Why RollerCoaster Tycoon Is A Masterpiece

My favorite part about RCT was watching the individual guests. If you stalk one of them for long enough, eventually you'll see the thought "I feel like someone's watching me." appear.

Gabi: "RCT was programmed by a single man" Me: Damm he was really good Gabi: "He did all the code in Assembly" Me: He... he... he is a god amongst men.

I like how Gabi just randomly decides to put on a cowboy hat halfway through the video.

He also made Locomotion, which was released in 2004 and I am so close to beating but the last scenarios are very difficult

Gabi is out here exploiting my weakness: watching people passionately talk about their interests even if I don't know anything about it

One thing Gabi missed or only hinted on, The timelessness of RCT is also in large part due to it being built in assembly. It's ridiculously difficult to play a LOT of old pc games. The fact that you can boot up RCT or RCT2 on modern machines is again a testament to how well it's built.

As a programmer, I really appreciated you going into the actually development of the game. You did a good job covering the topic ❤ You make programming sound somewhat cool (RARE)

I’m so grateful for ORCT2 for keeping this amazing game alive!

The explanation of Assembly at 5:15 offers a really great intuition of what a nightmare it must have been to singlehandedly create these two games.

glad you touched on the fact RCT was written in assembly, seriously crazy technical achievement

Xennial here. Interesting that you mentioned RCT predating The Sims, because RCT was actually a relative latecomer to the construction-management simulation genre of computer games that originally began with Utopia (1982) by Intellivision and then popularized by SimCity (1989) from Maxis (Will Wright). Simulation games then branched out into multiple sub-genres, including city-building games (Caesar, The Settlers, the Anno series), business/economy simulation games (Theme Park, Capitalism, Railroad Tycoon), and government/politics simulation games (Tropico, Civilization). Many of these games ran on MS-DOS or older Macintosh machines. The Sims, however, was part of the larger Sim game series (incl. SimCity2000, SimEarth, SimPark, SimLife, SimFarm, SimCoaster, SimGolf, to name a few) that applied the notion of a virtual dollhouse to the simulation genre, a relatively novel idea for gaming in Y2K.

As someone who has a degree in Computer Science, I know just enough about Assembly to know that’s a madlad move to build your game in.

Ah. A woman of culture.

is nobody gonna say anything about gabi keeping peanut butter in the fridge??

Gabi not only making a whole video about one of my favorite games of all time, but also including a clip from Call me Kevin in said video, is the real compound medication I've been needing all along!

Some of my earliest childhood memories were watching my Dad play Railroad and Rollercoaster Tycoon. Then when I was in 5th grade he pirated RCT along with all of the Sims games (1,2, and the BRAND NEW 3) on to my computer. He was the best, RIP Dad and thank you for getting me into the life simulation genre <3

Chris Sawyer is the Tame Impala of video game development, he’s just one guy

I still play RCT to this day, and the carousel music is still fire

The stylistic art and isometric veiw made that game so beautiful to play. So satisfying and allowed you to make parks that looked simply beautiful.

The music the carousel plays is literally etched into my brain, so much nostalgia from playing this game