RollerCoaster Tycoon was the last of its kind [video] | Hacker News Reader

RollerCoaster Tycoon was the last of its kind [video]

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242 pointszdw63 comments

If someone ever gets the itch to play RCT again, I’d recommend taking a look at OpenRCT2 [0] for a bunch of QoL improvements (and MacOS support).

[0] https://openrct2.org/

Is there an effort to make graphics for the game so that I don't have to go online to buy the files somewhere?

I can vouch. Having OpenRCT2 and being able to play this amazing game again has brought me so much joy.

I’ve been playing a copy of the original installment in the series off GoG with my kids recently and they love it. Thinking about setting up OpenRCT2 though.

OpenRCT2 is great on PC! Also consider Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic. It's a really good remaster of the original two games with modern touch-friendly controls and it has excellent iOS and Android versions that play really well on tablets.

https://atari.com/products/rollercoaster-tycoon-classic#play...

I see a lot of beefs in the reviews about the UI (especially on smaller screens like phones). How's the game compare to RollerCoaster Tycoon Netflix, which is more highly rated in the Play store?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.netflix.NG...

Yeah the UI would be tiny on a phone and I wouldn't play it that way. But on an ipad-sized device it's a dream.

That other game you linked is something else entirely. It's a modern mobile interpretation of RCT, but not at all related other than sharing a name and them. Where-as the one I linked IS the original legendary game. I would skip the modern mobile game personally, as I don't like that of game.

It's surprisingly great on iOS, even with the small UI factor. I managed to play it decently on an iPhone SE years ago. Would definitely recommend it if you want to play it on the go as it's still very fun to play nowadays.

There's also Parkitect, which is a sort of spiritual successor to RCT2. It might be a little more accessible if you're trying to introduce kids to the RCT games.

Sort of, but it plays not nearly as good and the coaster physics are bad.

The thing I really don’t like is that it puts too much emphasis on scenery and not the tides themselves.

The thing you don't like is why I think it's pretty good for introducing younger players to the genre. Being able to build something that looks pretty in the game provides a much more immediate feedback than taking a few hours to try to understand the coaster mechanics.

What about Planet Coaster?

Planet Coaster is good, but it has a vastly different aesthetic. RCT2 and 2 had that nice isometric grid which Parkitect has as well.

OpenTDD is mentioned in the video and OpenRCT2 is also hinted at

Honestly the only reason I have a steam deck

Worth noting is that OpenRCT2 has multiplayer co-op!

The project’s FAQ says that the original Rct2 is required; are there plans to also provide alternative assets, OpenTTD style?

Edit: yes, work in progress at https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenGraphics

Can't wait to relive my childhood. Thanks :)

I was around 10 the first time I played RCT. A friend of mine brought me a copy disk of his original one. I could install the game but not play since there was a protection against copied CDs with an error message. In a desperate attempt, I bruteforced the exe by clicking 50 times on it and suddenly the game magically started. I was so happy I started a dance of the joy and would then use this trick to play the game.

To this day I still don't know how it was possible to bypass the protection.

I have no idea, but thats cool :-D

Could have been some sort of Race Condition maybe, which is more likely on an older resource constrained system?

Maybe if the copy protection process became unavailable, the game loaded anyway as a way of providing a better user experience?

I'm probably being too generous there LOL

RCT1 No-CD is as easy as editing a Registry key actually.

— Install the base game and both expansions normally.

— Copy and merge the `ObjData` and `Data` folders from the CDs directly into the install folder.

— Open RegEdit, navigate to `HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Fish Technology Group\Rollercoaster Tycoon Setup`, and change `Path` and `SetupPath` to the path to your install folder.

Source: Did this just a couple months ago on my HITACHI FLORA 270HX.

When playing The Sims as a kid, there were loads of expansions, but you only needed the last one in the chain you had installed to play. So if I had 1 and 2, and a friend 3 and 4, I could buy 5 and then borrow my friends disks and install those.

Or if it was a game for a LAN, just boot the game with the CD in, then pass the CD along for others to do the same.

Co-op mode piracy

how's a 10 year old supposed to know that

They aren't, it's in response to the final line of curiosity to this day.

Mostly this, but also 10 is old enough to find GameCopyWorld https://web.archive.org/web/*/gamecopyworld.com

Source: was once 10

Folks may also like the noclip documentary on RollerCoaster Tycoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts4BD8AqD9g . It goes into more detail, particularly about what happened after RCT2, and has some perspectives from people in the OpenRCT2 community.

Ahoy is one of the best creators on the platform. I’d would recommend his video about Polybius. Great stuff. https://youtu.be/_7X6Yeydgyg

I was curious what happened to the programmer Chris Sawyer. From Wikipedia:

> He volunteers with the media team at a local primary school. Sawyer travels the world to visit roller coasters as an enthusiast, and gave his "coaster count" at 770 in 2024.

Here's a video of him checking out a roller coaster https://youtu.be/UU73g72NTHc

Its strange to dedicate whole life to one subject, feels childish

The last developed in Assembly, but as he admits, not the last successful bedroom coder game.

There are still a few successful solo developer or small team games even today. Manor Lords, Tiny Glade and Townscaper come to mind. But certainly fewer than 30-40 years ago.

Within 30 years the game development & gaming will have been integrated as an experience for the average game.

is this the hundredth reheat of "they wrote Rollercoaster Tycoon in assembly language"?

