Carousels are the embodiment of the gentle, non-threatening rides that your less adventurous but just as loyal customers are dying (not literally, we’ll get to that) to see. You could have dozens of award-winning rollercoasters, but unless you have at least one Carousel, you will never be a true RollerCoaster Tycoon. I don’t care how many other rides you have, it’s just not a park. It’s just not a theme park until there’s a Merry-Go-Round there.
And they have to be near the entrance too your guests have to know before they’ve even entered the park that yes, you have a Merry-Go-Round, and yes, it’s playing that stupid, glorious music at full volume. Grab your Park Map and join me for the ride! It just might take a while I was always a bit rubbish at building manageable queues…ġ5) It’s not a real park until there’s a Carousel playing that cheesy repetitive musicĮven though the Carousel isn’t a very important ride, it feels to me like a vital part of any of the virtual theme parks I’ve built, or have yet to build. Well, I’m going to go all BuzzFeed on you and make this ’15 Things You’ll Remember If You Played RollerCoaster Tycoon!’ because the game has created so many memories – funny, awesome, and occasionally annoying – that I want us all to remember them and chuckle in the friendly warm glow of this extended nostalgia trip. The graphics are nice, the gameplay is really good, and… that’s about it. The problem is that a standard review just wouldn’t work for me. And if you haven’t played RollerCoaster Tycoon by now, you probably won’t (and you clearly do not have me as a friend on Steam or I would have rectified this mistake several Summer Sales ago,) but I feel like I can add more. I’ve reminded you of RollerCoaster Tycoon, which is the sole purpose of this article. You can build stationary rides like Carousels, Slides and Ferris Wheels, and also manually build rides with custom tracks, like Log Flumes, Water Slides, and many, many varieties of rollercoaster, along with more administrative tasks like setting prices, hiring staff to keep the park clean, safe and happy, and running advertising campaigns to boost your guest-count.Īnd to be honest, that’s about it.
It managed to capture the audience of the city-building Sierra games, the casual PC simulation games, and every child who ever daydreamed about building their own theme park, which it turned out was basically all of them.īut what is RollerCoaster Tycoon, and why is it so successful? And what’s with that random capital C in Coaster that I would ordinarily ignore, but Chris Sawyer has sufficiently earned the privilege for me to respect his weird, incorrect/inconsistent spelling? Well, RollerCoaster Tycoon is your standard city-building game, only instead of cities, it’s a theme park. There isn’t exactly a Venn diagram that can explain the audience of RollerCoaster Tycoon. My mother has played RollerCoaster Tycoon. My friends who don’t play video games have played RollerCoaster Tycoon. My friends who play video games have played RollerCoaster Tycoon. My sisters have played RollerCoaster Tycoon. Very rarely does a game garner such a large variety of people in its audience, and in the case of RollerCoaster Tycoon, that audience was enormous. While you may well go years on the internet without thinking about it, RollerCoaster Tycoon is one of the most famous PC games ever released. Fondness, nostalgia, and a little bit of surprise that the game released more than 20 years ago – God, do I feel ancient typing that – is still so fun and impressive today. Not the most original way to start an article about RollerCoaster Tycoon, but if you’ve played the game, you know exactly what tone I’m going for, and it’s exactly how you just read it.