Rollercoaster Tycoon, Part 1 – So I'll just write a Review or Something

After recently acquiring an unopened copy of Chris Sawyer’s “Transport Tycoon” from a local charity shop, and with the birth of my new blog, I figured it would be appropriate to write a bit about another one of Chris’s games, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and also just pay a bit of tribute to the man himself.  
While part 1 of this article will mostly just focus on explaining gameplay mechanics that was introduced in the first installment and largely remained intact throughout the series, part 2 will focus more on gameplay mechanics that did not.

Chris Sawyer is a video game programmer and designer who is best known for his simulation/management games, in particular “Transport Tycoon”, its successor “Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion”, and the subject of this article, the Rollercoaster Tycoon series. Both series have received wide praises for their complex and detailed simulations of the subjects they are built around, along with their great entertainment potential.

Rollercoaster Tycoon, the first installment in the series, was released in the late 90’s. As the name heavily implies, it’s about building and managing your very own theme park, sometimes from scratch on a fresh plot of land, and sometimes by expanding upon a park with some prebuilt rides already up and running. Despite it being largely a commercial success, today it seems that few reviews and articles have survived the test of time to make it onto the corridors of today’s internet, and it would seem that its success today has mostly been overshadowed by the series’ most recent installment, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. Most articles endorsing the first installment seem to be found only on the game’s GOG page. However, it certainly is comforting to see how high praises a lot of people are taking their precious time to sing for it there. Along with this, many people are still doing youtube videos of the game, and there's a fairly wide fanbase still digging the old classic on different forums and other websites dedicated to sharing screenshots, ideas, and other fan content.

Along with this, Rollercoaster Tycoon remains one of the least “aged” retro games that I can think of. With the release of the Rollercoaster Tycoon Deluxe edition on GOG.com and now also on Steam, almost any issue with installing and running the game on a modern operative system is gone, and the game runs as fluent and crash-free as ever, at least from my experiences. Asides from a few occasional graphical glitches with overlapping textures that were never fixed, almost no initial acceptance of simplistic pixel-graphics must be made as the game runs in a reasonably high resolution (1024x768) whilst utilizing an isometric graphical style that looks pretty much as good as it ever did, which is a lot to say for a management game that doesn’t even require “stunning” graphics to maintain its immersion anyways.

Stunning graphics!

But much more importantly than that, Rollercoaster Tycoon is hell of a lot of fun. To this day, it remains the only one of the installments that I actually still fairly often find myself wanting to play.

I’ll come back to why that is in part 2 of this article, but for now I’d like to just take a moment and explain some of the gameplay elements that contribute to making Rollercoaster Tycoon so fun.

RCT's ride construction mechanic in all it's glory.

Building in Rollercoaster Tycoon is fairly easy and intuitive. As mentioned before, the game employs an isometric viewpoint. A map is made up by a grid of square meters or square feet, resulting in a simple, grid-style construction system. Hills are easily formed by dragging terrain up or down in steps, following a sort of vertical grid. This means that you can easily undo a mistake, and for the most time you’ll have an easy time knowing what the hell you’re doing. A tunnel is easily constructed by directing a pathway or ride track into a wall and through the ground.

Editing terrain really couldn't be any more intuitive.

Some rides simply takes up a certain area, requiring you to simply place them somewhere and place pathways leading to them, some are towers and you can decide how high they’ll be, and some follow longer tracks that the player can design more freely. Tracks are segmented and can be placed one after another, effectively forming the ride until the end and beginning of it has been connected.

A recurring element in Chris Sawyer’s simulation/management games is the thorough utilization of physics regarding movement of vehicles, along with complex simulated systems, and these are both important gameplay elements in Rollercoaster Tycoon, since it must be taken into account when designing your rides, as well as your park in general. 

When designing rollercoasters, trains must be able to make it around the entirety of the ride without being stopped by hills designed too steeply, and different types of rollercoasters have different characteristics which must be taken into account when designing the rides.

Failing to design rides properly could mean the trains flying off the tracks and crash, killing anyone onboard and ensuring a major drop in your park’s reputation, or the ride being so rough and uncomfortable that no one wants to try it. Alternatively, rides can also be so long and tedious or short and gentle that only few guests will find them enjoyable. Additionally, the reliability of rides degrade over time, resulting in more frequent breakdowns, and usually at some point resulting in the dreaded “station brakes failure”. This event has a tendency of causing crashes (and casualties) on rollercoasters with multiple trains, further raising the need for the player to design their rides intelligently. 

Designing a safe and enjoyable ride.

The accumulated design of a ride is ultimately boiled down into three ratings; Excitement, intensity and nausea. While excitement simply means how enjoyable the ride will be and is the one rating you’ll always want to raise to the highest value you possibly can, intensity and nausea will determine which guests will want to try that particular ride. Some guests really don’t like getting sick on a ride, some don’t like rides with a high intensity, and some are daredevils who’ll only want to try rides with a high intensity.

This is the first -and only- rollercoaster i somehow managed to design with an excitement rating above 9.

Along with this, shops and other utilities must be used to keep the demands of as many guests as possible satisfied, personnel must be employed to keep the park tidy and the rides functional, etc. etc. Aside from all these factors, the complexity of the game is demonstrated by doing something that I find exceptionally entertaining and interesting in games utilizing as complex systems as Rollercoaster Tycoon; 

Robb T. here is having a pretty good time.

Any guest has certain simplified stats, an inventory, a number (or a name) and a few menus highlighting important aspects of their experience in your park; Their favorite ride, their money spent, their time in the park, their happiness, their energy, their hunger, their preferred intensity of rides, etc. Additionally, a handy button grants the player the ability to track any guest they choose around the park, informing whenever they’re queuing for a ride, using a toilet, buying from a shop, entering a ride, and exiting the park. Now, coupled with the fact that a park usually ends up having more than a thousand of guests walking around –at once–, there is nothing more fascinating than not just being able to observe the accumulated crowds of people wandering about your park, their accumulated satisfaction with your park, their accumulated experiences- but being able to observe any given individual, their experience in your park and how that experience is formed…

Statistics about Robb's time in the park. His finances, inventory and thoughts about his current situation also have tabs.

Maybe you have a super successful park with plenty of well designed rides and environments, but one particular guest is having a terrible experience because, by chance, the queues are full at exactly the moments when he passes by the rides he wants to try, and he consistently chooses pathways leading him around all the strategically placed shops you have. There’s pretty much always going to be a minority in the park who’s having a terrible experience and a minority who’s having a fantastic experience, and to see how the general picture is formed by all these simplified but semi-unique small people provides an experience that I have seen in only few other games.

Complexity coupled with excellent game design is what makes Rollercoaster Tycoon truly enjoyable. Even despite the fact that it is a fairly complex game to understand, it’s not really difficult to play. Building, as mentioned, is intuitive and easy, and managing your park is, well, manageable. There’s something enjoyable both by designing a park to fulfill the game’s criteria of high satisfaction and sky-high profits, and also just about designing a park that just… Looks cool. Tunnels, rides and pathways passing over and under each others, designing vertically and using tunnels, placing fences and foliage. Watching a park you’ve made earlier and realize how you got lucky and made something really cool looking is a good feeling. And it’ll keep me playing and enjoying this classic, presumably, hopefully, for years to come. 


*All pictures are screenshots taken directly from Rollercoaster Tycoon Deluxe and edited by me.