There is at least one roller coaster designed
specifically to kill you. It was never built, it was never in consideration
for construction. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fascinating. Blueprinted by Julijonas Urbonas, the “Euthanasia
Coaster” is one massive climb, followed by a series of increasingly tight loops. The ride, once the top of the hill is reached,
lasts about one minute, during which the rider experiences 10Gs, loses consciousness, and
ultimately dies due to a sustained lack of oxygen to the brain. Urbonas does not consider his coaster a cruelty,
or a machine designed for executions. Instead, the 1600-foot tall monolith is envisioned
as a more meaningful encounter with death than traditional medical euthanasia methods. “the procedures of terminating a patient’s
life are highly hospitalised and not much different from the mundane injection of medicine. There is no special ritual nor is death given
any special meaning apart from the legal procedures and psychological preparation. It is as if death is divorced from our cultural
life just as death rituals are in our secular and postmodern Western society. But if it is already legal, why not make it
more meaningful...as a ritual adapted to the contemporary world” Urbonas repeatedly describes his design as
euphoric, the thin strands of the track as beautiful, and the experience of death as
both intentional and dignified compared to our current methods. He also acknowledges its potential as both
horror and black comedy; there’s even a short film based on the idea, with interesting,
if not quite as profound, results. But, judging on the number of times the coaster
has been featured on the front page of reddit, how many articles and thinkpieces have already
been written about it, there’s an energy here that truly captures the imagination. I think it’s the physicality. Not as detached as an injection, not as fast
as a firing squad, not as invisible as an electric chair. The ride is eminently conceivable while simultaneously
leading to something beyond our comprehension. And it is also, absent of context, simply
a beautiful design. There is, actually, another roller coaster
designed to kill you, although it lacks some of Urbonas’ elegance. It was made by an anonymous forum user in
the game Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, and it’s called “Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride.” While the euthanasia coaster is a minute of
oxygen-depriving force, Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride is, by contrast, lethally slow. It’s a 31,000 foot track that riders practically
crawl through, confined to their cars while four in-game years pass. At the end, since the game’s simulated guests
don’t experience starvation or decomposition, they’re fittingly dumped right back in line
for the ride. As well known as Urbonas’ design is, he
might be beat by this track’s lasting legacy- not the design itself, but the only thought
present in its riders’ minds: “I want to get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride” I, too, have created lethal virtual rollercoasters,
though it was rarely intentional. Instead, my crushing g-forces and my cars
that left their rails behind were due to my complete non-understanding of physics, rather
than my poetic utilization of it. But I still found myself weirdly transfixed
by this game, Roller Coaster Tycoon. True story, once the mayor of my city came
to visit our elementary school class and asked everyone what they wanted to be when they
grew up. I proudly answered “a theme park designer!,”
although I’m not sure I had even been to one at that point. My obsession comes back, as I mentioned with
the Urbonas, to physicality. Theme park rides, especially roller coasters,
have this interesting distinction of being some of the most visible engineering many
of us ever see. You might see a building scaffold go up, but
it's quickly replaced by smooth facades, glass and brick and metal. But a coaster is nothing but scaffolding,
it is absolutely raw in its design, as if challenging you to confront the fact that
it’s as much a piece of machinery as it is a...luxury entertainment mechanism. Rarely are we met with the realities of what
steel can do more than when staring up at one of these twisting, corkscrewing colossuses. And don’t even get me started on wooden
coasters, so absolutely packed with struts and supports that it seems that your ride
through it is almost an afterthought. A quick side-story: when I was a kid, back
when I was declaring my intentions to be a theme park designer, I had never really been
on a roller coaster. Not a big deal, I thought. I know I like em. My first chance to test this theory was the
“thunderhead” coaster at Dollywood, a real park themed around legendary country
singer Dolly Parton. Yep. The South is weird, y’all. I began to regret my decision before we could
even see the cars. Just the line snaking under what felt like
hundreds of tons of wooden boards, all being shaken by the ride above, was enough to seriously
spook me. If my dad wasn’t with me and (gently) pressuring
me to stay, there’s absolutely no way I would have climbed into that seat. We had to get the picture though. It was just too good. Despite the fact that Roller Coaster Tycoon
is graphically primitive compared to what we’re capable of now, it absolutely sells
that level of design. Part of it comes from how visually dense the
coasters themselves are. Put a carousel or a pirate ship somewhere,
and it’s a fun novelty landmark. Put a coaster down and it dominates the landscape. It will block off sightlines, it will deform
the ground. Some of the high-tech steel designs may leave
some light between their supports; a wooden coaster might as well be a brick wall. They’re also just freaking huge, they are
catastrophically big. They are not something you can just squeeze
into a corner, dropping one means basically a change to the layout of an entire park. This is one way in which RCT feels far more
realistic than something like SimCity. In a citybuilder, I can basically drop a skyscraper
wherever I want. In Tycoon, every square foot matters. One of my favorite demonstrations of this
is a scenario in which you literally have unlimited money, but the terrain is so extreme
and the existing park so tight that all the money in the world doesn’t help if you don’t
