By Patrick Holland
14
An Ode to
RollerCoaster Tycoon
By Patrick Holland
14
Good games have the potential to keep you occupied for a few weeks, great games can keep your attention for a few months, but the very best games can stay with you for years and change the course of your life. This sort of game is a rare one.
I’ ve dabbled in StarCraft and League of Legends, I went through a short Halo and Call of Duty period, and of course it’ s hard to forget my brief addiction to Runescape. But beyond those, no game has really ever stuck, with the sole exception of one incredible series: RollerCoaster Tycoon.
Most people wouldn’ t categorize RollerCoaster Tycoon as the sort of game that will drag you in and fundamentally change you as a person, but it really did for me. This series has been with me since I was seven or eight years old and I have yet to completely let it go. To this day, I still have a copy of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 on my laptop in all its isometric glory.
I distinctly remember my first real exposure to RollerCoaster Tycoon. I was at a beach in North Carolina with my family and family friends. We were all renting a massive house together for a week, so I was constantly with a few other kids my age. One of them had brought his parent’ s laptop with him, and with it,
RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. During the evenings when we weren’ t building sand castles and playing in the rough ocean waves we all gathered around this clunker of a computer and took turns building roller coasters.
The point of RollerCoaster Tycoon, as the name would suggest, is to create theme parks that are viable from a business angle. To successfully play the game you have to manage cash flow, cater to the whims of your customers, and constantly innovate. Of course, as seven-year-olds, these were the last things we cared about. When we gathered around the computer, we ignored the business side of the game to do two things: create monstrous rides and ruin the lives of the tiny people walking around our theme parks. Anyone who has ever played RollerCoaster Tycoon knows that one of the most perverse pleasures in the world is setting up rides that happen to be incomplete. The result is usually a roller coaster that deliberately shoots its cars into crowds of park guests. It’ s pretty messed up, but hey, we were seven!
We spent all our nights at the beach growing more and more obsessed with the game. By the end of our trip I had even taken to reading the manual for the game on the beach. We were completely addicted.