Beverley P is stuck in a maze. She's spent the last 50 years toiling away near its entrance. Starving, thirsty and exhausted, Beverley ekes out a desperate, endless existence, alone and without hope. If she were able to talk, she might whisper: 'kill me'.
Rollercoaster Tycoon Free Online
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 is a construction and management simulation video game. It is the third installment in the RollerCoaster Tycoon series, first released.
Regina F. managed to make it past Checkpoint 1, and is currently circling Checkpoint 2. 47 years after she began her journey through the maze, there is a sliver of hope that she may find the exit. But she still has a long way to go; there are five checkpoints in total. Miserable, exhausted and desperate for a drink, Regina soldiers on. Maybe, in another 50 years, she'll have reached the half-way point.
Rollercoaster Tycoon 10 Years Free
Is this the most evil RollerCoaster Tycoon creation ever? Probably.
It is the brainchild of a particularly mischievous fan who created a park that's home to just one attraction: a massive maze - and let 16 AI guests inside to see if they could find their way to the exit.
Over the course of 50 in-game years, none of the guests have managed to make it out the maze. In fact, some seem stuck in endless loops, destined to toil away forever in a virtual purgatory.
Just A Walk In The Park is the work of 'RogueLeader23', a 28-year-old from the east coast of America who recently got stuck into the excellent mobile game RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic. He tells me he used to draw mazes to pass the time as a child, and the name of his park was inspired by Jurassic Park 'and how it relates by going through hell to escape'.
A couple of years ago, after downloading RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 from Steam, RogueLeader23 had the idea to construct a maze to see how long it would take for a basic, 15-year-old AI to successfully navigate. 'There was no cruelty involved, as every guest who entered the queue (maybe?) knew what they were up against,' he says.
But the devilish plan was shelved as real-life took over. It only became a reality after RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic came out in December 2016. Classic is a mix of RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 and 2 - the brilliant originals designed by Chris Sawyer - ported to iOS platforms. 'The idea again immediately surfaced and I began making plans to construct a maze that fit just about the entire park.'
What resulted was 'an abusive, 14 hour project', RogueLeader23 says.
The maze was created with the ultimate goal of directing one unlucky maze-goer through the entire park. Checkpoints were incorporated just as a way to keep track of the progress of the guests. It took 20 in-game years of cutting through a massive hedge to build Just A Walk In The Park. It is as enormous as it is complex. To give you an idea of just how enormous and complex, 36 pathways become available at Checkpoint 1 alone.
'The only design challenge when creating a maze is to always remember to keep a route open,' RogueLeader23 explains. 'If you close off every route, your maze cannot be completed. And, when near completion (especially with RCT), keep track of where you're building. One slip up could mean that your long and windy route to the finish is countered with an unexpected 'shortcut' you were unaware of.'
The experiment began with the injection into the maze of just one AI guest, to see how long they'd take to fully navigate it. The first guest to walk through the entrance to Just A Walk In The Park was Beverley P. RogueLeader23 observed her behaviour, using the mobile version of the game's accelerate time option to speed up proceedings.
'At first, my findings were that the AI chose a completely random direction to take at every intersection,' he explains. 'Bev had 'decided' to wander close to the entrance after two in-game years, so I decided to open the flood gates and let an additional 15 guests in.
These additional guests seemed to behave according to RogueLeader23's 'random direction' theory until, about 15 in-game years later, a couple of guests made it to the first checkpoint. This sparked a thought:
'Now, it could definitely be a correct number of random choices that brought them there, but once the guest Regina F. made it all the way to checkpoint two, leaving most of the other guests in the dust, I either thought it was a huge random guess that was made correctly, or something else was up.'
Was something up? RogueLeader23 struck upon a theory.
'Anyone who's played the Rollercoaster Tycoon series is aware that every guest has a certain preferred ride intensity. In order to please every guest in your park, it's necessary to include both your 'merry-go-round' and your 'I think I might die' rides.
'Allow me to use our sweet Beverley P. and Regina F. as examples. Beverley has a tolerance and preference for more intense rides. She came looking for rollercoasters, but she all got was a lousy hedge maze. She continues to linger around the entrance, possibly hoping someone will let her back into reality.
'On the flip-side, Regina came looking for less-intense rides. Hedge mazes are clearly her specialty, as she's already navigated to the second checkpoint.'
But are hedge mazes really Regina's speciality?
The hedge maze in Rollercoaster Tycoon is the only ride a player can build that allows guests to navigate themselves. Would the developers have taken the time to code the AI with less-intense ride preferences just to navigate mazes easier? RogueLeader23 doubted this was the case, but remained curious.
He checked the preferences of the other 14 maze challengers, and, it turned out, those who had a preference for more intense rides were trapped closer to the start of the maze, and the guests with a less intense preference were able to work their way through it.
