[Afforess]

It still boggles my mind that Chris Sawyer wrote Roller Coaster Tycoon was written in pure assembly, only failing back to C to handle windows sound apis. The game is a masterpiece, it defined an entire game genre for decades. And RCT ran smooth on my pentium 2 400mhz processor, even with hundreds of guests and dozens of rides. I believe there are many magnitudes of performance hiding in poor software abstractions in modern software.

[ChuckNorris89]

That also blows my mind but then again there also craftsmen who can make beautiful timepieces all by themselves so I guess making fun games in assembly is not that different than making a beautiful timepiece if you have the love and passion for it with the paciente to boot.

[m463]

And then there are the monks and the sand paintings.

[rerx]

I have never played Roller Coaster Tycoon, but Bullfrog's Theme Park (1994) was a massive hit with us kids on the Amiga. That one really defined the genre five years earlier, to be fair.

[Maken]

What Roller Coaster Tycoon brought to the table, and makes it shine even years later, is not the theme park simulation but rather what the title promises: the roller coasters.

The game comes with quite complete roller coaster (and some other rides) designer tools, which not only let you build the entire track from scratch, but also includes a simulation of vertical and lateral acceleration and g-forces along the track. It also has a appeal system for the rides, which is directly linked to the ride simulated operation parameters (plus some theming bonuses).

Designing rides is what (for me) takes most of the playing time and I judge every later entry in the amusement park entry by its roller coaster design tools.

[rerx]

Yes, laying out roller coaster tracks was the major thing that made Theme Park so exciting to us in 1994. I am sure Roller Coaster Tycoon did a much better job at everything, but the genre was already defined. :-)

Edit: I kind of enjoyed reading this flame war from 1999 between fan boys and girls from both camps https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic/...

[mekster]

I remember deleting the introduction movie file because 5MB sounded like a good space saved.

[madarco]

Transport Tycoon is the predecessor of RCT, using the same engine and it was released in 1994 too.

Having played both on my 386 back then, I'd say that TT run much more smoothly and with a bigger world

[mekster]

What's very impressive is that you'd still think the graphic doesn't look so bad 25 years later and the music was superb too. Some of the tracks are stuck in my head indefinitely.

[gambiting]

What I'd really love to know is how the game was ported to Android/iOS recently, because as far as I can tell the game is literally a 1:1 copy, so I wonder if they wrote some kind of x86 assembly interpreter for it? I cannot imagine they just remade the game in some other engine and achieved this level of accuracy.

[warmwaffles]

It was reverse engineered by a group of devs. https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2

[gambiting]

Right, but that's the OpenRTC2, and I mean the official port done by Atari that is available on both Android and iOS currently

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.atari.mobi...

[nodule7]

Chris sawyer gave Atari devs the assembly source code and helped them with porting it, completely separate to openrct

[olyjohn]

Back when I had first played TTD, I had a demo of the game and it came on a single floppy disk. And it ran smoothly on my 486 with 20MB or RAM. I played that demo for hours and hours...

[xattt]

It ran smooth on a Pentiuk MMX 200 MHz with 32 MB of RAM. A Pentium II 400 MHz computer might as well have been a Cray to me at the time!