[PLAYFUL MUSIC PLAYING] DANNY: Hello, and welcome to Greatest Hits,
the brand new show from Noclip where we dive into the history of
some of your favorite games. And we mean your favorite games,
because the titles we cover on this show are voted on
and selected by our patrons. And this episode they've sent us
on quite the wild ride. [PEOPLE SCREAMING] I'll have to admit it. When
RollerCoaster Tycoon won our first poll, I was pretty surprised. What is it about a theme park management
series that resonated with so many people 20 years after its
heyday? Well, it's a good thing that's the entire point of this show,
to not only talk to the people who made these classic games, but to explore
their legacy, to figure out what it is about these games we consider classic,
and what our love for them tells us about video games today. This series has spawned a half dozen
sequels, bunches of expansion packs, and more than a few spiritual successors. But when people are talking about
their love of RollerCoaster Tycoon, generally they're referring
to the first two games. These two games programmed
by a single guy. These days he's pretty hard
to find. That is, of course, unless you own a boxed
copy of the originals. Tycoon designer Chris Sawyer all but left the games industry
after the release of the third game. And by modern media standards, he's
almost impossible to get a hold of. But if we're to tell the story of
this game, we also need to figure out who kept the torch lit
since Chris' departure almost 20 years ago.
The developers evolving the genre, the communities keeping the game alive,
and the YouTubers creating brand new RollerCoaster Tycoon fans today. Why do people still care
about RollerCoaster Tycoon? What effect has this series had
on the games we played today? And can we get Chris Sawyer
to turn on his webcam? A lot of questions, and the clock is ticking.
Welcome to Noclip Greatest Hits. [KEYBOARD CLICKING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Okay. A brief history lesson for
those of you out of the loop. This won't be long, but it's a bit twisty. So please keep your limbs
inside the car at all times. The original RollerCoaster Tycoon
was first released in 1999, programmed by Chris Sawyer with
graphics by Simon Foster and music and sound by
veteran composer Allister Brimble. Chris and Simon had previously worked
on Transport Tycoon together, an isometric transport management
game set against the backdrop of 20th century expansionism. The story goes they worked remotely, sending floppy
disks through the royal mail on a daily basis. The game was a critical
and commercial success, and Chris used the profits
to take a well-earned break. The Scottish developer traveled around
Europe and across the Atlantic to North America, visiting theme parks
during his journey and quickly developing a love for riding roller coasters.
So when it came time to create his new game, a new idea
was on the tip of his tongue. And while the original title of White Knuckle
would eventually be dropped in favor of continuing the Tycoon brand,
he was true to his vision, creating a game that satisfied both the
management pleasures of his transport game and the joyful creativity of
designing looping diving roller coasters. In RollerCoaster Tycoon, you build and
manage theme parks, placing rides, paths, concession stands, and toilets. And while there are non roller coaster
amusements available, the bulk of the game's creativity comes from making custom
roller coasters from a variety of styles. The goal of the game is to attract
visitors to your park by creating the most exciting roller coasters possible. But many players will tell you that the
pleasure of RollerCoaster Tycoon comes from the craft of park building.
Organizing paths, placing rides where you want them, adding flowers and
flair, and constructing increasingly imaginative coasters. The first game sold a
staggering 6 million units by the time its sequel came out. RollerCoaster Tycoon 2,
largely considered to be the pinnacle of the series, added dozens of
improvements over the first game, leaning into the creativity of the
community to give the players more options with rides, buildings and scenery.
By the time it was released in late 2002, the strategy genre was ready to leave 2D. And while Chris Sawyer did do some
consultancy work on the third game, Atari handed development over to Frontier
Developments for RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. The story gets a little bit
messier after that. Don't worry. We'll check in on it later. But what's
important now is that you know when people talk about their
love for RCT, generally they're talking about those first two
games in the series, written in Assembly by Chris Sawyer with timeless
graphics by Simon Foster. So what if I told you that
despite all the sequels, all the spinoffs and spiritual successors, there are thousands of people today who
were still playing those original games and millions watching them? Alright, it's time we checked in on the
RollerCoaster Tycoon community, but like any good club
I'm going to need an in. And mine is a Dutch guy
with a YouTube channel. MARCEL VOS: Hello everyone, and
welcome to another video. Today we will be answering the question that
has plagued many generations of great RollerCoaster Tycoon players. Why do tired guests drown slower
than fully energized guests? RCT was huge in the Netherlands.
