History YMMV / RollercoasterTycoon

* SequelDifficultyDrop: The third game gives the player more leniency to complete each level than its predecessors, by replacing TimedMissions with objective lists, giving parks more space to work with, and allowing the player to build while the game is paused. These conventions would carry on in Frontier's SpiritualSuccessor, ''VideoGame/PlanetCoaster''.

** The Space Rings is generally considered ''the'' worst flat ride in the game. The ride is slow, it doesn't really make profit, it has the worst annual customer turnout for flat rides at 232 (in comparison, the Ferris Wheel, the second worst, has 402), can't be modified to potentially raise the turnout (which is something you can do to other rides such as the carousel), has the lowest profitability of all flat rides (the Crooked House even makes more than it), and ironically for a gentle ride, it has ''the second highest nausea rating of all flat rides'', only being beaten by the Enterprise. Watch WebVideo/MarcelVos cover it [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSElvtZMp38 here]].

** There are many people and groups who try to add their own challenges to particular scenarios, specifically easier ones like Forest Frontiers and Bumbly Beach. WebVideo/MarcelVos has managed to beat Forest Frontiers with [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iMtHWWY110 a single Merry-Go-Round]] and with [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYHylSOczjM no rides at all!]]

--> WebVideo/MarcelVos: "What exactly did the Heartline Coaster do to Chris Sawyer to deserve its stats to be this terrible."
** Any ride where the cars/trains can fly off the track and crash due to going to fast either up a hill or around sharp turns. The Bobsled, Wooden Side-Friction, and Wooden Reverser roller coasters are notorious for this, as are the Water Slide and Ghost Train/Haunted Mansion ride. A car/train full of guests will also go faster due to its added weight than an empty one, which many have learned the hard way when a ride that cleared a test run with no incidents suddenly became very fatal in actual operation. This makes them tricky to keep going at a decent pace without crashes, especially the Water Slide as putting a chain lift somewhere other than at the very beginning will result in a row of boats stalled at the bottom of the hill after every breakdown; the prebuilt one in White Water Park in particuliar is infamous for frequently stalling due to its multiple chain lifts.

** The Space Rings is generally considered ''the'' worst flat ride in the game. The ride is slow, it doesn't really make profit, it has the least annual customer turnout for flat rides at 232 (in comparison, the Ferris Wheel, the second worse, has 402), can't be modified to potentially raise the turnout (which is something you can do to other rides such as the carousel), has the lowest profitability of all flat rides (the Crooked House even makes more than it), and ironically for a gentle ride, it has ''the second highest nausea rating of all flat rides'', only being beaten by the Enterprise. Watch WebVideo/MarcelVos cover it in this [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSElvtZMp38 video]].

--> [[WebVideo/MarcelVos]]: "What exactly did the Heartline Coaster do to Chris Sawyer to deserve its stats to be this terrible."

** The park value is majorly determined by a ride's excitement rating. However, it's also determined by its intensity rating and nausea too. If you happen to build multiple poorly built launch coasters that ramp up the nausea and intensity rating, those ratings will also rapidly increase the park value too. You could also build multiple Roto Drops and Reverse Freefalls and those would increase the value too. Additionally, never opening these rides will also mean that the park value will never deteriorate. A Youtuber [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iARh8HGhNwo discovered a way]] to destroy any challenging aspect of Micro Park in Classic due to this oversight. [[spoiler:Since park value never deteriorates as long as a ride is being tested, you could essentially build a handful of extremely tall Roto Drops that rack up the Park Value and keep the park running for three years straight.]]. [[WebVideo/MarvelVos]] also [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZujGbroHYc made a video on this too]], demonstrating this oversight in action too.

** The Space Rings is generally considered ''the'' worst flat ride in the game. The ride is slow, it doesn't really make profit, it has the least annual customer turnout for flat rides at 232 (in comparison, the Ferris Wheel, the second worse, has 402), can't be modified to potentially raise the turnout (which is something you can do to other rides such as the carousel), has the lowest profitability of all flat rides (the Crooked House even makes more than it), and ironically for a gentle ride, it has ''the second highest nausea rating of all flat rides'', only being beaten by the Enterprise. Watch [=MarcelVos=] cover it in this [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSElvtZMp38 video]].

** A Youtuber [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iARh8HGhNwo discovered a way]] to destroy any challenging aspect of Micro Park in Classic due to an oversight. [[spoiler:Since park value never deteriorates as long as a ride is being tested, you could essentially build a handful of extremely tall Roto Drops that rack up the Park Value and keep the park running for three years straight. If you really aren't in the mood for handling this scenario, it's the perfect way to absolutely cheese it]].

