By Sarah Granoff

In the final days of the last millennium, I sat in the playroom of my childhood home in front of a beige brick of a computer. A tinny combination of fairground organ music, laughter, and delighted screams blared from the speakers on the windowsill. I was playing one of my favorite games, RollerCoaster Tycoon, and trying to recreate from memory my favorite real-life roller coaster, the historic wooden Dragon Coaster at Playland at Rye Beach. I wasn’t having much luck. My park was constantly running out of money, guests were complaining about the “disgusting” paths, and every roller coaster I tried to build from scratch was too intense for any guest to ride. And yet, I was having fun. 

The game I’m writing about, RollerCoaster Tycoon, is an iconic, classic amusement park construction and management simulation game. It was developed over the course of two years by Chris Sawyer with art by Simon Foster, and released for Microsoft Computers in North America on March 22, 1999. It is also one of the first video games I ever played. 

The computer games of my early childhood were almost all educational in some way, purchased by my parents to assist my development in academia and life. Games like Where In Time is Carmen Sandiego? or the Cluefinders series reinforced my school lessons in history, math, and English. The Secret Paths games of Purple Moon Studios told stories about girls my age encountering and overcoming the sort of emotional trials common to that stage of childhood like peer pressure and bullying. 

RollerCoaster Tycoon was unique in that none of the lessons it taught were directly related to anything I learned or experienced in the classroom. I was a fan of amusement parks, and always enjoyed going to Playland and riding the Dragon Coaster, but theme park management and design was hardly part of the second-grade curriculum. What was it? The game was educational, or at least had the capacity to be. I loved reading the descriptions of all the different types of roller coasters, imagining what it might be like to ride them. After I finished my homework, I would eagerly place the CD-ROM into its tray on the computer in the playroom and listen to the chain-lift coaster sound of the game’s intro screen, eager to create the roller coaster filled theme park of my dreams.

That original CD-ROM I played on was lost at some point. Mislaid, thrown out, or perhaps simply vanished into the ether. By middle school, it was gone, and RollerCoaster Tycoon was relegated to the domain of fond memory. 

I’ve tried in recent years to recapture that nostalgic feeling, to see what I could find that might answer that remembered fairground organ’s siren call. There have been attempted successors to the RollerCoaster Tycoon amusement park management throne. The 2016 Planet Coaster, for example, takes that original formula and expands upon it with the wonders of modern video game technology. Rather than being restricted to an isometric grid, the park can be fully seen and explored in three dimensions. Rides can be built more freely, with fewer limits placed on track type and space. Planet Coaster is compelling and wonderful in its own right. But, perhaps because of nostalgia blindness, it never quite captured that original magic for me. Oddly enough, I find the restrictions and limitations in the original RollerCoaster Tycoon more freeing, offering more opportunities for me to be creative in how I design my rides and plan out my park space. And Planet Coaster doesn’t quite contain that educational element that was present in the game of my childhood.

So I assumed that RollerCoaster Tycoon would have to remain a pleasant memory, sitting atop its throne in the realms of nostalgia, taunting me with its carousel music forever more. But then, in 2017, RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic became available to purchase on Steam.

RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic is Chris Sawyer’s remastering of the first two RollerCoaster Tycoon games and their expansion packs. It offers up the same isometric view, playable scenarios, ride building tools, and educational information present in 1999. For a nostalgic kid of the 90s and early 2000s, it seems like an offer almost too good to be true.

It’s often a gamble to revisit media from one’s childhood. Memories are viewed through rose-colored glasses, and in the untinted light of the present day the flaws in a piece of media become more apparent. RollerCoaster Tycoon just turned 25 years old, a relic of the final year of the last millennium. It would be natural for such an old game to have aged poorly, or to not hold up as well in the modern day. 

Happily, 25 years on, RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic holds up extremely well. The game has a well-structured difficulty curve, with early scenarios teaching the player about ride construction, budgeting, pricing, park layout, park rating, and how to maintain the happiness and satisfaction of guests. Educationally, the game offers far more than I could appreciate as a child. Beyond simply reading about the different types of roller coasters and rides, the process of building custom roller coasters provides practical lessons in physics. Physical forces like gravity, friction, and velocity impact whether or not a coaster car can actually travel the length of a track. Speed, perceived “air time” (when a roller coaster rider feels like they are lifting out of their seat during a drop), and lateral gravitational forces affect the ride’s ratings for intensity and excitement. Different types of roller coasters have different requirements to meet the threshold for satisfactory excitement – a certain number of drops, seconds of air time, number of inversions, etc. – and meeting these requirements without making the coaster too intense to ride is a fun and interesting challenge.

Perhaps most importantly, the care and craft that went into the design of RollerCoaster Tycoon remains clear. Even all these years later, the game displays its love for roller coasters, amusement parks, and game design. It shows in the information present about each roller coaster, that cheerful carousel music, the way guests literally jump for joy after exiting a ride they love, the way balloons pop and ducks quack when clicked on.

My favorite thing about playing RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic as an adult is realizing how much I’ve changed – and haven’t – in those twenty-five years. Now, I can actually understand the goals of each of the game’s scenarios. I can appreciate the physics behind how to design a thrilling roller coaster. I know how to assign handymen to areas where guests are more likely to litter or be sick to keep the park rating from going down because of “disgusting” paths. I still haven’t quite been able to recreate the Dragon Coaster from memory, and my approach to park design remains “the game is called RollerCoaster Tycoon, so I’m going to build some roller coasters.”

Playing RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, I am simultaneously a thirty-two year old woman engaging with an interesting and challenging puzzle and a seven year old girl sitting on a stool in front of a beige brick, tinny fairground organ music mixing with the laughter and delighted screams of the park guests. And, despite all the years between those two selves, I am still having fun.

Sarah Doherty Granoff has self-published a number of games, including several about her experience as an autistic woman. You can find her games at https://octopi-with-hats.itch.io/. Sarah will be working with our interns on an second anthology of Bronx-based Twine games.

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