
- Chris Sawyer Games, information page (web, secondary): release dates of the game, the expansion packs and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. https://www.chrissawyergames.com/info.htm
- “RollerCoaster Tycoon (video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Simon Foster as the game’s artist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon_(video_game)
- Matt Hrodey, “RollerCoaster Tycoon: the best-optimised game of all time?”, PCGamesN, 3 January 2020 (web, secondary): Sawyer on programming in x86. https://www.pcgamesn.com/rollercoaster-tycoon/code-chris-sawyer
- “RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic”, Wikipedia (web, secondary), citing Wesley Yin-Poole’s interview with Sawyer in Eurogamer, 3 March 2016: Origin8, release dates and the C++ rework. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon_Classic
- OpenRCT2 project README and repository, GitHub (web, secondary): what OpenRCT2 is, its licence (GPL version 3 or later), its need for the original data files and its support for the first game’s scenarios; repository created April 2014. https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2
- OpenTTD project README and COPYING file, GitHub (web, secondary): GPL version 2. https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD