RollerCoaster Tycoon is a simulation strategy computer game that simulates theme park management, and roller coaster design. Developed by MicroProse and Chris Sawyer, and published by Hasbro Interactive. It was widely praised for its originality and success in simulating a theme park. The roller coaster designer was a popular feature and was praised for it's high attention to detail, with many real types of coaster available, and allowing very elaborate creative coasters to be built. A release for the Xbox for the original was released with mixed reviews, which turned out to be the same, but with hard-to-coordinate controls.
The principal games in the RollerCoaster Tycoon series are:
RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999)
Corkscrew Follies (aka Added Attractions) (1999)
Loopy Landscapes (2000)
Compilation RollerCoaster Tycoon: Gold (aka Totally RollerCoaster) (2002): Includes original game and both expansions
RollerCoaster Tycoon: Deluxe (2003): Includes original game and both expansions with fan-made designs for the different customizable rides
RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 (2002)
Wacky Worlds (2003)
Time Twister (2003)
RollerCoaster Tycoon 2: Combo Park Pack (2003): Includes original game and Wacky Worlds expansion
RollerCoaster Tycoon 2: Triple Thrill Pack (aka Totally RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 (2004): Includes original game and both expansions
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (2004)
Soaked! (2005)
Wild! (2005)
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Gold (2005): Includes original game and Soaked! expansion
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Platinum (aka. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 Deluxe Edition) (2006): Includes original game and both expansions
Amusement Park of Doom: Ivory Towers is vandalized and full of litter and vomit starting out, Rotting Heights is basically a garbage dump, and Fiasco Forests starts out with a fatal accident on a ride named Deathslideunless you pause the game right after entering the scenario. You can also create your own.
Anachronism Stew: Players can build an 1890's Side Friction Coaster and a 2000's Intamin Giga coaster in the same year.
That's perfectly fine for some people, but it gets worse with Time Twister; one scenario takes place (according to the text) in the actualMiddle Ages despite... well, since it's a game about theme parks, pretty much everything.
Artificial Stupidity: In the first game, none of the guests are that smart. They really just walk down paths, and if they see an intersection, they will pick a direction at random. This will only change if they are incredibly hungry or thirsty, or if they have to go to the bathroom. The same thing applies to your staff. Less severe in the second game, in which they will actually form a sort of guest-line along a two-or-more-tile pathway, and can watch rides from a distance and head for them if they're interested; and completely averted in the third game, especially with handymen.
A word of advice for those playing RCT 1: Don't watch any one of your guests too closely. You will quickly find yourself infuriated as one of your guests gets thirstier and thirstier, and angrier and angrier, walking away from the soda vendor you keep placing him at again and again, refusing to buy a drink, and blaming the park for his misery, because he won't put down his cheeseburger.
Staff in the first two games may occasionally drown on their own if their patrol area is set to footpaths built above water.
Easter Egg: Guests named after the game developers occasionally perform special actions such as taking photos or waving. Naming someone "Michael Schumacher" or "Mr. Bean" makes him an extra fast or slow go-kart driver respectively.
Expansion Pack: All three games have two of these. The first game's packs added many unique attractions, theming categories, and scenarios (including the first "money doesn't matter" scenario, Arid Heights). The second game's packs were purely aesthetic add-ons; all the new rides were just reskins of existing ones, and the new scenarios were nothing special besides theming. The third game's packs added entirely new park types (zoos in Wild, water parks in Soaked).
Follow the Leader: The vast majority of simulation games with "Tycoon" in their name were created in order to capitalize on this game's success. The magazine PC Gamer eventually created a "Tycoon" genre for classification in their game reviews because of this. *
Railroad Tycoon, the first game with "Tycoon" in the name, predates this game by nine years. Nonetheless, it's Rollercoaster Tycoon that popularized the idea.
Fake Difficulty: Guests often overestimate their tolerance for nausea-inducing rides, and offering barf bags is not an option. They will throw up on your nice clean paths once they exit. You can provide benches for them to sit down and try to recover (which rarely helps much) and First Aid stations in the sequel, but still, no barf bags.
Speaking of handymen, they and other employees will ignore "no entry" signs, so if you start out with a huge, empty park and use these signs to keep guests within the part you're developing, you can expect your employees to go AWOL a lot.
Which is why you can limit their range and dictate the only places they can stroll to.
Game Mod: It's buggy and cumbersome with the first installment, but the second on was built around it.
There are also people who have created "custom rides" you can install. No, not custom coasters; custom flat rides with new animation and everything. There was a major limit to what they could do with this, because they all had to be based on — and thus use the same stats and capacity as — an existing ride, but the results could still be pretty creative.
Genius Programming: The first two games are capable of running at full speed on computers that were manufactured back in the early 90's. The third game averts this completely, although given its complexity and nature, it does not fall into Idiot Programming either.
The original was actually mostly written in Assembly with only a bit of C to work in Windows.
Holiday Mode: The third game's menu plays horror-themed music on Halloween.
Insurmountable Waist High Fence: Every ride needs to have enough space for an entrance and exit house that sticks out from the side of the ride station. Because of the game's isometric grid layout it is possible to place down rides without being able to connect them up properly with the existing paths. Also the paths and ride tracks have to have a square in height to clear each other, leading to an inability to complete rides or queue lines because of a few metres of clearance. In RCT 3 the increasingly detailed terrain also means paths can be at microscopically different heights and not connect up properly, giving the irritating warning messages that 'guests cannot reach the entrance of Ride X', or 'mechanics cannot reach Ride Y, ensure it is connected to a path'.
Karma Meter: Torturing, killing, and overall making things difficult for your guests causes your park's approval rating to go down, and you'll get less visitors (and make less money). Although intentionally drowning guests or making them fall to the center of the earth doesn't seem to affect this.
