The author wishes there was more of a storyline to the game. Which is absolutely fine as it’s their preference.
But it made me think of how Minecraft has almost no story (well, something was added later but it’s optional to follow it) and perhaps that contributed to its major success.
Decent sandbox games don’t need stories if the mechanics are satisfying enough and games like Sawyer’s Tycoons and Minecraft are evidence of that.
Sometimes it’s nice to just unwind by playing a game with little to no pressure. You pick it up and drop it at your leisure. The only downside is they can turn into huge time sinks as they don’t have a clear “The End” to them.
Yeah, the author wants a story saying there wasn't enough continuity between scenarios or motivation to continue, but that was a non-issue for me personally. It's been many, many years, but my memory is that while RCT didn't have a completely open sandbox like TT to boot, each scenario was effectively its own sandbox with restrictions that made them interesting. New rides became available you progressed, and each park enabled creativity in different ways. When you finished all of the scenarios, I believe there was a completely open sandbox that became available, and that was like a nice reward. There really was no need for a story, and I think that would have detracted.
> It's been many, many years, but my memory is that while RCT didn't have a completely open sandbox like TT to boot, each scenario was effectively its own sandbox with restrictions that made them interesting
Also a very long time ago I played it, but I seem to remember that you could continue any scenario for as long time as you wanted after completing it, you didn't need to exit the scenario once completed. Maybe I misremember? If not, that'd basically mean every scenario is also a sandbox once the goals were completed.
Story is one of the easiest ways to add progression, but it's not the only way.
That's not to say story is bad but you can have quite good games without it, and any "long lasting/replayable" game has to have gameplay that stands alone.
People will put up with crappy gameplay for an amazing story, but they're not going to replay it much.
RCT, Railroad Tycoon 2 (which has scripted scenarios and sandbox ), SimCopter and Streets of Sim City were great
RRT2 has it scenarios like Hell or High Water where you have fill in a giant crater with cement by orchestrating trains before ocean levels rise or just sandbox play building railways buying up business and watching connected cities boom. Always loved using cheats to make all competitors trains break down then take over their bankrupt company.
SimCopter and Streets of Sim City had missions/scenarios. Or you could just go fly/drive around any SimCity2000 map.
Remember a SimCopter cheat would essentially nuke the city and set everything in fire.
And Street let you blow up buildings by adding weapons to your car.
I think his critique wasn’t that it didn’t offer a story, but that it didn’t offer a sandbox mode, only a campaign mode… and that the campaign wasn’t really a campaign.
> Written by Sawyer in pure, ultra-efficient Intel assembly language — an anomaly by that time
Not mentioned in the article, but this did allow for a port of the game to the OG XBOX (733 MHz PentiumⅢ box) way back in 2003, long before the game's eventual remake as RCT Classic for ARM etc in 2017.
Interesting that the XBOX port is RCT1+expansions even though it came out after RCT2 did on PC, maybe due to lesser requirements or probably just to avoid cannibalizing RCT2 PC sales and to double-dip people who had already paid for RCT1 PC: https://youtu.be/Vtincfkl8KY?t=75
RCT1 was one of those games that I spent entire summers playing as a kid (see also: SimCity 3000), entirely offline because tying up the house's single phone line with the modem wasn't allowed during the day. Even though RCT2 was objectively the better game it felt like an aesthetic downgrade, and I actively hated RCT3 and still do. RCT1's vibes are immaculate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BitorD-HVuQ
I remember FINALLY getting RCT1 from Scholastic Book Club and then a few months later got RCT2 from a cereal box. Was nuts. Easily the best cereal box thing ever.
> but this did allow for a port of the game to the OG XBOX (733 MHz PentiumⅢ box) way back in 2003
Not sure if the clock speed is just for reference or emphasis re: efficiency, but RCT1 will in fact happily run on a Pentium 90 (which is still mind blowing to me given the scope of the game)
Just for disambiguation to emphasize that I'm talking about the Intel-based console, because the naming scheme of the later Microsoft consoles makes it easy to confuse “Xbox One” with the OG one. I spent most of my time playing RCT 1 and 2 on a 400 MHz PⅡ, and their performance was indeed flawless :)
Having cut my teeth writing asm on 386/486 in ms-dos, these comments are kind of hilarious to me because Pentium is well into "you can write most of it in C" territory.