** There are many people and groups who try to add their own challenges to particular scenarios, specifically easier ones like Forest Frontiers and Bumbly Beach. Marcel Vos has managed to beat Forest Frontiers with [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iMtHWWY110 a single Merry-Go-Round]] and with [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYHylSOczjM no rides at all!]]

** [ride] looks too intense for me![[labelnote:Explanation]]Something that park guests may think if a ride seems too intense for them. A somewhat frequent snowclone in videos of roller coasters, with the name of the ride usually being substituted for the default model name in the games. (e.g. "LIM Launched Coaster 1" for a launched roller coaster)[[/labelnote]]

** Because of the fact how wall terrain tiles worked in the first Rollercoaster Tycoon, Fun Fortress and Good Knight Park (both castle parks) do not transfer well within the Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 engine, which Classic happens to use. The end result is off-colored wood tiles with castle walls on top. Compare them to Crazy Castle, which was constructed using the second game's resources. [=OpenRCT2=] remedies this by incorporating the terrain tools from both games, allowing both to be used at the same time (that is if you're importing assets from both games).

** The more safety-minded players will often build coasters with a set of brakes leading right to the station as a fail-safe for the dreaded Station Brakes Failure breakdown. Said malfunction only affects the station and will never disable any additional brake tracks. If a train collides with another at a slow enough speed, it will not crash. It's also common for these players to take the pre-built or scenario specific coasters and modify them to add extra brakes.

** Good luck trying to build an effective Steel Mini Roller Coaster if you're playing with the original Roller Coaster Tycoon (without the expansion packs). The ride doesn't allow banked curves at all, making the ride unforgiving and forcing you to use very wide turns. Thankfully Loopy Landscapes allows the ride to have banked curves.

* FanonDiscontinuity: As far as most fans are concerned, all of the games released past ''[=RCT3=]'' and its expansions don't exist. Many find ''VideoGame/{{Parkitect}}'' and ''VideoGame/PlanetCoaster'' to be [[SpiritualSuccessor far more worthy successors.]] (It helps that the latter was made by the exact same development team behind ''[=RCT3=]'').

** Killing the park inspector was a popular meme back in the 2010's.

* BestLevelEver: Oh so many. Where to begin?

** As mentioned, there is no downside or penalty for having more than one of the same ride. Therefore, the optimal strategy in most scenarios is to [[{{Whoring}} concentrate almost exclusively]] on high-excitement, high-popularity, high-profit rides like the Go-Karts, Inverted Freefall, and Enterprise (in addition to roller coasters, of course), while ignoring lower-performing options like most gentle rides. However, many players find [[AwesomeButImpractical playing this way less fun]] and that it goes against the spirit of the game, not to mention feels less realistic. Many players make a point to build as wide of a variety of rides as possible and avoid duplicates, at least until they've built one of each ride.

* WhatAnIdiot: The guests, oh so much.

* TheyChangedItNowItSucks: Even before the third game used an entirely different game engine and had a different game design, the transition between the first and second games made quite a few changes despite looking almost identical and running on the same engine, and not all of them being productive. It's impossible to charge for both the park entrance and rides at once (as mentioned above, [=OpenRCT2's=] brings that option back but makes it impossible to charge for flat rides if you charge a park entry fee), for some reason water rides use the same, shrill shriek for falls when this wasn't present in the first game, and scenarios aren't unlockable, which ruins a lot of curiosity for players.

* StopHavingFunGuys: Chris Sawyer, creator of the ''[=RollerCoaster Tycoon=]'' games, has gone on the record as saying that the "entire point" of ''[=RollerCoaster Tycoon=]'' is the scenarios, and '''''only''''' the scenarios, stating that the casual sandbox-players (that is, those who just wanted to build a simulated theme park and who didn't really care about playing the scenarios) are "doing it wrong, and need to get serious and do it right", especially when they used a fan-produced "key" program to open the game up for sandbox play. He disliked sandbox play so much that when he wrote the expansions and the sequel, he continually added code that would wreck the game if the player attempted to use any sort of "sandbox key". Not only did sales plummet appropriately, the attempts never worked. He finally gave up and included an open sandbox option in the third game, though the fact that he was one of two executive producers instead of the only one probably had something to do with that.[[note]]Interestingly, a publisher demanded scenarios be included in ''VideoGame/SimCity'' because they felt no one would ever do a free-form game. Of course, few gamers played the scenarios.[[/note]]

** [[http://i.imgur.com/NIGCm.png A similar situation]] can be done with [[TheScrappy a Heartline Twister Roller Coaster]] by filling it with Reverser Sections and Heartline Rolls.

