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Rollercoaster Tycoon is 25

Will forever be a top 5 computer game for me. I remember being in school, a friend took a blank CD-R and returned it to me with a full copy of RCT2. Apologies to Chris Sawyer for that bit of theft, though I have since purchased the game a couple of times on different platforms so I don't feel too bad about it. I recently played through the iPad version (which is actually a pretty great port with a surprisingly intuitive interface for the game, believe it or not) and was able to beat all but maybe four or five scenarios.
 
DiogoJ42 said:
I think I must be the only person who prefered RCT3.
.... when it didn't crash.
Click to expand...

As someone who didn’t care about the management side of things, I also loved RCT3, although admittedly never played RCT1 or 2. I dread to think the amount of hours I spent playing it on the family computer, and then on Mac when it got released on the App Store. I remember the day I finally figured out how to make proper buildings (I never saw the tutorial where they told you to press shift to drag up) and I felt absolutely elated!

Last played it in 2016 ish when I tried to make a Europa-Park re-creation, but had balls’d up the game enough by downloading all the mods that so many things just didn’t work and files became corrupted. Still, so much fun and was a lot less hassle to create a half-decent looking area than it is these days in Planet Coaster. Good times.
 
The most amazing thing about RCT1 & 2 is that they were written entirely in x86 assembly language. For those who do not know, assembly language is a very low level language within a computer, it is not really human readable, making it very difficult to work with. You have to literally move bits around the CPU and memory to and from registers etc, goes without saying you have to have an extremely good understanding of how the fundamentals of computers work. Even now in 2024 it is an amazing achievement, almost nothing is written in this low level language for a reason, with how difficult it is to use.

The trade off being though is that you get great performance, something the original RCT games did extremely well, 1000's of peeps, huge parks, all running well on what were Pentium 1 and lower machines with no dedicated graphics. You could get away with it now on a much higher level language like C++, or going even higher something like C# or Java, but back then, the only choice you had to make a game like this possible and for it to perform well was by using assembly, one of the lowest levels of code that runs in any computer / phone, to this day. I think one level below assembly in any computer / phone is the physical binary that the machine itself speaks in. The graphics were sprite based and not 3D but made to look 3D and ran completely within the CPU in fact, no GPU of any type needed, to be fair, something that was common around that time period for games, as it was just on the cusp of when proper 3D accelerated graphics took off.

Think of it like layers I guess, the 'lower' level the language, the closer it is to the physical processors, the faster it runs, but the more work you need to do as a programmer to achieve a given task, alongside it being harder to read / write. The higher up you go, the easier the code is to work with, more easier to achieve given tasks with less code, but you trade off speed. As the computer is having to also do more conversion in the background to make the code work, as there is a bigger gap between what you are reading and writing as 'code' and the binary, 1's and 0's, compared to assembly where the gap between what you read and write as 'code' and the 1's and 0's being much smaller, but much harder to read, write and work with. The speed issue is not so much an issue these days due to how blazingly fast computers are, but still a massive consideration depending on what type of software you are writing.

You wouldn't write an operating system's kernel or a server side memory manager in JAVA or C# for example, even today, as the code cannot execute fast enough to make the software work as it should, even on a multi billion, yes billion cycles per second and relatively 'slow' multicore phone processor. You need to go into a 'lower' level language, maybe not as low as assembly, but lower than the high level JAVA or C#...…..anyway that's enough about computer science, a topic I could talk about all day.

No one writes games in assembly, but Chris Sawyer did, he has to hit the hall of fame for that reason alone. Achieving a game on a technical level that was not possible, on the hardware of the day without writing in assembly language. Google Chris Sawyer Games and take a look at his original 20 year old website, the site has some cool information on regarding the games. I cannot link from this computer.
 
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Jb85 said:
Ah yes…… running low on cash? Yep. Want to build a new coaster? Yep

In comes several thousands guests !

Mind you keeping that many people happy was impossible!
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I used to love using the trainers to spawn thousands of peeps and then see how the park infrastructure held up. You could really fine tune your attraction and specifically coaster operations in RCT2 to a fine degree that you've never been able to since. To really maximise throughput and what not.

OpenRCT2 is great at breathing old life into the game, it is free but requires you own the base game, there are thousands of improvement's, hacks, trainers and quality of life improvements built into this to make the base game, much, much better than the original. I play it from time to time. I also supports modern operating systems and resolution's much better than what the original base game did. 1000% recommendation to anyone who wants to play RCT2 now, it is a must have addition in 2024 I would say.
 
The claw of death was great, picking the paying punters up and doing one better than how Keith Sparks would have built his attractions if he could have, by swinging them around and then dropping them in the water and letting the chaos commence. Deleting crowded bridges over water was good fun too...

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I also can't imagine any more recent simulations allowing you to kill guests (rct3 allowed you to put guests in the Lions den but they'd never get eaten)
 
DiogoJ42 said:
I think I must be the only person who prefered RCT3.
.... when it didn't crash.
Click to expand...
I certainly did at the time, although now I usually play open RCT. I was gutted they made guests indestructible though - totally ruined my strategy* of ‘the drownings will continue until morale improves’.

*not necessarily a GOOD strategy
 
I’ve spent far too many hours on this game, both as a kid then rediscovering it again with OpenRCT. The community is quite active, MarcelVos and Deurklink frequently post videos on YT with some amazing creations, sometimes of recent rollercoasters. The mods have allowed for newer rollercoaster models to be included in the game as well - the RMC’s are fun to build
 
A great watch from one of the best video game historians on YouTube. If you are a video game fan in general, check out their channel. Some great stuff on there..widely regarded as one of the best channels for this sort of content. Sort of how Digital Foundary are the world wide technical analysis kings.


From: https://youtu.be/ts4BD8AqD9g?si=GFqDDD0Gu82_-uLv
 
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