Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon’s Creator, Chris Sawyer
Back in 1996 or 1997 I was really struggling for inspiration and focus while working on Transport Tycoon 2. This sequel to my earlier game Transport Tycoon seemed a good idea at the time but the planned improvements over Transport Tycoon Deluxe weren’t that great, and the power and memory of PCs at the time weren’t enough to allow a more ambitious approach with the sequel. At the same time I was developing quite an interest in rollercoasters, a fascination with their design and engineering, and I’d also played games like Theme Park which included crude representations of rollercoasters. It got to the point where I needed to take a break from Transport Tycoon 2 and have a bit of fun playing around with other ideas for a while, and luckily the success of Transport Tycoon Deluxe meant I could afford to postpone the sequel and take some time off.
It was a long gradual process — I was under contract to create Transport Tycoon 2 so initially all I was doing was postponing it while I took a break and had a bit of fun exploring other ideas. I expected to go back to Transport Tycoon 2 at some point once inspiration and focus returned. The great thing about the way I worked back then was that I could get ideas programmed and working really quickly, as I was basically doing it all myself so no issues with managing (or paying for) a large team or having to explain or justify ideas to anyone else. So tinkering with different ways of getting a rollercoaster working in the Transport Tycoon 2 isometric gameworld system I was working on was quite a quick process, and fun too. I went down a lot of dead-ends, and the display system ended up having to be considerably re-written and improved before anything reasonable was working, but it just sort of grew gradually and I felt it was better spending my time working on something that was fun to work on even if at the time it looked like there was no possibility of it becoming commercially worthwhile.
