THE HISTORY OF RosslerCoaster TYCOON
Whether the thought of riding one sends your stomach into free fall, or your heart racing with excitement, you can’t ignore the sheer number of thrill-seekers out there that love a good rollercoaster. And the idea of running an amusement park has become such a staple of construction games today that many gamers will find their interest piqued by just the mere mention of a new game devoted to building a theme park. And no names can get such a giddy rise out of gamers than the original: RollerCoaster Tycoon.
“I was really struggling for inspiration and focus with Transport Tycoon 2,” says Chris Sawyer of how the game first got started. “[A sequel] seemed a good idea at the time but the planned improvements over Transport Tycoon Deluxe weren’t that great and the power and memory of PCs at the time weren’t enough to allow a more ambitious approach with the sequel.” Chris doesn’t really need much introduction when it comes to the genre: it was his games that gave birth to the genre term ‘tycoon game’, after all. “At the same time I was developing quite an interest in rollercoasters, a fascination with their design and engineering, and I’d also played games like Theme Park which included crude representations of rollercoasters.” For Chris, working on such a concept was a distraction from the primary game, and the fact that he could ‘research’ these rides first-hand only helped with that – especially since Chris had his own fear of rollercoasters that he wanted to overcome. “Luckily the success of Transport Tycoon Deluxe meant I could afford to postpone the sequel and take some time off.”
The move into a full title was an invisible one, according to Chris, who says it was a gradual process as he just began working on the concept of developing the idea of building rollercoasters in the existing Transport Tycoon engine. “Early on there was very little designing or planning at all,” Chris recalls, “I just worked from the bottom up looking at the technical aspects that interested me, and the