** Loan interest in ''[=RCT1=]'' is very low. You can have a loan of $40000 and you will pay $20-$40. Because of that they will sap your money in parks such as Sprightly Park and the real-life parks (Alton Towers, Heide-Park, and Blackpool Pleasure Beach). The reason is that ''their loans are way higher than normal.'' Sprightly Park has a starting loan of ''$250000'', and that's still nothing compared to the real life parks such as Alton Towers, with a loan of [[UpToEleven FOUR MILLION DOLLARS!]]

** ''Loopy Landscapes'' has Micro Park. Most of ''Loopy Landscapes'' scenarios are unique, fun and/or challenging in a good way. Micro Park is none of these. It's a 15x15 park that's completely flat, it isn't fun trying to micromanage your rides (Worse when it's a roller coaster) and it's unfairly challenging because the goal is to have a park value of £/$10,000 at the end of Year 2. There's a reason why Dinky Park has a land on the other side of the road available to buy.

* FirstInstallmentWins: Not to say the second and third games don't have their fans, but the first one is generally the most liked and most remembered, for the vast amount of scenarios that need to be unlocked, the ability to charge for both entry to the park and rides ([=OpenRCT2=] has this option as a cheat, but guests will refuse to pay for flat rides if you charge a park entry fee), and water rides re-use the roller coaster screams, in contrast to 2's single shriek.

** Some people consider the ''Marketing Campaign'' mechanic to be this once the player gets the gist of how it works, and consider it to be a cheap cop-out if a player is struggling to get that last batch of guests in their park before the time is up. At the cost of a maximum of $4200 every six weeks to set up park marketing/coupons to spawn more guests to come to your park, the player can effectively make any level that requires "X amount of guests to be in the park by the end of October, Year Y" to be an absolute joke, because your guest numbers have suddenly doubled from 500 to 1000 in just six weeks. As for paying, $4200 may sound like a lot at first, but if you have an established park, you will make that all back easily within a week, usually when one charges a hefty fee for park entry, which guarantees profits well before any marketing campaign expires.

** There are many people and groups who try to add their own challenges to particular scenarios, specifically easier ones like Forest Frontiers and Bumbly Beach. There has been a person who has beaten Forest Frontiers with just a Merry-Go-Round.

* TheyChangedItNowItSucks: Even before the third game used an entirely different game engine and had a different game design, the transition between the first and second games made quite a few changes despite looking almost identical and running on the same engine, and not all of them being productive. It's impossible to charge for both the park entrance and rides at once (and even with [=OpenRCT2's=] cheat option, guests will be far stingier with ride fees if you already charged a park entry fee), for some reason water rides use the same, shrill shriek for falls when this wasn't present in the first game, and scenarios aren't unlockable, which ruins a lot of curiosity for players.

** The Heartline Twister Roller Coaster. It may look rather interesting, but it is nigh impossible to make a good one...a decent roller coaster of most types might have an excitement rating of 7.00 or so, with the lower bound of practicality around 6.00 and the potential of getting into the 8.xx or 9.xx range. The Heartline Twister ''might'' give you an excitement rating of ''4.00'' if you do a good job on one. And it's one of only two types of roller coaster that ''do not allow turning''. Yes, you cannot build ''turns'', which means the entire track has to be in a straight line, underneath or above existing parts of track if need be. Might also border on CoolButInefficient because of its unique design.
** Any ride where the cars/trains can fly off the track and crash due to going to fast either up a hill or around sharp turns. The Bobsled, Wooden Side-Friction, and Wooden Reverser roller coasters are notorious for this, as are the Water Slide and Ghost Train/Haunted Mansion ride.
*** One must be very careful when designing and testing a water slide, as the speed of one is much different while testing as opposed to when guests actually ride on it. You have to keep your eye on the ride to make sure that the ride goes as safely as possible while boats don't get stuck lest one finds an entire row of boats going 0 MPH.