I really don't understand people's obsession with this fact. Every game that was developed on consoles before the playstation was also written in its machines assembly language. It was extremely normal at that time.

It may be due to the high level of bloat in contemporary software. People also find the demoscene interesting. JS1k games vs. 14mb React landing pages. Gaming isn't solely about the fantasy induced by the content. For some there is an appreciation of the underlying engineering.

Roller Coaster Tycoon is notable because:

- It was relatively late. The heyday of coding games in assembler was years prior (maybe there were some exceptions in portable platforms?). Was there any other smash hit PC game in 1999 coded in x86 assembler?

- It's a pretty substantially complex and large-scale game, at least relatively speaking. It's one thing to write a game like Tetris in assembler, RCT is magnitudes more complicated than the vast majority of games on e.g. the SNES. Doesn't mean the games are bad or anything, and there are probably exceptions. (I know the SNES in particular has a Sim City port, though it's pretty slow.)

- It's not just about assembler really, it's about the whole mindset. RCT is very well-optimized. For example, gameplay mechanics are adapted (e.g. stretching the length of months, shaping algorithms for calculating scores and ratings, etc.) around reducing the number of multiplications, and even on fairly crummy computers of the early 2000s it was possible to have huge parks with a lot of guests running quite well. Contrasting RCT2 with RCT3 paints a pretty good picture, because if you ran both on contemporary computers for their respective releases RCT3 with its fancy 3D graphics and modern development practices couldn't handle a fraction the size of parks without becoming a laggy unplayable mess.

I admit that I think people focus on it a bit much, especially since I'm not sure most people who repeat this fact actually understand what it means. But honestly, I'm willing to be arrogant enough to say I understand, and I salute. Writing scalable and complex code that actually works in macro assembler is not at all impossible, but it's certainly not easy. It requires a discipline that is not to be taken for granted.

That said, I watched the video, and while it did talk on this point, it was largely about the death of hit games from small teams and the bedroom coder.

I think it may have to do with the fact that most programmers today don't even know what a computer is. You can ask most "Software Engineer I's and II's" what the difference between the stack and the heap is and get some pretty strange answers. So, it is interesting for some to think about people that had some idea about it. I don't know.

coworkers decades my senior at my last job didnt even know what pointers were :-/

Ouch.

Oh my

yeah it's just like writing a larger program in C. It takes longer to build up the basic primitives than you may be used to, but once you get going it's just programming.

I think programmers just haven't had that experience, so it's other worldly.

It's brought up, but the main point of the video is that RollerCoaster Tycoon was one of the last major retail games made by a handful of people (Chris Sawyer for design and programming, Simon Foster for graphics, Allister Brimble for sounds/music), and managed to become the best selling computer game of 1999 despite going up against games made by teams of at least a hundred people. That's what he means by the game being "the last of its kind".

Minecraft?

Retail can years after the original indie release

Later in the video he discusses how times have changed once more, and solo developments turning it commercial hits is still possible. I do feel Minecraft was close enough to RTC to say that it never really stopped being possible.

But in general I think the video is just remarking how the industry evolved and it became significantly harder to compete against bigger studios in the 2000s and beyond. I think it is undoubtedly true that the benchmark for many types of games has risen beyond the capabilities of the average solo developer in terms of graphics, content and gameplay scope. But many types of games do not have the burden of high end graphics and a particularly motivated individual can still make breakthroughs.

It gets easier every year now, whereas for a while it was getting harder every year.

This still happens. Stardew Valley for example.

That one is popular, but certainly nowhere bear nr 1 in the charts.

It's still top 10 played on steam, which is incredible really, and while it might never be number 1 best seller in the short term, it's probably out-sold many of the games that did get "number 1" in the year it was released.

The author specifically hails that the sands shifted once systems like Steam opened up to enable the publisher-less world.

This is a video game history channel that usually goes a little more in-depth than that. Good production value, a soothing voice, and a nice ride through gaming's yesteryear -- often much better than others in the "genre" on YouTube

OpenRCT2 – RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 in browser using emscripten https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42318673

Funny to see these comments here say basically the same thing as was said in the submitted video.

One fun fact about RCT is that it was written almost entirely in x86 assembly. It used a small C++ wrapper to basically do a few DirectX calls to setup the display and make windows api calls, but the actual game engine, all the guest logic, etc was pure assembly. Same basic engine as Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

Addressed at 9:22, it is the one of the core parts of what this video is about

Did he forget Minecraft? It was made by a solo developer. He's now a billionaire from it and bought one of the most expensive homes in LA.

He does mention the recent surge of indies including Minecraft at the very end.

No one watches the video.

Addressed at 15:14

Not really the same situation if you ask me. Minecraft hasn’t been a solo project for a the vast majority of its lifespan. Mojang was a small team but it really hasn’t been a solo effort since the very early days.

RCT was basically start to finish developed by one person with some sound and graphics work done by a couple other people.

When Jens Bergensten joined Mojang (to work on Scrolls), Minecraft was quite advanced and already had the nether and red stone. Notch did not rely on any store and was using his personal paypal account that got blocked due to an anomalous amount of transactions.

https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_Alpha_v1.2.0

https://blog.omniarchive.uk/post/1096322756/working-on-a-fri...

Right, Jens joining is what I was referring to.

It was “quite advanced” but at the same time very much in its infancy in terms of the timeline of the game.

I personally don’t think the game would have gone as far as it did if it continued as a solo project.

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