When I was a kid, you know, like early 2000s, you couldn't go anywhere without
people talking about RCT. Everyone had the game. Like I remember
my friend's dads burning it onto a different CD for another classmate. I think one of the main reasons why it's
popular is that it has an incredibly low entry barrier. I mean, anyone can, who's never played any kind of
game like that can pick it up. And you can then see your park,
and you can put down a merry-go-round. You can open it, and then you will
get guests. And they will get on it. And you can build a roller coaster.
You don't have to build it yourself. There are plenty of good prebuilds,
and most of them aren't too big. So you can put them in almost
any park, and it just works. But then when you get better at it,
you can, there are a lot of options. So it doesn't get played out very quickly. I got a few comments every
now and then, people saying, I don't even play the game. I just
watch the videos. Or people are saying, you know, I've played this game
15 years ago, and it's interesting to see how it works in depth, even
though I don't play the game anymore. Also a lot of comments saying
people picked up the game again, but also still quite a few people that
are actively playing, either that are in the community or that, you know, play on their own and are not
necessarily in any community. Hello everyone, and welcome to
another video. A few days ago, I uploaded the video about why
certain mazes are nearly impossible to solve for the guests because of how the
path finding algorithm works in mazes. If you haven't seen that one yet, you
will not really understand this video. So I recommend watching that one first. DANNY: But you brought up an interesting
point, which is that the game I played growing up on my
Amiga was Theme Park, which is similar in some
ways to RollerCoaster Tycoon, but you hit that threshold pretty quick.
Like the game ends at a certain point. There's not much more to do. Whereas
RollerCoaster Tycoon, it seems, I mean, your channel is a
testament to how limitless it is. MARCEL: That said, you know, almost everyone
isn't going to reach that skill gap. And I would not have reached it either
if not for a lot of other people and the community that, yeah, there's just so
much to do with a very low skill ceiling. And another thing which I think is
very important is the graphical style makes it so that you can really easily
make something that looks pretty. You have, for example, you have
Planet Coaster, which is kind of, sort of like a spiritual successor,
especially to RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. But the downside to Planet Coaster is
that you need to be better at it to make something decent than you need to be in
a RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. Because RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, you can put
down a few trees and it just works. DANNY: There are many things a game needs
to be in order for it to become a classic. But one of the most important things
is how it looks. Some games age more gracefully than others.
And thankfully for RCT, there is something timeless
about the original two games. There's no better example of this
endurance than New Element. For almost 20 years, this website has
been highlighting outstanding visual design in custom RollerCoaster Tycoon
parks, with accolades handed out to the most beautifully crafted levels. The latest iteration of their community
competition is currently running. So it's all the more impressive that
the graphics for RCT 1 and 2 were created entirely by one person,
Simon Foster. He used 3D Studio Max to
create thousands of 3D renders, which he would then manually export
and send to Chris on rough grids. Once you factored in all the animations,
the four isometric angles, and the different number of people
that may be riding on the coaster, one roller coaster car could take
as many as 6,600 unique frames. It was painstaking work, but it led to a game
which looked incredible in its day without adversely impacting performance. This was absolutely crucial, as levels
in RCT could get really complex. But with most of the game written in Assembly,
Chris Sawyer ensured that even at the absolute limit of parks sizes, RollerCoaster Tycoon ran well and rarely
suffered from computational errors. But even the most tightly written code
cannot avoid the passage of time, and for many years the original two RollerCoaster Tycoon
games were unplayable on modern machines. So how exactly is Marcel
playing RCT 2 in 2021? MARCEL: I can't imagine making my videos
without Open RollerCoaster Tycoon. For example, it's got windowed
mode and HD resolutions, which is really useful. But other than
that, you know, a lot more hotkeys. You can speed up the game for when you
need to test a long coaster or have your guests spread out in the park
and maybe go ride around a lot. There are just so many
quality of life improvements. There are way too many to list,
but they make the original game you know, by comparison, playable. DANNY: The original RollerCoaster Tycoon
was written by a single programmer, Chris Sawyer. But the person keeping the original
RollerCoaster Tycoon alive today does so with the help of a global team.
