This is, for a game from 1999, simply amazing. I grew up playing tycoon games mostly on Roblox (I know, kill me), and always had a fascination towards those that let me actually customize, or create my own world; and my god if only I had known about this game. It takes the idea of being a park manager, and perfectly encapsulates it within a pill of gaming greatness. Designing parks, dealing with complaints, expanding, trying new ideas, having a good selection of maps to play with; the customization of rides alone seems insanely cool to me for such an old game. All of this coming together to make a timeless feeling experience for me, and one that I can not wait to see expanded on in the next entries I explore.

I used to play this game as a child and enjoyed it, but I was never able to build my own rollercoaster. To do so, you need to have a good understanding of spatial awareness and space management, which I lack. Also, it requires a certain level of financial ability. Instead, I would simply place prebuilt rollercoasters in my park and delete trees and decorations. I never knew how to work with pre-existing parks or where to place rollercoasters in them. I would just wait for hours to achieve the park goal, feeling like I was doing nothing productive. Seeing what others created online made me realize I lacked the skills to do the same, and I can't help but feel a sense of jealousy lol.

Pros: Rollercoaster construction in Rollercoaster Tycoon is, ironically, not filled with highs and lows! It's all HIGHS baby! The satisfaction of building a successful coaster is great, but then again, so is the high of building an unsuccessful coaster, as you proceed to watch them crash and burn in glorious fashion!

Roller Coaster Tycoon is a fantastic management sim game, not just for building coasters with the finesse and fun of a Lego or K'nex set, but also entire theme parks filled with a diverse set of rides and attractions for entertaining loads of guests, who in turn, will tell you just how much they're enjoying your park, through their words that you can check in on, or by the vomit they leave on the park grounds! Or if you don't hear from them, they might be DEAD!! Yeah, these rides can be dangerous and harm the parks reputation, so you'll definitely be motivated to create and customize a theme park that everyone can enjoy! Customization options are wonderful, as you work on an isometric angled landmass, where you can alter the terrain in any height and in any fashion, you can place paths and objects in any way you desire, changing colors, names, or adding signs and what have you, to theme rides and the park itself to your heart's content, and it feels GREAT! Of course, the rollercoasters are the star of the show, and they're incredibly fun to watch after you've built them, with pretty nice pre-rendered visuals for the day, to make everything pop with a bit more dimensionality. Sometimes I'd just sit and scroll through my park, not adding anything, and just have fun watching the whole machine in full operation, one that you can be proud of building. Highly addictive and satisfying game, one of the greatest PC sim management games of all time, most definitely.

Cons: Some UI hiccups here and there, like windows popping up endlessly that need to be closed manually, or trying to delete an object on a slope with the isometric point of view can be tricky. But what bothered me as a kid when playing the game, was that you couldn't ride the rollercoasters yourself, which, to be fair, you can't do that in a game that doesn't use real 3D visuals, you're stuck in that isometric angle, which, fine. It's still a joy to watch the coasters zip and zoom along their tracks from afar anyway. In any case, these were issues addressed in later games in the series, but the simplicity of the first Rollercoaster Tycoon, and its genius glitch-free programming by Chris Sawyer, makes for a seamless experience that you can't help but smile while playing in its sandbox.

What it means to me: One afternoon, my brother and I stumbled upon someone playing this game, and we both were all "WHAT IS THAT??" and we had to ask for a turn at the computer, and just go to town. We were instantly hooked, and luckily, later in the year on Christmas, we were gifted Rollercoaster Tycoon at a, get this, church banquet, what a WIN!! Praise the lord!! This game shot up to the top of most played PC games relatively quickly, outdoing SimCity 2000. Theme parks are fun, we loved Six Flags as kids (hell, still enjoy it), and of course love coasters, there's no way a kid ain't gonna love this one. What more can be said, it's a thrill!

Who doesn't love building rollercoasters? This was a hit in my household, even for my mother who doesn't play a lot of games. You get to build your own theme park with rides, shops, and even decorations and landscaping--and all of it becomes intuitive quickly. With many different scenarios in a variety of settings, there's plenty to do as you work up to more extravagant parks. Oh, and yes, you can be an absolute sadist and torture your guests with maze-like paths, a dip in the lake, or a rollercoaster crash...