** Boat Hire sometimes gets this reaction for several reasons. For one, it suffers from a GameBreakingBug that sometimes causes boats to get stuck as they try to re-enter the station which would, in turn, get every ''other'' boat trying to get into the station stuck[[note]]most of the time, this occurs if the player adds an incomplete track to try to control an open area for boats to paddle[[/note]], and causes players to restructure the ride until it works properly. Another reason is because of [[TooDumbToLive guests who occasionally go out too far]] in a vast water area, and can't return to the station which leads to many complaints about not being able to get off the ride. Then there's the fact that so many ride improvements are dedicated to this lousy ride because of the amount of boat types it has, and it gets worse with the ported [=OpenRCT2=] versions of the first game's scenarios, where they're considered separate rides yet ''still'' need to be researched, taking up valuable research time in the water rides category.
** The multi-dimension roller coaster is a very gimmicky ride that is incredibly hard to construct properly. The cost is absurdly high, the rotations are hard to figure out, and the ride will generally have far higher intensity and nausea than its excitement rating. The wiki outright states that you should only bother constructing one if you're doing a sandbox park or in the ride designer, as even figuring one out can be time-consuming. (Also the seat rotations don't take into consideration with the excitement rating, they're just there for visual purposes)

** Height-building is pretty annoying in [=RCT1=], because there's no option to normally build rides up in the air, or down underneath the soil. The only ways to get this to properly work is to either raise up a ground block so that the ride uses said block to be built high up in the air. Or, if you're building a track, you start making the ride normally, but instead place station somewhere deep underground, and instead start creating the ride from there.
** With the exception of some smaller maps, like Dinky Park and Haunted Harbour, the ''Land-for-Sale'' mechanic is quite underutilized in [=RCT1=]. Almost all the levels can be beaten without the player ever feeling the need to increase the size of the park.
* VindicatedByHistory: ''[=RollerCoaster=] Tycoon 3'' was criticized at launch due to its shift from isometric sprites to 3D environments, lack of involvement from creator Chris Sawyer, and poor performance on computers of the time. Its poor reception caused the series to go on hiatus for several years. However, in the interim, PC specifications improved enough to run the game as intended, and the game developed a dedicated fanbase due to the creative freedom it allowed, sheer amounts of new content including swimming pool and zoo introduced by the respective expansion packs, and its ease of access for modding; it had an active and extensive modding scene for several years after its official support had ended. This eventually led to the release of an acclaimed SpiritualSuccessor, ''VideoGame/PlanetCoaster'', over a decade later, which, while suffers from the same performance issues relative to contemporary average mid to low spec PC users, fared better with critics and fans since launch.

** Guests will ride underground/indoor tracked rides like crazy in the rain. However, if you were to do the same exact thing with an outdoor flat ride (like a Twist, Swinging Ship, or Ferris Wheel) and place it underground or build something over it, guests still complain that they won't ride it while it's raining, even when the ride is completely unaffected by the rain otherwise. To be fair, this isn't possible in [=RCT1=], so the code probably never accounted for this.

* AuthorsSavingThrow: ''RCT Classic'' can effectively be considered an apology letter from Atari for the universally-panned ''4 Mobile'' adaptation and the TroubledProduction and ObviousBeta nature of ''World'', as it is a straight-up mobile port of the universally beloved original game with scenarios and features from the also beloved second game.

* FirstInstallmentWins: Not to say the second and third games don't have their fans, but the first one is generally the most liked and most remembered.

* ScrappyWeapon: Well, not really weapons so much as rides, in which there are many that players despise.

** Any ride where the cars/trains can fly off the track and crash. The Bobsled, Wooden Side-Friction, and Wooden Reverser roller coasters are notorious for this, as are the Water Slide and Ghost Train/Haunted Mansion ride..

*** The Ghost Train/Haunted Mansion Ride, similar to the Water Slide, has inconsistent testing/actual ride results due to the speed, making you think twice about making that tight turn.
** The Ferris Wheel. Near universally disliked because the guests wait too long to even get on the ride and they'll complain that they want to get off at ''two'' full rotations or more unless you set it to one.

** Boat Hire sometimes gets this reaction for several reasons. For one, it suffers from a GameBreakingBug that sometimes causes boats to get stuck as they try to re-enter the station which would, in turn, get every ''other'' boat trying to get into the station stuck[[note]]most of the time, this occurs if the player adds an incomplete track to try to control an open area for boats to paddle[[/note]], and causes players to restructure the ride until it works properly. Another reason is because of [[TooDumbToLive guests who occasionally go out too far]] in a vast water area, and can't return to the station which leads to many complaints about not being able to get off the ride. Then there's the fact that so many ride improvements are dedicated to this lousy ride because of the amount of boat types it has.

