Rollercoaster Tycoon (or, MicroProse’s Last Hurrah)
I think it touches on two of the most fundamental aspects of human nature. We all like doing something constructive, where we can see that we are creating something from virtually nothing, and we all have a desire to nurture or look after things. This is what the game is all about. You spend hours painstakingly building your park and roller coasters up piece by piece, and then it becomes your own baby, which you want to look after and keep running smoothly, watching it grow in popularity and delighted by all the little guests who are enjoying all your hard work. Of course, the subject matter, roller coasters and theme parks, helps a lot as well. What could be more fun in a game than to build and run a park which is full of little people also having fun?
When Jeff Briggs, Brian Reynolds, and Sid Meier resigned from MicroProse Software in 1996 in order to found their own studio Firaxis, they left behind one heck of a parting gift. Civilization II, the last project Briggs and Reynolds worked on at MicroProse, became one of the rare computer games that sell in big numbers for months and months on end. Combined with a brutal down-sizing that involved laying off half the company and finally retiring the redundant Spectrum Holobyte brand, Civilization II managed to put MicroProse in the black in 1997 for the first time in more than half a decade. The $7.9 million profit the company posted that year, on revenues that were up by more than 40 percent, may have paled in comparison to the $120.2 million it had bled out since being acquired by the Spectrum Holobyte brain trust in December of 1993, but it was better than the alternative.