The question was, could this all be a coincidence? Could it be an unexpected byproduct of the AI's programming, something even the developers were unaware of?
Whatever the case, the guests cannot simply give up and disappear from the maze. Unable to die, they are trapped in a kind of virtual theme park purgatory until they reach the end. While their hunger and thirst levels can drop to minimal levels, and they do show signs of fatigue (although, curiously enough, the guests all have steel bladders), they must soldier on - theoretically forever.
It's not all doom and gloom. A total of 3857 umbrellas have been sold since the park opened, and the information kiosk at the entrance has seen a total of 20,039 guests come through (although only 16 guests were allowed in the maze itself, with over 200 crammed into the queue). In order to accommodate guests further, the park has added a delicious seafood stall, accompanied by a hot chocolate stand. 'A delightful combo for guests during those hazy summer days,' RogueLeader23 says.
RogueLeader23's Just A Walk In The Park experiment is now at year 70. Essentially, every guest is only able to crawl around, so exhausted are they by their unending plight. Their only chance to get out is if the player pulls the plug by closing and editing the ride. This would trigger a purge, forcing every guest to the exit.
Or, the guests could succeed by reaching the exit.
So, what will RogueLeader23 do? Will he put his guests out of their misery?
'I am a man of science,' he says, 'and I must see the experiment until the end. So reaching the exit is their only chance of hope.'
At the time of publication, Regina F. is closest to escape, but she's really not that close. She's been in the maze a total of 48 real world hours, or 47 years of in-game time. Currently, she has been circling around Checkpoint 2, possibly checking off every wrong route she follows. There are five checkpoints in total.
As for poor Beverley P, she's still wandering close to the start of the maze, some 50 years after she began her journey. 'We assume Beverley has lost all hope as she circles around the same familiar pathways,' RogueLeader23 says. But her effort has not gone unnoticed. A Walk In The Park has designated a month every year to sell yellow umbrellas as a tribute to Beverley being the first and most likely oldest guest in the hedge maze.
'I believe, with enough time, someone will successfully navigate the maze,' RogueLeader23 says.
'I honestly couldn't tell you how many routes there are to take throughout the maze or the chances of succeeding (a Reddit user said the chances were quite astronomical), but I will keep the internet updated every 25-ish in-game years on the progress of our maze challengers (about every week).'
While we wait for a year 100 update (previous updates can be found on Imgur here and here), I thought I'd check in with Chris Sawyer, creator of RollerCoaster Tycoon, to see what he thought of RogueLeader23's handywork. In short, he was impressed.
'Just when you think you've seen everything in RollerCoaster Tycoon something comes along like RogueLeader23's jaw-dropping maze spanning an entire park,' he told me, over email.
'I'm not sure what I admire most, the amount of patience and dedication needed to design and build this massive maze or the trudging determination of the poor little guests exhausted from years of desperatelyand hopelessly trying to find their way out.'
(I also asked Sawyer about the RollerCoaster Tycoon AI programming, in a bid to shed some light on how it operates in a maze, but he declined to comment.)
As for RogueLeader23, once - if - a guest reaches the fifth and final checkpoint, he plans to stream RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic on Twitch. The problem is, he doesn't know when that will happen. It could be anything from a week to five years from now.
'It's all up to Beverley P., Regina F. and the other 14 guests who thought they'd be taking Just a Walk in the Park...'
While it’s never a safe bet to celebrate anniversaries of old video games that the Internet tells us were released on the last day of a month, since few-and-far-between sources tend to have a more accurate date, this one has nothing holding us from doing just that.
(Presumably!) exactly 20 years ago, the American release of the original RollerCoaster Tycoon happened. In essence, it was created by three people – Chris Sawyer as programmer and designer, Simon Foster as artist, and Allister Brimble as the audio/soundtrack composer. The game borrowed a lot from the same team’s 1994 legend Transport Tycoon, from the isometric view, through the general controls, even the fact that they were written in assembly code and ported to Windows by the same company, Fish UK.
Already in 1997, RollerCoaster Tycoon (with working title White Knuckle), when it only had roller coasters, looked ahead of its time.
What Sawyer originally envisioned as a simulator of roller coasters became a fun park game that would ultimately overshadow Bullfrog’s Theme Park series. Whereas the latter focused more on the management part of the gameplay, RollerCoaster Tycoon not only took that but enabled the level of customization that was up to then unseen. A large percentage of rides could have any number of track designs that were built by players or were given by default, and then those same tracks and even trains could be painted in multiple different colors. Don’t like the terrain? Here, have land and water editing tools, and go to town with replacing grass with sand or chess boards. And here’s some scenery that guests can acknowledge and enjoy for good measure. Oh, and have the same color tools you paint your rides with become applicable to flowers and staff uniforms. This little world is yours to personalize.