Peak autismcore gaming, build a gorgeous little miniature and watch all the little ant people walk around and ride the rides. This game is fantastic. In the modern day the way I recommend playing it is by picking up RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 and the OpenRCT2 sourceport, as well as a user-created campaign pack that recreates the original game's scenarios. Almost no change to the actual content and mechanics of the game, but lots of improvements made on the technical side of things to keep it running smoothly on modern systems.

If you were to ask players how to define an indie game, their response would likely mention a small development team and budget. But when the term does get brought up, it's almost always in modern context; titles like Stardew Valley, Minecraft, and Hollow Knight are some of the more popular examples. But while they're more prevalent in the mainstream than ever, they've always sort of been there. And it would be wrong to discuss games with small development teams reaching astonishing worldwide success without mentioning one of the PC's most notable examples, RollerCoaster Tycoon. Developed almost single-handedly by legendary Scottish game developer Chris Sawyer, (in Assembly code, no less), it's one of the most popular early examples of a solo-developed game reaching a worldwide audience, selling over 4 million copies, and it-and its sequel-still maintain a highly-engaged and dedicated fanbase to this day.

RollerCoaster Tycoon was released in 1999 for PCs, and the timing was almost perfect. By this time, the PC was clearly being recognized as a viable gaming option separate from consoles, and around half of US households had a PC at the time-a far more lucrative market than even the best selling console. And after the success of Sawyer's first management sim Transport Tycoon, he began work on RCT, which would contain all the excellent groundwork from his previous title into a much more unique and interesting concept; theme park management. The basic concept of RCT is to load various scenarios, in which you'll have to attract a certain amount of guests to your park, make a certain amount of money, and so on, all while adhering to the rules of each park. If it feels limited, it's intentionally so; so much of the joy in RCT is taking the base scenarios and imparting your own vision on to them. Each scenario's park provides an excellent springboard-and sometimes, theme-with which to express your creativity. For a game released in the 90s, the customization available here is truly incredible, even more so because it was all developed by one person.

The star of the show is, of course, the roller coaster designer, which is thoroughly impressive and is great fun to play around with. The physics in this game are so impressive that they would be more than suitable for modern titles, and it makes crafting that perfect rollercoaster-enough momentum but not too fast, not too much g-force, just the right amount of airtime-an extremely satisfying venture. It's a canvas for nearly boundless potential, and it's backed by a pretty robust set of scenarios; although the 21 base scenarios are admittedly a bit plain, most versions of the game you can find today include the DLC, which provide some really inspiring landscapes for the player to work with. The scenery is nice, though there isn't quite enough variety in it to keep different parks from feeling a bit uniform, and its application feels pretty limited.

It shouldn't be too surprising that RollerCoaster Tycoon contains its fair share of limitations, though, given its uniqueness. Some of them came from the AI of the park guests, which wasn't capable of walking on wide paths without getting lost or using transport rides correctly. Some came from, as previously mentioned, the somewhat limited ride and scenery applications; for example, rides can only be placed on ground level, which makes maps with large amounts of water or uneven terrain a bit tedious. Many of the late-game scenarios are also locked behind completion of earlier ones, and while this does give a nice sense of progression for completionists, it also will force speculative players to play through many of the simple, more generic ones first, and some new players might get burned out before reaching the more challenging, interesting maps.

In spite of that, though, and regardless that RollerCoaster Tycoon is, in many ways, outshined by its sequel, there's no denying the importance and the impressiveness of this title. For many, this was their introduction to management sim games, and it's doubtless that there are many popular series in the genre today that would not have the same following were it not for RCT. Its impact was even clear at the time; it wasn't the first title to use the "Tycoon" naming scheme, but it's certainly the reason it became such a popular naming convention in the early 2000s. Back in the days of cereal boxes coming with a CD-ROM game, RollerCoaster Tycoon was the title to have, and it laid the groundwork for what is perhaps the most fondly remembered-and still thriving-series from the turn of the millennium.