Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer | Hacker News Reader

Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer

lifeandtimes.games

105 pointswizardfeet39 comments

It still boggles my mind that Chris Sawyer wrote Roller Coaster Tycoon was written in pure assembly, only failing back to C to handle windows sound apis. The game is a masterpiece, it defined an entire game genre for decades. And RCT ran smooth on my pentium 2 400mhz processor, even with hundreds of guests and dozens of rides. I believe there are many magnitudes of performance hiding in poor software abstractions in modern software.

That also blows my mind but then again there also craftsmen who can make beautiful timepieces all by themselves so I guess making fun games in assembly is not that different than making a beautiful timepiece if you have the love and passion for it with the paciente to boot.

And then there are the monks and the sand paintings.

I have never played Roller Coaster Tycoon, but Bullfrog's Theme Park (1994) was a massive hit with us kids on the Amiga. That one really defined the genre five years earlier, to be fair.

Transport Tycoon is the predecessor of RCT, using the same engine and it was released in 1994 too.

Having played both on my 386 back then, I'd say that TT run much more smoothly and with a bigger world

What's very impressive is that you'd still think the graphic doesn't look so bad 25 years later and the music was superb too. Some of the tracks are stuck in my head indefinitely.

What Roller Coaster Tycoon brought to the table, and makes it shine even years later, is not the theme park simulation but rather what the title promises: the roller coasters.

The game comes with quite complete roller coaster (and some other rides) designer tools, which not only let you build the entire track from scratch, but also includes a simulation of vertical and lateral acceleration and g-forces along the track. It also has a appeal system for the rides, which is directly linked to the ride simulated operation parameters (plus some theming bonuses).

Designing rides is what (for me) takes most of the playing time and I judge every later entry in the amusement park entry by its roller coaster design tools.

Yes, laying out roller coaster tracks was the major thing that made Theme Park so exciting to us in 1994. I am sure Roller Coaster Tycoon did a much better job at everything, but the genre was already defined. :-)

Edit: I kind of enjoyed reading this flame war from 1999 between fan boys and girls from both camps https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic/...

I remember deleting the introduction movie file because 5MB sounded like a good space saved.

It ran smooth on a Pentiuk MMX 200 MHz with 32 MB of RAM. A Pentium II 400 MHz computer might as well have been a Cray to me at the time!

What I'd really love to know is how the game was ported to Android/iOS recently, because as far as I can tell the game is literally a 1:1 copy, so I wonder if they wrote some kind of x86 assembly interpreter for it? I cannot imagine they just remade the game in some other engine and achieved this level of accuracy.

It was reverse engineered by a group of devs. https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2

Right, but that's the OpenRTC2, and I mean the official port done by Atari that is available on both Android and iOS currently

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.atari.mobi...

Chris sawyer gave Atari devs the assembly source code and helped them with porting it, completely separate to openrct

Back when I had first played TTD, I had a demo of the game and it came on a single floppy disk. And it ran smoothly on my 486 with 20MB or RAM. I played that demo for hours and hours...

I played Roller Coaster Tycoon for months and months and months as a kid, and still have an installation of OpenTTD on my machine for an relaxed evening. But RCT is his masterpiece. I remember being shocked as a teenager when I learned that the game I thought was the work of at least a dozen people was written by a singly guy in assembly.

Well today is your lucky day https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2

I was obsessed with RCT2 in elementary school.

My tastes in video games have changed over the years and I am no longer sucked into the game as I was back then, but I did have a few weeks where I played a ton of OpenRCT2 with a friend - the multiplayer feature of it is a great feature and allowed me and a buddy to have a great time goofing off building rides

You need to separately install a copy of RCT2 for the graphics / sounds / etc. It can be bought from Steam, too.

Back in the day here in Canada, cereal boxes often came with CDs of different games you could install and RCT2 was one of the ones regularly included - I probably have collected a dozen copies over the days that are now lost. So if you go digging around in your basement you might be able to install it for free instead.

I really like the soundtrack of this game, composed by John Broomhall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTi6LG8aeK8

I was looking for the soundtrack and there is remastered version coming from mobile version. It's so awesome.

https://youtu.be/jSFsrmLhC00

It makes me want play OpenTTD :)

Chris if you are reading this, thank you for one of the most memorable economic simulations ever produced. I later designed a major crypto exchange and am currently running a robotics venture seeking to create a fully autonomous food retail network. I can probably track my operations research interest to Transport Tycoon, which I pirated from a local computer shop at about age 11. PS. Soundtrack was also genius!

Transport Tycoon was the first game I remember playing. What a great game.

The first computer I was on played it so slowly that trains would jump around like a slideshow. That was normal. When we upgraded and they ran smoothly it was mind blowing.

This guy is a genius. I spent a great chunk of my childhood playing this game. I have no hesitation to pick it up even today, given the time.

Where is the interview? Link is about history of Chris Sawyer's works but doesn't actually contain an interview. Still fascinating though, really enjoyed his games.

It's an audio interview, right at the very top of the article.

It is not.

You're right, the article title should be fixed. Transport Tycoon (aka the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer)

One of the mods must have changed the post title without listening to the audio or reading the transcript (which contains around half the story). There's a note near the end of the audio about how Chris won't do interviews except via an intermediary.

Sawyer is such a recluse the title got my hyped. An interview with him would be gold. I guess the author knew that too and decided to "fill the market demand with a substitute product".

I believe Retro Gamer magazine interviewed him within the last year. It's behind a paywall though.

Whoops, that was our mistake. We've changed the title back to that of the page. Sorry.

Oh, I read the first bit and gave up listening, waiting for an interview :(

It's really obnoxious how the people running this site change post titles arbitrarily. This isn't even a interview. If they are going to power trip like mods typically do at least they can be competent about it. Jesus

Should be noted that it is an iteration of Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon, released 4 years prior.

Transport Tycoon and Railroad Tycoon are not related despite both having trains and the word tycoon in them. Both great games though. I play OpenTTD to this day.

Railroad Tycoon and Railroad Tycoon 2 are two of my all time favourite games. Along with Sid Meier's Colonization, they are actually the only games that I've gone back to time after time for years.

Ok, maybe not an iteration then. But Sawyer drew inspiration from Raiload Tycoon and wanted an isometric version. Then it was natural marketing to publish Transport Tycoon with MicroProse. source: https://www.filfre.net/2020/10/transport-tycoon/

Sid Meier and Will Wright (Sim City) had the system simulators in 2D, and I wonder whether Sawyer influenced them with the isometric world from Transport Tycoon.

Oh, nevermind, Sim City 2000 actually came out in 1993.

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