Inverted if the guests are unhappy; killing them will boost your park's rating, which makes sense in a sadistic way (fewer unhappy guests = better reputation).
Lava Is Boiling Kool Aid: Except for the boiling part. In the second game's scenario editor, there is a menu to choose between blue water, green water, acid water or orange water that is supposed to look like lava. Of course, in a theme park, everything is fake.
There is also an official patch for the second game that added pink water as an option.
Letting the Air out of the Band: The music your rides play do this whenever they break down. Actually justified with the carousel, which is limited to playing a medley of classical music on an apparently built-in mechanical organ. On the other rides... not so much.
The inverse applies sometimes for the Carousel, with the music getting faster and higher pitched.
Lost Forever: In the original, if you were to dig into the ground too far, that square would drop into oblivion, and you wouldn't be able to fill it back up, thus losing one square (or more, depending on how large the dig tool was) forever.
Similarly, if you delete a path that a guest was on while underground, that guest would keep dropping down into oblivion. Nothing is mentioned of them ever again.
Meta Example: The Promo & Competition parks for the original seemed to have been lost to the internet for a while, but then this came up.
Luck-Based Mission: The penultimate scenario in RCT 3 Soaked, "Mountain Spring" requires a monthly ride income of $250,000 to reach the Gold level (for comparison the average scenario can be beaten with parks that pull in about $100,000 from rides). Unfortunately the weather in the park is very rainy, and guests won't be as keen to ride the big rollercoasters in the rain. So beating the scenario relies on getting lucky to have a relatively dry month so the income beats the target.
Made of Explodium: In the first two games, if two roller coaster trains collide with a combined speed of 48 km/h (30 mph), one of them will explode. If a car goes off the track, no matter how low the velocity or short the fall, it explodes. And of course, this always kills the riders.
Even something like a rubber raft for the Water Slide will go kaboom.
Made of Iron: In the third game, the peeps are invincible. They can and will survive falling from great heights, being flung from coasters, being hit by coasters, blown up and staying in the water for hours. All while smiling and cheering.
In the first two, you could make guests fall from an elevated ride exit onto a lower path without any ill effect, other than the occasional message telling you there's no path to the ride exit.
If you build a path underground however, and delete it while Guests are walking on it, they will fall through the ground and keep on falling until they fall off the stage into nonexistence. They simply cease to be, your Guest Count falls ... that's it.
Nintendo Hard: The first few parks aren't too bad, but quickly, after the first six or seven, the difficulty starts to pick up.
Micro Park is the last stage in the Loopy Landscapes set and is just like Dinky Park, but with 13x13 for land. The goal is focused around park value, where you build things. See where I'm going?
Percussive Maintenance: In the first two games, a vehicle malfunction or jammed restraint/door is usually solved by a mechanic giving the offending vehicle/car with the restraint/door a good kick, and the dreaded (Station) Brakes Failure is solved by the mechanic hitting the rear section of the ride's station brakes four times with a hammer. In the third game, mechanics fix broken down shops by kicking them.
Rare Roller Coasters: The wooden Reverser Coaster is based on a unique design called the "Hooper Reverser" built in Salt Lake City in 1914 and long since demolished. The side friction coaster was once a common design but into the 21st century only one is left, the Leap The Dips from 1912 at Lakemont Park Pennsylvania.
Screwed By The Developers: For some people, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3's poor performance was an example of this, with people blaming the developers for not spending more time to fix it. Given that Technology Marches On, however, the game has become much more Vindicated by History.
Shout Out: A rock track that You can put on a ride from the first games expansions and the second game entirely sound similar to a track from Driver.
Super Drowning Skills: In all the games, you can grab individual park guests and place them wherever you want, ostensibly to recover them from getting lost in your park or to move employees to troublesome areas. You can also choose to drop them in water. In the first two games, if you don't pick them back up, they will drown, reducing your park population by one. Averted in the third, however, as they will just keep treading water until you move the camera away from them, during which time they'll just appear somewhere else in the park.
Unwinnable by Mistake: In the third game, you can create a situation where a track is at X Height, the station is at X.3 Height, and its impossible to 'thread the needle' and finish the track. It doesn't happen often, however.
The third game one-upped the cruelty potential with Ragdoll Physics.
One Example being if you built a steep upward path, and as the Peeps walk up it, when they get near the top of the long path, delete the path just as they step on it, and they trip, fall back into the crowd behind them, and start a HUMAN AVALANCHE!! (It was actually marketed as a feature of the game)
Wild! lets the player find out what happens if a zebra is dropped into a lion's enclosure (hint: no more zebra)
Video Game Settings: They've always been comparable to theme park areas, so of course there's plenty of freedom to make them.
Big Boo's Haunt: Horror themed sets and rides are a mainstay.
Circus of Fear: Combining the Horror theme sets with a few canvas tent rides and objects, and making your park a little bit less than safe will set this off.
Slippy Slidey Ice World: The Snow And Ice theme, and also the ground textures made to look like ice.
Wackyland: Several themes, but especially the Wonderland one with its giant "candy" objects.
Video Game Time: The timing of how long a visitor takes is wildly different from that of construction and management, leading to people spending what are essentially months in the park.
Wide Open Sandbox: In the first game, completing a scenario turns that park into a sandbox. In the second game, you can create your own scenarios and make the conditions easy enough to unlock the sandbox almost immediately. The third game came with a built-in sandbox mode.
You Have Researched Breathing: Happens with some scenery in the third game. For example, you may be able to build a tall brick wall at the start, but need to research a smaller, diagonal wall.
Some stages don't start with information kiosks and/or drinks. It is also possible to setup a scenario without bathrooms.
People promptly went "Wait, what ?".
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