By the P2 era (97-98), especially as consoles show up, assembly's not desirable at all.
Pmode/w was released in 97 which speaks to the demand for a Watcom C/C++ protected mode extender at the time...
I don’t think necessity has anything to do with it being written in assembly in the first place, it’s just Sawyer’s background was in porting others’ titles and it was just what he was used to using
Somewhat relevant: I’ve been following the developer of Car Park Capital on twitter [1], a “retro tycoon game” in their own words. Yesterday, the current MicroProse [2] announced they would publish it.
MicroProse games in the 90s were next level. So many milsim games where you got to experience a crude 90s graphics recreation of being a service member shooting bogies.
I never could complete a mission of F-117A Steal Fighter on Mac System 9.
However, RCT was a “Minecraft” of its day without the support of the community. It was huge. Everyone was playing it. I wish modding was a thing back then. We would have gone crazy but then when you read how RCT was made - glad we didn’t have to do it.
I'm not sure RCT ever had a modding community, but it's predecessor, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, did. TTDPatch[0] had several gameplay and quality of life improvements, but it was eventually superseded by OpenTTD[1].
I really miss some of the companies from that era... Red Storm Entertainment, Tom Clancy's vision, comes to mind. The early Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six games had a dedication to immersion that their modern counterparts totally lack.
Ghost Recon (2001) runs perfectly through proton on my linux desktop. I still fire it up from time to time.
At our local lans in the early 2000s, Rainbow Six Rogue Spear was probably the most popular game we played, and still there doesn't seem to be any tactical shooters like that available today, that focuses on realism over cosmetics and arcade-mechanics.
Also makes me think of the countless hours of fun Westwood Studios provided me with in my youth, real shame they didn't get to survive longer :/
MoO2 and Heroes 3; there's a combo that sends me right back.
I think there's a serious argument somewhere in there that perfection of a game is much easier in the "2D" realm and even now we've not really gotten close in 3D space - as proof I'd offer Factorio.
Because of this, heavy heavy code reuse is common and likely the folks who wrote it are gone, leaving only behind an ABI and a doc. This is why so many games have very similar design components to them. It worked for the business before (or a similar one), someone said sales go up, they pull in the ABI, now everything’s an open world, scavenger, PVP, base building, inventory management, shooter, looter, micro transaction scooter, rpg (with aimbot if you use a controller)
Man, I can still remember the magic I felt when first discovering that game on my cousin's laptop in 1999. Such a simple game yet allowed enough creativity for an 10 year old boy to be imaginative.
There does come a point where there isn't much else to do with the game once you get good enough at it, so I started having fun doing "experiments". One of the things I did in RCT was build "prisons" where I leveraged things like the carousel to work as a one-way door into the park to allow guests to come in but prevent them from leaving; it lead to a barren cement building with a turbo drop coaster designed to be intentionally dangerous so I could "execute" prisoners. There was puke everywhere after a while. What a disturbing mind I had.
> There was puke everywhere after a while. What a disturbing mind I had.
I think you were not the only one exploring those sides of those sort of games! I don't remember if it was SimCity 2000 or 3000 that I played the most, but I remember some of these tycoon/management/simulation games let our destructive sides really come out by letting us unleash volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes and similar, all at the same time :)
I always used the Do Not Enter marquee signs such that once guests entered the park they could never leave. Great for helping meet the total park population scenarios.
Similar things come to my mind with The Sims. Once the game was “over” (maybe you’ve reached the top job) you could still do all sorts of things… Some of them a bit masochistic.
If you liked micro-prose, they are back in full form with Highfleet. Maybe not "back", but it's one of the most engaging engineering / action games I've played and it has a very microprose feel
Well, if it has a very microprose feel then it was by luck, because they picked it up late in development and it's a single russian guy's brainchild. He also made hammerfight, another excellent (if janky as hell) game.