Open RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 is a free program which modifies the original
game's installer to work on modern OS's, including several operating system
families the original never supported. So every two months we're going to have
the patrons vote for a new episode of this show, which means that we only have about four
weeks all in all to get the interviews locked in to give us enough time
to actually edit the episode. So pretty quickly we've
reached out to Chris, at least the company that represents
him to try and get an interview. And we also have a couple of industry
back channels working as well to see if we can contact him that way.
But so far it's been a couple of weeks. We've heard nothing back. So while our attempts to contact Chris Sawyer
were still going unanswered, we decided to reach to the only other
person who knows the code as well as him. Ted John started Open RollerCoaster
Tycoon in 2013, but his passion for the series
came much, much earlier. - I mean, I got the first
game RollerCoaster Tycoon. I was probably seven at the time.
You know, I played other park games. I think I played Theme Park in the past. But what interested me most
about RollerCoaster Tycoon is it didn't feel dumbed down.
It seemed quite sophisticated, and the graphics looked really good. They still look good today 'cause
they're all pre-rendered. and I really liked the second
game as well. In fact, I remember looking at the
screenshots before it came out. I also looked at the
game manual because that was available before
the game was released. So one of the other games I
played was Transport Tycoon, which is the previous game
Chris Sawyer made before he made RollerCoaster Tycoon. And I
remember in, I think it was about 2005, I found OpenTTD for the
first time and was impressed at what they achieved and how
it was the exact same game but had these new features, had
multiplayer with many players. You could be the same company. You could work on the same,
on the same infrastructure. And it ran on every platform operating
system you could think of at the time. And I thought that this is great.
RollerCoaster Tycoon should have the same thing. We got it working on other platforms
like Mac OS and Linux quite early. And then I think the community
are quite excited about being able to make much,
much larger maps with a lot more different
types of rides, scenery. The other commonly asked
for request is improved guest AI. There's quite
often the guests that, you know, they get lost and they
complain about being lost. Even though your park's got brilliant
pathing systems, directions, they got maps. Yet they still can't
seem to find where they want to go. DANNY: Your job is like half game designer,
half like game preservationist in a way. So where do you draw the line
between like, oh, this is additive, but it doesn't take away from
what the original was or is. - Yeah, we're very cautious about
adding too many new features. I've got a lot of, a lot of people like to
request things that make it a bit easier or in other ways, things that we think of
as a cheat, I suppose, where it tells you how much you should price
the rides and various things like that. And we're not sure whether that
should belong in the base game. However, we know that some
people do want that, and to sort of please everyone
we've decided, well, why don't we make the mod for the game
moddable so that other people could add their own mods on top of that and
make the game exactly how they want. DANNY: Ted seems uniquely positioned to start this project. Not only is he
a massive fan of the original games, but remarkably his day job as a software
engineer is focused on getting COBOL programs to run on modern machines. He's eager not to take all the
credit for this work though, as like any successful open source project,
OpenRCT2 has benefited from a passionate community of
developers who have a deep love for the design of the game. TED: So we've had over a hundred
contributors now. A hundred different people have
contributed to the source code in different ways. People translating the game to
numerous different languages, where we've got some people trying
to create new art for the game. And some people are just there to
test the game or do documentation. DANNY: When we asked our community on
Patreon why they voted for this game, we received a broad range of answers.