That’s all well and good, but if someone back then would make a game with that many details going on at the same time, computers of the time would’ve spontaneously combusted, so what were the minimum system requirements? Any Pentium 90 that could run Windows 95. And Pentium 90’s were on their way out, since almost all other games in 1999 required at least a 166. Therein lies the magic of assembly code. While I would put anyone who uses it on suicide watch due to the fact that it’s difficult to comprehend what goes on in any given moment, assembly code directly handles a computer’s memory, therefore it can be used to optimize the behaviour of the software it is trying to create and claim as few resources as possible if the code is good enough. And indeed it was, even on computers of the time, every scenario in RollerCoaster Tycoon ran pretty much without any loading times to speak of.
The game sold like mad, and was even bundled in cereals and pizza roll boxes. The public wanted more. In November 1999, the first expansion came out, and its name depended on your location – in Europe, it was called Added Attractions, and in North America, it was called Corkscrew Follies. Its European title did not fully communicate what was new – other than new rides, it brought new and far more challenging scenarios (including one real park, Alton Towers), path signs that could be used to block certain areas to non-staff (no more “I’m lost” messages, heh), and expanded list of rides and purchasable items that could be painted. Guests no longer had to have numbers identifying them, as you could toggle between names like “Guest 234” and “Jimmy H.”, and staff could be renamed as well for all those OCD staff zone users. To top that all off, all the new options except the new rides were applicable in the base game’s scenarios. Woo!
The original game with expansions could simulate real-world parks to a pretty high degree, but the engine had reached its limits and a sequel needed even more optimization.
As if that wasn’t enough, September 2000 saw the release of the second expansion called Loopy Landscapes, which was a less additive one, bringing even more parks (with two real ones, Blackpool Pleasure Beach and Heide-Park), and the ability for rides that are not merry-go-rounds and dodgems to play different music styles. The new scenarios could have entrance fees removed just to spice things up, and some did not have any money involved, making them sort-of sandboxes. However, this expansion did include the entirety of Added Attractions/Corkscrew Follies content for those who had missed it, so that’s a plus. By that time, Bullfrog had created a few Theme Park sequels, but even with EA’s money and marketing teams, they failed to get much attention.
A sequel to RCT was underway, and one can imagine the expectations people had of it. However, on 14 October 2002, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 was released to an early case of discrepancy between the opinions of reviewers and gamers. While the reviewers lamented how it was largely the same game, the players immediately understood what Sawyer wanted to do with the sequel – the game had an optimized engine with a slightly better guest and staff AI, more frames were made for trains, many new rides were added, many new concepts even (first aid rooms, ATM machines, mass scenery removal tool), as well as some basic in-built editors so people could make their own scenarios and share them with others without resorting to creating their own tools. There was even a “hidden” option to import up to two custom audio tracks to be played as music in the game. Oh, and there were Six Flags-licensed parks and items, just in case. While the graphics were somewhat polished, Sawyer had only one real focus – gameplay. And according to millions of fans around the world, he succeeded in doing just that. Most fans still consider this to be the peak of the series, as it gave them the freedom to make their own experiences. At the series' peak in popularity, 2002 also saw the releases of a licensed board game and pinball machine(!).
Although not without limitations, the editors in RCT2 increased the game's longevity to... well... I think it's safe to say INFINITY.
Things took a bit of a strange turn immediately afterwards. Sawyer was not directly involved in the expansions for RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 – instead, the first studio not controlled by him entered the scene – Frontier Developments. Contrary to the expansions for the first game which added gameplay elements, the second game’s expansions Wacky Worlds and Time Twister, both released in 2003, included only new scenarios and scenery with the themes of world wonders and different time periods, respectively. Sadly, the new rides were merely reskins of the original ones and were listed separately from the ones they were based on in the game and the editors. These were not as well-received, not least because of their overly high price-to-content ratio at launch. Meanwhile, in that same 2003, the first game and its expansions were ported to the original Xbox, but it would appear that few people are aware of this release today.
While Sawyer was busy doing a sort-of sequel to Transport Tycoon, called Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion, he was also the executive producer on Frontier’s next game – RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, released on 2 November 2004. It was the series’ first entry to 3D using Frontier’s proprietary Cobra engine (that’s being used to this day, with major upgrades) and its main feature was the ability to experience the rides from a first-person perspective. Staff now also had satisfaction levels, could be trained and their wages were customizable. Each scenario had three different difficulties, the objectives of which had to be done in succession. Stalls and shops had more customizable elements (e.g. optional ice cubes and lemon slices for drinks), VIP guests would arrive from time to time, and players could make synchronized fireworks using the MixMaster tool. Custom music could be properly imported through the game’s interface, and even custom images could be used for signs. However, the game launched in a buggy state, and some memory leaks were left unresolved to this day. Many fans accepted the game, but the majority remained with the first two titles.