Nu-MicroProse has been seeking out games similar in spirit to those published by old MicroProse trying to become the continuation of what it used to be. It might have been luck that there was a guy developing that kind of game at the time, or it might have been that there's a growing desire for that sort of game that MicroProse is coming along at the right time to pick up
The author wishes there was more of a storyline to the game. Which is absolutely fine as it’s their preference.
But it made me think of how Minecraft has almost no story (well, something was added later but it’s optional to follow it) and perhaps that contributed to its major success.
Decent sandbox games don’t need stories if the mechanics are satisfying enough and games like Sawyer’s Tycoons and Minecraft are evidence of that.
Sometimes it’s nice to just unwind by playing a game with little to no pressure. You pick it up and drop it at your leisure. The only downside is they can turn into huge time sinks as they don’t have a clear “The End” to them.
Yeah, the author wants a story saying there wasn't enough continuity between scenarios or motivation to continue, but that was a non-issue for me personally. It's been many, many years, but my memory is that while RCT didn't have a completely open sandbox like TT to boot, each scenario was effectively its own sandbox with restrictions that made them interesting. New rides became available you progressed, and each park enabled creativity in different ways. When you finished all of the scenarios, I believe there was a completely open sandbox that became available, and that was like a nice reward. There really was no need for a story, and I think that would have detracted.
> It's been many, many years, but my memory is that while RCT didn't have a completely open sandbox like TT to boot, each scenario was effectively its own sandbox with restrictions that made them interesting
Also a very long time ago I played it, but I seem to remember that you could continue any scenario for as long time as you wanted after completing it, you didn't need to exit the scenario once completed. Maybe I misremember? If not, that'd basically mean every scenario is also a sandbox once the goals were completed.
Minecraft doesn't have (much of) a story, but it does have progression, which is just as important in a sandbox game
Story is one of the easiest ways to add progression, but it's not the only way.
That's not to say story is bad but you can have quite good games without it, and any "long lasting/replayable" game has to have gameplay that stands alone.
People will put up with crappy gameplay for an amazing story, but they're not going to replay it much.
RCT, Railroad Tycoon 2 (which has scripted scenarios and sandbox ), SimCopter and Streets of Sim City were great
RRT2 has it scenarios like Hell or High Water where you have fill in a giant crater with cement by orchestrating trains before ocean levels rise or just sandbox play building railways buying up business and watching connected cities boom. Always loved using cheats to make all competitors trains break down then take over their bankrupt company.
SimCopter and Streets of Sim City had missions/scenarios. Or you could just go fly/drive around any SimCity2000 map.
Remember a SimCopter cheat would essentially nuke the city and set everything in fire.
And Street let you blow up buildings by adding weapons to your car.
Story of my life. Literally.
(wonder how many people, especially engineers share this, uh storyline... Just get up, build things)
I think his critique wasn’t that it didn’t offer a story, but that it didn’t offer a sandbox mode, only a campaign mode… and that the campaign wasn’t really a campaign.
Yes, there is a reason sandboxes are so popular among kids.
> Written by Sawyer in pure, ultra-efficient Intel assembly language — an anomaly by that time
Not mentioned in the article, but this did allow for a port of the game to the OG XBOX (733 MHz PentiumⅢ box) way back in 2003, long before the game's eventual remake as RCT Classic for ARM etc in 2017.
Interesting that the XBOX port is RCT1+expansions even though it came out after RCT2 did on PC, maybe due to lesser requirements or probably just to avoid cannibalizing RCT2 PC sales and to double-dip people who had already paid for RCT1 PC: https://youtu.be/Vtincfkl8KY?t=75
Notably one of the XBOX games that has never been backwards compatible lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_games_compatible_...
RCT1 was one of those games that I spent entire summers playing as a kid (see also: SimCity 3000), entirely offline because tying up the house's single phone line with the modem wasn't allowed during the day. Even though RCT2 was objectively the better game it felt like an aesthetic downgrade, and I actively hated RCT3 and still do. RCT1's vibes are immaculate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BitorD-HVuQ
I remember FINALLY getting RCT1 from Scholastic Book Club and then a few months later got RCT2 from a cereal box. Was nuts. Easily the best cereal box thing ever.