Some said it was the management. Others talked about coaster
design or park layout. For some, it was a relaxing sandbox experience
or just a shot of nostalgia. But Ted told me that in recent surveys,
they had noticed an influx of younger players into
RollerCoaster Tycoon, folks who weren't even born when
it came out. So I asked him, why does he think people
are still playing this game? What makes RollerCoaster
Tycoon such a hit? TED: Well, I think a lot of people,
they haven't played in a long time. They played it when they were
younger and they see the game again. And they realize they can play it. But
I think for a lot of other people, it's a toy. It's like Lego and the,
you know, you can't get old of it. There's always different things, new
things that you can think of building. It's not too complex.
It's very uniform. You know, you're talking about
isometric grid. Everything's tile or block-based, a bit like
Lego and Minecraft. You know, it's easy to place things
exactly where you want. [EXPLOSION] RollerCoaster Tycoon 1, it's all
about the progression, you know, playing each park gets bigger,
and you research more new rides, and you have to meet objectives.
And then you can tick off those objectives. You can complete the game.
Whereas RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 is your sandbox mode,
where you create whatever you want. One thing that stands out and you can
get this from the game is that Chris Sawyer is clearly obsessed with
roller coasters and theme parks. And he knows, he's read a lot about
them. And that is in the game, the detail, the different types
of roller coasters, the different pieces that make up a
roller coaster. It's all in the game. It's very technical, and you have
to be very technical with how you build them. You can't build anything you'd
want, you have to stick to the rules. You have to make sure that the lateral G isn't too high, people
don't get too sick. Also that they're not too boring either. And likewise, you can't have a theme park
with just really scary rides. You have to have a balance between
everything, and the game is very good at encouraging that. I don't think it's
crazy that it was written in Assembly. I think lots of games back
then were written in Assembly. Certainly lots of games written for game
consoles were written in Assembly. But it must've given it an
edge in performance because I think it's one of those games where
you think it works on any computer. When you think, yes, you got a
part, you got 2000 individual people do path finding logic. You got all the roller coasters,
and they've got all the animations. There's a lot going on. In order to
get the performance good back then is the graphics are very
simple. Palette based, 8 bit. There weren't many
mathematical calculations. It's all very integer based and lots of
table look ups. There was no, you know, crazy floating point
numbers going around. It was all very simple physics. And I think
that's what allowed the game to have that high
performance on any machine. DANNY: After the release of
RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, Sawyer, for one reason or another, decided
to focus on a new game, Locomotion, a spiritual successor to
Transport Tycoon. By now, Chris had made his
fortune with the series. So while retaining the rights to the IP, he handed control of the
franchise over to publisher Atari. They in turn hired Frontier Developments,
who had done the Xbox port of the original and both expansion
packs of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, to create a sequel. Sawyer would do a
small amount of consulting on the project. The result was
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, and it would be a significant
technical leap for the franchise. The first 3D version of the
game with a free camera, day and night cycles, and significant
additions to customer behavior. It would go on to sell more than
10 million copies and review well, but like a lot of early 3D games, many fans of the series failed to connect
emotionally with RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. The game was well-designed, but for many,
much of the magic of those originals was simply missing. The original RollerCoaster Tycoon games
had a beautiful simplicity to them. At least the story around
what those games are, right? It was a Scottish developer who just
loved roller coasters, and on his own, he created these rich and deep
and beautiful, artistic even, games about designing
roller coaster parks. Those first two games play and look
pretty similar and have a lot of nostalgia with them. But after RollerCoaster Tycoon 3,
stuff started to get a little bit messy, a little bit more complicated.