While not nearly as exciting as the real thing, RCT3's first-person mode helps understand the meaning of ride statistics.
In a way, Frontier made up for the weak RCT2 expansions by releasing meatier ones for the third game. On 22 June 2005, they released Soaked!, which introduced pools and all the items you’d see in an aqua park. They also started adding something that was missing in RCT3 compared to the originals, and that was proper tunnelling support for paths and rides, though that was only really implemented in the little-known official patch for Soaked!, so the change is generally attributed to the second expansion online. That second expansion, Wild!, was released on 25 October 2005, and introduced the ability to place live animals (currently alive or extinct), basically entering the territory of Microsoft’s Zoo Tycoon series.
Then came a silence for many years. Atari, to whom Sawyer had licensed the usage of the IP as the legal successors of his prior partners (MicroProse and Infogrames), had even filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and had allegedly even put the IP’s license for sale, even though Sawyer has had ownership of the IP in his own hands since the beginning. However, Atari somehow survived, and in 2012 they released RollerCoaster Tycoon 3D, a largely ignored Nintendo 3DS exclusive developed by n-Space.
The real shocker came on 10 April 2014, when they released the unthinkable RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile for Android and iOS, which barely had any gameplay, let alone any that would nod to the prior games in the series (paths serving no real purpose, notably), and had the audacity to have loads of microtransactions. It was even a purchasable game at launch, and only after stark criticism did it become free-to-play with those microtransactions intact. This, combined with EA’s rightfully hated Dungeon Keeper (Mobile) game from just half a year prior that attempted to do pretty much the same thing, drew attention to the practices big publishers employed in the mobile market, tainting it further in the eyes of the general gamer public. To contrast this, Chris Sawyer himself released a mobile game called simply Transport Tycoon (in truth a port of Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion) on 2 October 2013 to some success. In 2015, Atari even called Frontier to port RCT3 for smartphones, despite the hanging issue of unpaid royalties for the by-then decade-old PC version.
So after that debacle, Atari decided to create two more RCT games. After many developer changes and an excruciating development, RollerCoaster Tycoon: World was ultimately released on 16 November 2016 to international ridicule, not least of which because within the same 24 hour period, Frontier Developments released their own independent creation called Planet Coaster, which involved everything good about their RCT3 game (including the exact same engine on steroids!) with fixes in areas where it had failed. Another independent production, Parkitect (ultimately finished on 29 November 2018) inspired by the isometric titles in the RCT series, was deep into development and had available high-quality WIP builds at that time, to further stress how lacking RCT World was in every aspect.
Planet Coaster, seen here with a park made by GameFront's own Danny, is everything RCT3 could have been if it were left in development a bit longer, and looks gorgeous.
The second 2016 RCT game, however, was the competent and successful RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, which had Chris Sawyer involved for the first time since RCT3: Wild!. It was an Android and iOS port of RCT1 and RCT2, with the contents of the latter’s expansions and editors being available as admittedly overpriced DLC (again!). However, someone had the “bright” idea to re-port that back to the PC on Steam on 28 September 2017 (with the DLCs already included), which was quite unnecessary since the fans had not only had those games in relatively stable states from GOG and Steam (which are cheaper, too), but there was also the OpenRCT2 project that had become the de facto way to play those games and was fully compatible with all their existing content. To this day, some newcomers are confused on which to buy.
2017’s mobile game RollerCoaster Tycoon Touch was seen as just another attempt to enforce the horribly flawed philosophy behind RCT 4 Mobile, and by the time the 2018 PlayStation 4 VR game RollerCoaster Tycoon: Joyride and the Nintendo Switch (later PC) game RollerCoaster Tycoon: Adventures came out, nobody even cared anymore.
So while Atari has horribly mismanaged the series they do not even own (again, Sawyer still holds the IP through efforts of his agents at Marjacq Ltd.) and have even received a lawsuit from Frontier Developments regarding unpaid royalties over RCT3 (which is the reason it’s now unavailable for purchase online), the fanbase never abandoned the series, at least not its spirit. Most are too busy playing OpenRCT2, Planet Coaster, and/or Parkitect to care about the mediocre sequels Atari has been pushing lately, and the fansite NEDesigns still gets a lot of impressive Loopy Landscapes and RCT2 creations. Despite the grim turn of events the series has experienced in this decade, the same period has actually seen nothing but the revival of a creative community that still plays enhanced versions of the game which we celebrate today. Long live RollerCoaster Tycoon, but for crying out loud, remove it from Atari’s hands.
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