have an understanding of how to maneuver the rolls and curves of your coaster around the
land. And guess what? I don’t! I have played enough of this game to know
that I absolutely do not have that understanding, I don’t have the elegance, I don’t have
the chops. My go-to move when building a coaster was
always to go as high as possible, do a giant drop, a few spins, and then desperately try
to connect it back to the start. What this was taught me was:
Even trying to accomplish a task as simple as a closed-circuit track was WAY harder than
it looks. There are certain ways tracks just can’t
bend, you need to accommodate the realities of the material you’re working with, and
the cars that will ride on top of it. You need to accommodate the realities of the
materials riding inside the cars- that is, people. I can’t tell you how many times I pulled
and prodded a track into a shape that was finally complete, only to test it and have
the results tell me it somehow has an intensity of 15 with a excitement of 1?? How is that even possible? Its 7 Gs??? Move over, Urbonas, I’ve got my own death
coaster right here. (also, as a reminder, this was the kid who
wanted to design theme parks. This one). That difficulty only increased my respect
for the genuine article though, only made it seem more impossible that these rides run
as safely and smoothly as they do. They don’t, for the most part, have secret
tricks. They stand there, confrontational, everything
out in the open. They are, again, confrontational- like they’re
saying, “what, you think something’s going to surprise you? It’s all right here. It’s a horror movie except I’m telling
you exactly where all the scares will be, and you’re still afraid?” (yes). And there is, not-so-coincidentally, a parallel
to the actual construction of Roller Coaster Tycoon here. Chris Sawyer, the father of the series, did
his homework, visited dozens of parks, rode the rides, all that. But he did more than that- he built the game
itself like a roller coaster. In video game writing, a game being like a
roller coaster typically means exciting, bombastic, linear. I don’t mean that here. I mean in its bones, Roller Coaster Tycoon
is an exposed framework of code, as imposing and confrontational as the rides themselves. Because RCT is written in ~Assembly~. There’s an interview on PCGamesN with Chris
Sawyer called “RollerCoaster Tycoon: the best-optimised game of all time?” This is a weird headline- we don’t usually
sell games on optimization, it’s not really what drives the clicks. But in this case, I totally get it. Assembly, the coding language I referred to
earlier, is not a game engine. It’s not even as user-friendly as something
like Java; it’s closer to the literal language computers think in. Think of it this way. When you design a game in Unity, that engine
is giving tools to developers to make it easier to work with. Those tools make it easier to create everything
we expect a game to have. But then, when running that game, there’s
a process of reverse-translation: Unity has to tell the computer what those tools mean. Computers don’t think like we do, and so
we make engines to present things to us in terms we understand, we abstract the 1s and
0s into something more palatable. A good chunk of a computer’s processing
power is figuring out how to undo that abstraction. So, to write an entire game in assembly means
that there’s almost no work the computer needs to do to un-abstract the thing. It’s all right there, right in the open,
and that means that Roller Coaster Tycoon would have been an absolute monster to program,
but it also means that it could probably run on your graphing calculator. Do you see what I’m saying here? Sawyer somehow took the sparseness of a coaster’s
design, the form-is-function aesthetic, and used that same principle to make a game about
roller coasters. There is no abstraction to bog us down here,
nothing to slow the experience, just pure undiluted engineering. It kicks ass. Urbonas describes his euthanasia coaster,
as it exists now, as “polyreal,” not confined to just one plane of existence. The coaster itself is not an ethical, legal,
moral statement; it exists, in theory. It would function, if one was ever built. It’s us that impart the meaning onto it. “Euthanasia Coaster as a social fiction
design is an incomplete story, as it is actually a functional design proposal for a killer
coaster: just an engineered falling trajectory. Thus, such design is capable of existing in
several realities at once…[that] are neither here nor there, but are simultaneously material
and mental.” As galaxy-brain as this sounds, it’s actually
precisely how I feel about the strangely legitimate-feeling parks of Roller Coaster Tycoon 2. It’s just a game; a 20-year-old game at
that, with all the graphical limitations and abstracted systems inherent to its age. But still- when I played Zelda, I didn’t
decide to be an adventurer. When I played Lego Island 2, I didn’t tell
the mayor I wanted to be a pizza delivery guy. There’s a realness in these pixels, pulled
from the punishing physics and spatial realities hard-coded into this game. My 600-foot-tall unrideable g-force killer
will never exist in real life. Neither will Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride, nor the
Euthanasia Coaster. All of these are functionally just thought
experiments (with wildly varying levels of prestige). And yet, they’re still wonderfully confrontational,
just like their real-life counterparts. They’re bare, exposed, harsh pieces of design. One of my favorite things to do in Roller
Coaster Tycoon 2 is just to pull the camera back. It can start so close, you can see individual
people making decisions, eating food, laughing with delight. One click back reveals the patterns in their
movement, the way they’re shaped by the footpaths and rides and their own automated
desires. One more, and the crowd sounds mix with the
music, each ride’s little jingle overlapping with its neighbors. But you can keep going back, and back, and
back, until the crowd, the music, everything else has just fallen away. What you’re left with is just those great
hills and drops and turns, far outstripping everything around them, reaching towards an
isometric sky. Whoaa! Whoaaa! Oh sorry, I didn’t see you there- I was
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