And not just in the games themselves, but also the politics
that surrounded them. The relationship between Atari and
Frontier soured in the years after RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, resulting in
a complex and largely private set of legal battles over the rights
and usage of the threequel's code and intellectual property. Between this and
Atari's general financial woes, the franchise would disappear
for the best part of a decade. And it's here that you can start
to feel sorry for serious fans. RollerCoaster Tycoon did eventually
return in 2012 with the confusingly titled RollerCoaster Tycoon 3D,
a 3DS exclusive which used assets from
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, but with a more classic
isometric like perspective. And this knife was twisted further
by 2014's RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile, a freemium phone game that was critically
panned in part due to its aggressive micro-transactions. Rather confusingly,
RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile was followed by RollerCoaster Tycoon 3
Mobile, a Frontier developed mobile version of the game, which by
and large was actually pretty decent, though obviously not the RollerCoaster
Tycoon game that many fans of the series had been praying for.
Okay, you still following along? This is where it gets
a bit more confusing. 2016 saw the release of multiple RCT
products and the return of Chris Sawyer, though perhaps not in the
exact way fans of the series were praying for. RollerCoaster Tycoon
Classic was a mobile release in the style of the original games,
created by Chris Sawyer and a team that he'd worked on in an earlier mobile
release for Transport Tycoon. It was generally well received. The second RCT game that year
was RollerCoaster Tycoon World, a new 3D entry that bounced from studio
to studio and enjoyed a tumultuous early access stint before
it was officially launched one day before Frontier's new
roller coaster game, Planet Coaster. Planet Coaster reviewed well, while RollerCoaster
Tycoon World was about as bad a nightmare fans of the series
could have possibly imagined. Buggy, unfinished and not very fun.
It was critically panned. A mobile port of Worlds quickly followed under the title RollerCoaster
Tycoon Touch, followed then by RollerCoaster Tycoon Joyride, an on
rails shooter for PlayStation VR, and RollerCoaster Tycoon Story,
a mobile matching game. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention
RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures, an equity crowdfunded port of
RollerCoaster Tycoon Touch for the Nintendo Switch, which later came out on PC as
an Epic Game Store exclusive, which I guess makes that a PC port
of a Switch port of a mobile port of the worst
RollerCoaster Tycoon game. Beginning to feel sorry for
RollerCoaster Tycoon fans. From the fans'perspective, it does seem
that under Atari's stewardship, the RollerCoaster Tycoon franchise
has become a bit of a cash cow. But it hasn't been all bad
news for fans of the genre, as outside of the Tycoon franchise, there are two games that have attempted
to pick up the baton. Planet Coaster by Frontier Developments is the spiritual
successor to RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. It was their return to the genre on PC,
having attempted to do so on console twice with Thrillville and Screamride. Planet Coaster launched to critical
acclaim in 2016, enjoyed frequent content updates and DLC, and is reported to have sold over two
and a half million copies to date. We successfully made contact with
Frontier and attempted to get some spokespeople on to talk to us,
perhaps David Brabham who worked on RCT3 and knows Chris, or even some of the folks who
worked on Planet Coaster. But sadly, they stopped communicating at
a certain stage. And honestly, it's tough not to see why.
The RollerCoaster Tycoon brand has an element of chaos attached to it. And in Planet Coaster, Frontier
had managed to create a fresh start, one that through significant work and
support had generated its own passionate community. Perhaps this is also why we
failed to get Chris Sawyer on board. In many ways, he's been hands-off
with the IP over the past few years. And with all those old lawsuits, one could forgive him for being
cautious over what he says and to whom. His most recent interview was conducted
by my old colleague in the UK games press, Wesley Yin-Poole
over at Eurogamer. And even that was conducted via email
through the company that represents him. Not exactly a prime candidate for the
type of off-the-cuff video interviews that we like to do. So while Planet Coaster may be the tycoon game of choice for
many players and a worthy spiritual successor to RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, what about all those fans of
Chris' original games? Surely somebody out there can make
a spiritual successor to those games. Something cute and vaguely isometric.
Maybe from a small team. One guy who programs and loves roller coasters,
and another who does all the art. And maybe they answer their emails.
