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Pinback’s Top Ten Games of All-Time: #2
June 19th, 2008 by Pinback

#2: Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999)

Before there was Mall Tycoon, and Zoo Tycoon, and Crackhouse Tycoon, and Auschwitz Tycoon, there was Rollercoaster Tycoon. Let me start the review with the end of the review, which is that there still has never been a better “building” game, and RCT does what it does with such perfection, freedom, and joy, that it shakes free from the bonds of its own genre to become one of the greatest games in history (some would say, the second best.)

But besides all that, it’s important to point out that RCT is one of two games, along with Microsoft Flight Simulator, which actually changed my life in a non-trivial way.

The background is that I’d loved coasters as a child, and spent significant chunks of time “designing” and drawing coasters wherever I could, on blackboards, in the margins on papers, on book covers, etc. Something about the mixture of the elegant curves of the structure, along with the promise of fun and excitement, just spoke to me. The family’s yearly trip to Kings Dominion was the highlight of my young life. I wanted to be a roller coaster when I grew up.

Then, something happened, I grew up, I left home, and coasters just disappeared from my life.

In 1999, my coworker Justin and I saw a downloadable demo and (on company time and equipment), installed it and fired it up. We both sat there transfixed, fiddling with the controls, realizing that, holy crap, this would actually let you build the coasters you had rolling around in your head all these years. Seems he was in the same boat, and something about this game was rekindling flames which once burned brightly in our youths but were sadly extinguished. We vowed that day to go out and buy the game the day it was released. And we did.

Many, many hours were spent with the game that weekend. That’s the point where we realized that Six Flags Great Adventure was just down the road, and after not having had the joy of clickety-clacking up a lift hill for far too many years, we got our ride on in a big way.

And, man, that was it. We were both gleefully, immaturely hooked all over again. This newly re-found obsession culminated in a two week trip spanning most of the northeast quadrant of the country, and the enjoyment of over 120 different coasters all over the US in about a two-year span. Coasters were my life, all over again, and it was a time which I will always remember fondly, and which was just too much fun to begin to describe.

And all of that can be traced directly back to this game, which reminded me of one of the great loves of my life.

None of that is enough to qualify it for being the second best game of all time, though. What IS enough, is that it is about a hundred games in one, and manages to do them all superbly, and tie them together into a magnificent whole, with unlimited replay, and unlimited capacity for creative expression and, damn it all to hell, fun.

The coaster building part was revolutionary. The economic model was perfect. The animations and individual tracking of thousands of park visitors was astounding. The pathway design, park decoration, theme building, landscaping, and advertising parts, all perfectly able to occupy hours of time on their own, were nothing but beautiful, in terms of UI design, pacing, variety, graphics, sound, all of it. The game world is a huge canvas, full of unlimited potential, onto which your only job was to paint a good time.

And that’s the last thing which makes RCT special. It is one of the few games that have been purely about fun, and in which nothing bad could ever happen. Look at the other games in this list. In one way or another, they are all about killing something, or not getting killed, or avoiding disaster, or blowing something up, or struggling through obstacles, etc, etc. This is the case for 99% of all games ever, as far as I can tell. RCT had none of that. The worst that could happen was, other than a little nausea, people would be sad that you didn’t have rides they wanted to ride on. Nobody to kill, nobody to be killed, no treasures to protect. The purpose of the game was to generate as much fun and joy as you could. If you didn’t do well, you only generated a little joy. If you excelled, you created much joy. The currency of the game was fun and excitement. Even the granddaddy, SimCity (which could have very well been on this list itself), forced you to deal with things like crime, and fire, and natural disasters, and pollution.

RCT’s world, and its gameplay, were a perfect respite for all of life’s struggles and ills. You had fun creating fun. There was really no way to lose. The ultimate tool for putting a smile on your face.

The fact that it did everything so goddamn great was just a bonus.


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