RollerCoaster Tycoon Optimizations are Insane

Finally A non AI related prime video... What a great day to be alive

Chris Sawyer is a legend. People forget how intricate RCT was - on top of having the physics engine and construction and patching, each and every booth and item had its own stats that modified the game world and most could be shown. And the game world tracked each and every park guest and their stats and how those affected everything else. Dude let you free hand mazes because the guests in the park already had their own path finding. And he did it all on the same thread on the same process running the rides, charts, animations, etc. In asm. As a single person dev team. On a small CRT. Dude was sturdier than an IBM Model M keyboard.

I wonder how much energy and memory utilized in modern datacenters it’s just an insane stack of abstractions rather the actual thing.

my favourite is that guests dropped in water drown instead of swimming to safety was an optimization decision as well

And not only that but he started writing games in a different architecture (Z80), then he port his games from Z80-ASM to x86-ASM and with all his knowledge and discipline created RolleCoaster Tycoon; truly a Chad amongst us mortals. If anyone has a bit more interest, there is an Ahoy's video that covers Tycoon's history and development, "RollerCoaster Tycoon was the last of its kind."

I love how Rollercoaster Tycoon is so optimised that you can quite literally run it on a graphic calculator. Absolutely insane genius from but a single man.

Not only is Roller Coaster Tycoon elite, his previous game Transport Tycoon is also legendary. Others have continued his work with OpenTTD and it's also still going strong. Love that game

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What still blows my mind was this little very underutilised scenery piece, of a clock, that actually kept the real time. That’s the level of detail he went into. Absolutely nuts but things like that and the obscene levels of calculations for such minor little details is what makes it so timeless.

It took longer for a team of devs to rewrite his game in higher level languages than it took him to write the entire thing in Assembly