I mean, I can dream, right? SEBASTIAN MAYER: I grew up
next to Europa Park, which is one of the the largest
theme parks in the world. So I always was kind of interested
in how a park like that operates and all the technology
that goes into the rides. GARRET RANDELL: I took some pictures
when I was out there with Sebastian, and it was great to see like how
these roller coasters work up close. - My name's Sebastian, and I'm the
lead programmer for Parkitect. - My name's Garret. I am the, I guess
art director and co-designer of Parkitect. Parkitect is a theme park building game
in the line of the classic theme park building games such as Theme Park
and RollerCoaster Tycoon, with more of an emphasis on management
specific to like decorations and resources in a theme park. There's still all of the building
and customization, but we wanted to get a little bit more into the
behind the scenes of a theme park when it comes to what people want to see
and how the back end is managed. To win the game, you're not just
building the park of your dreams. You're also having to manage the backstage
and everything that goes on there. SEBASTIAN: The focus is not just on
the guests that visit the park, but also on the employees
that run the park. So you have stuff like staff
buildings and training rooms that you have to build.
It's kind of like a real theme park. So guests don't enjoy seeing these
parts of the park, so you have to build decorations and stuff to hide them
behind the scenes apart from your guests. DANNY: Parkitect seems to have
succeeded where so many theme park games have failed in
keeping things simple on the surface, but adding depth where it matters.
While Parkitect may boast a cute and cartoonish aesthetic, under the hood, there's a lot of
simulation work going on here. For instance, each visitor's
line of sight is calculated, and so their experience at the park is
positively or negatively impacted based on how much of the backstage
park maintenance stuff they can see. An innovative idea which actually
incentivizes players to add flair and scenery to their parks. GARRET: A lot of game companies are
very into the idea of innovation, especially when it comes to
market value and things like that. And it's very hard to
innovate this kind of game, not only for technical reasons, but
also just gameplay reasons. Yeah, there's kind of been a
renaissance in sim games, and we kind of got really lucky that we
kind of were at the beginning of that wave. And it's been really interesting to
see all of these different takes on 100 different aspects of the genre.
Like you've got town builders, you've got theme park builders,
you've got city builders. There's some interesting ones out there,
like that one where you build a town on the back of a walking creature
and like all these cool, innovative takes on it that I think is just really cool and
does push traffic across the genre for people who want more of
those experiences, I think. DANNY: Do you think there's a
difference between the way in which people play a game like Parkitect and
a game like Planet Coaster, right? Because thematically they're very similar, but in terms of the gameplay
experience, they're worlds apart. - What we hear from players very
often this that they enjoy both games for different reasons. And that's really cool that two games
that are kind of similar can co-exist. So for Parkitect, people are looking for
usually is the management part, I would say. And for Planet Coaster,
the options for building that you have in that game are just amazing.
And it looks really good too. GARRET: Yeah, I've seen some truly
amazing dioramas from Planet Coaster, just in pure 3D space and realism. I will say like it's community
that drives these games, right? For us community was like the number one
thing. We always knew from the beginning that we had to build a relationship with
the community and kind of keep them, keep them happy. And I'm not saying
like we had to bribe them or anything, but we just had to moderate it and
also keep their expectations in check, because we were very worried
about this getting out of hand because there hadn't been a
theme park game in awhile. So we have the devlog where Sebastian
would painstakingly describe a lot of the decisions we had made
and a lot of the technical stuff so people didn't get crazy expectations. 'Cause I think trust is important in this kind of endeavor because we are
trying to get them to buy a product we made. But above that, the community
just also fuels the game far past we ever could imagine too.
When it comes to community content, we wanted to make it cool for the community.
And our mod support is important to support after that kind of became
a thing way earlier than we imagined. And now we support like custom
code to a point, using Unity, but custom like assets
and stuff like that, where you can insert your own rides.
Because we can't cover everything. It would be impossible for us.
And there was 1,001 things people want. I think that's the number one most
important thing in this entire genre, in any simulation game, if it has a
creative element to it is just community. Of course that's true of most games,
but especially for these kinds of games. DANNY: That's the word that
keeps coming to mind when I think about RollerCoaster Tycoon.