*** In general, the formula is as follows: For roller coasters, if it has a piss-poor guest capacity per car/train, lacks ways to control intensity, and swings around a lot (resulting in extra nausea), it's crap. For gentle rides, if it's outdoors or lacks a roof, it's crap. And for any example, if it has a slow guest throughput, it's crap, because it'll be very slow to make that ride profitable. The Merry-Go-Round usually lags in excitement, but thanks to its roof (and for some, the music), it's exempt from this rule. The Slide isn't so lucky.

* SelfImposedChallenge:
** As mentioned, there is no downside or penalty for having more than one of the same ride. Therefore, the optimal strategy in most scenarios is to [[{{Whoring}} concentrate almost exclusively]] on high-excitement, high-popularity, high-profit rides like the Go-Karts, Inverted Freefall, and Enterprise (in addition to roller coasters, of course), while ignoring lower-performing options like most gentle rides. However, many players find [[AwesomeButImpractical playing this way less fun]] and that it goes against the spirit of the game, not to mention feels less realistic. Many players make a point to build as wide of a variety of rides as possible and avoid duplicates, at least until they've built one of each ride.
** There are many people and groups who try to add their own challenges to particular scenarios, specifically easier ones like Forest Frontiers and Bumbly Beach. There has been a person who has beaten Forest Frontiers with just a Merry-Go-Round.
** One of the most common challenges people do when they see Rotting Heights is to rebuild everything to how the park was before it was abandoned.
** Small parks naturally draw challenges to build as compact of a park as possible, doubly so if you can buy land to expand the park. Micro Park, Dinky Park and Haunted Harbour are the most common levels to get this kind of challenge.
* SongAssociation: The fairground organ music from the merry-go-round can become this if not a classical music enthusiast.
* StopHavingFunGuys: Chris Sawyer, creator of the ''[=RollerCoaster Tycoon=]'' games, has gone on the record as saying that the "entire point" of ''[=RollerCoaster Tycoon=]'' is the scenarios, and '''''only''''' the scenarios, stating that the casual sandbox-players (that is, those who just wanted to build a simulated theme park and who didn't really care about playing the scenarios) are "doing it wrong, and need to get serious and do it right", especially when they used a fan-produced "key" program to open the game up for sandbox play. He disliked sandbox play so much that when he wrote the expansions and the sequel, he continually added code that would wreck the game if the player attempted to use any sort of "sandbox key". Not only did sales plummet appropriately, the attempts never worked. He finally gave up and included an open sandbox option in the third game, though the fact that he was one of two executive producers instead of the only one probably had something to do with that.[[note]]Interestingly, a publisher demanded scenarios be included in ''VideoGame/SimCity'' because they felt no one would ever do a free-form game. Of course, few gamers played the scenarios.[[/note]]
** To a lesser extent, Chris Sawyer calls you out in a subtle manner whenever you automatically demolish something in the second game. [[http://www.rctmart.com/fossil/TreeChopping.html A program code]] causes scenery objects demolished manually (i.e. right-click) to cost ''much'' less than it would if it was automatically demolished (e.g. building a Spiral Slide on it). [[GoodBadBugs However, this feature doesn't always work properly and will reduce the cost of rides that are built into scenery objects that give you back some money when right-clicking on them]]. This leads to the greatest GameBreaker in the entire game: [[spoiler:By building ride tracks into fountains, you will ''get money'' for doing so, allowing one to amass a sizable fortune from ride construction.]] HoistByHisOwnPetard much? [[note]]A bit more info on why this happens: trees cost money to delete. If you plant a ride on top of a tree, the game is programmed so that it first checks how much it would have cost if you just removed the tree alone, then multiplies that by five, making it cost five times as much. But fountains are also counted as scenery...but they are fabricated, so demolishing them gets you some money back, similar with deleting a ride. However, because they're still internally counted as scenery, planting a ride on top of it still performs the same calculation...but you ''get'' money instead of losing, leading to this massive game-breaking oversight.[[/note]] Sadly, that money glitch has been patched in the Steam and GOG releases of the game.
* ThatOneLevel: [[ThatOneLevel/RollerCoasterTycoon Has its own section]]

** Until you hit some of the more restrictive scenarios like Rainbow Valley in the original, or unusual objectives like "achieve a monthly profit of $''n'' from food & drink sales", which force you to think out of the box a bit.