Since Chris Sawyer all but stepped away from full-time game dev
in 2004, the legacy of the original vision has been shepherded
by the kids who grew up playing them. YouTubers who have introduced
the game to countless new players, hobbyists who ensured that old fans and new
could continue to play this classic, and new innovators who, spurred on
by a similar indie spirit and love of roller coasters, created their
own vision for the genre. So eventually we did actually hear back
from the people who represent Chris, and they reiterated what I had already come
to understand from looking into this story, that he's retired from games and
is generally a pretty private person, but that he's flattered that people still
take such an interest in the games he created. In interviews, Chris Sawyer has mentioned how
much focus and work games development took in his younger days and how even more
demanding the world of games creation has gotten since he left. But there's one answer from 2016's Eurogamer
interview that really stood out to me. When asked how hands-off he's been
with the series since 2002, Sawyer said, "I think you have to understand that my
personal vision for RollerCoaster Tycoon was fulfilled with the last version I created
myself, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, and I had no interest in working on someone else's
vision for future versions of the game. Much better to let those who have
inspiration fulfill their vision of the next iteration of the
game and not to interfere. RollerCoaster Tycoon has moved on a long
way since its early days as RCT1 and RCT2. And while I'm intrigued to see how
the newer games evolve and expand, I'm not the right person to guide or
restrict the design and development of games so different to my own." Perhaps radio silence is Chris's gift
to this new generation of devs. While many lament his lack of activity,
he's also not stood in anyone's way. When I started this episode, I wanted
more than anything to talk to Chris, to ask him why he made the game
and what the series means to him. But in trying to find
the answers for myself, I stumbled upon far more interesting
stories. This video isn't about him. It's a video for him. A celebration of the legacy he left behind
and a worldwide community of players who are still gleefully creating
roller coasters 20 years later. SEBASTIAN: It's really cool how
supportive the community for these types of games is. I mean,
if you look at RollerCoaster Tycoon, game is like, 16 years old,
17 years old by this point. And it still has an active community. MARCEL: I like teaching people stuff or
showing off cool stuff I made. And it's just so satisfying to see
people, you know, leave nice comments and, you know, also just to
watch those numbers go up. I'm a big numbers guy. - So that's what's probably most fascinating is
that he's made effectively three games. - Right. TED: Transport Tycoon, RollerCoaster Tycoon,
Chris Sawyer's Locomotion. And all three of them have now got
open source projects replicating it. How many game studios, you know,
could admit that? - Yeah, it's amazing. Drop the mic and
walk away, Chris Sawyer. [LAUGHING] [MUSIC PLAYING]
My wife bought the current mobile version of classic RCT and she's been playing it so much that her hands get cramped. She hadn't played since she was a kid and now that she's older and understands the game a bit better, has just been crushing it. What has been most surprising is realizing how many levels there are and how many new rides/stalls come up later in the game that she never saw when she was kid. This thing was, and still is, a masterpiece in gaming.
Nothing like spending what seemed like hours to develop a bad ass coaster only for the patrons to be too scared to ride it.
I want to get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride
Ah the endless queue line that terminates in a body of water.
I grew up playing RC1 & RC2. I'd just spend hours and hours creating custom themed parks in RC2 because that was the version that had all of the Halloween, winter, candy and tons of other themed decor for your park. Can honestly say those 2 games helped me escape a lot of shitty days during my younger years, lol
My experience with this franchise is limited to stumbling across youtube videos of diabolical rollercoasters designed to kill as many people as possible. Anybody got a link?
This reminds me that I loved Transport(ation?) Tycoon by microprose. There is a kind of similar version in the iOS app store but I think it misses a lot of the nuance around competition for resources, resource depletion and has no rail or air transport...they just added shipping.
If you're into RCT 1 and 2, check out Marcel Vos on youtube. His videos look at mechanics, exploits, and how certain things interact with each other in the game. His videos are quite enjoyable.
Well that was nostalgic. Loved these and simcity so much, and good to see there's still major communities playing!