> but this did allow for a port of the game to the OG XBOX (733 MHz PentiumⅢ box) way back in 2003
Not sure if the clock speed is just for reference or emphasis re: efficiency, but RCT1 will in fact happily run on a Pentium 90 (which is still mind blowing to me given the scope of the game)
Just for disambiguation to emphasize that I'm talking about the Intel-based console, because the naming scheme of the later Microsoft consoles makes it easy to confuse “Xbox One” with the OG one. I spent most of my time playing RCT 1 and 2 on a 400 MHz PⅡ, and their performance was indeed flawless :)
Having cut my teeth writing asm on 386/486 in ms-dos, these comments are kind of hilarious to me because Pentium is well into "you can write most of it in C" territory.
By the P2 era (97-98), especially as consoles show up, assembly's not desirable at all.
Pmode/w was released in 97 which speaks to the demand for a Watcom C/C++ protected mode extender at the time...
I don’t think necessity has anything to do with it being written in assembly in the first place, it’s just Sawyer’s background was in porting others’ titles and it was just what he was used to using
Obligatory link to creator Chris Sawyer's page about RCT fountain's cellular automaton:
https://www.chrissawyergames.com/feature4.htm
I love the disclaimer on the RCT2 Screenshots page: https://www.chrissawyergames.com/feature5.htm
> Click each thumbnail below to view the full 800x600 screenshot image
> (Warning: Each image is between 100KB and 250KB in size and may take a minute or two to download)
Like when screenshot-heavy forum threads would have title suffixes like [56K NO!!]
Loved playing this game as a kid, Open Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 has been great for some recent replays: https://openrct2.io
Thank you for this
Somewhat relevant: I’ve been following the developer of Car Park Capital on twitter [1], a “retro tycoon game” in their own words. Yesterday, the current MicroProse [2] announced they would publish it.
[1] https://x.com/hilkojj/status/1950872926385037339
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroProse#Brand_revival_(2018...
There's also the city builder Metropolis 1998 [1]. Similar RollerCoaster Tycoon aesthetic
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
[2] (I'm the dev)
MicroProse games in the 90s were next level. So many milsim games where you got to experience a crude 90s graphics recreation of being a service member shooting bogies.
I never could complete a mission of F-117A Steal Fighter on Mac System 9.
However, RCT was a “Minecraft” of its day without the support of the community. It was huge. Everyone was playing it. I wish modding was a thing back then. We would have gone crazy but then when you read how RCT was made - glad we didn’t have to do it.
I'm not sure RCT ever had a modding community, but it's predecessor, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, did. TTDPatch[0] had several gameplay and quality of life improvements, but it was eventually superseded by OpenTTD[1].
[0] https://www.ttdpatch.net/
[1] https://www.openttd.org/
If anyone’s curious to see what a lossless 6016x3384 screenshot of OpenTDD would look like:
https://dmitri.shuralyov.com/temp/6K/OpenTTD.png (25.6 MB)
There is OpenRCT2: https://openrct2.io/
I really miss some of the companies from that era... Red Storm Entertainment, Tom Clancy's vision, comes to mind. The early Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six games had a dedication to immersion that their modern counterparts totally lack.
Ghost Recon (2001) runs perfectly through proton on my linux desktop. I still fire it up from time to time.
At our local lans in the early 2000s, Rainbow Six Rogue Spear was probably the most popular game we played, and still there doesn't seem to be any tactical shooters like that available today, that focuses on realism over cosmetics and arcade-mechanics.
Also makes me think of the countless hours of fun Westwood Studios provided me with in my youth, real shame they didn't get to survive longer :/
They made Master of Orion II : Battle at Antares which is a 4X turn by turn space game I still play in 2025, as much as fun as Heroes III
MoO2 and Heroes 3; there's a combo that sends me right back.
I think there's a serious argument somewhere in there that perfection of a game is much easier in the "2D" realm and even now we've not really gotten close in 3D space - as proof I'd offer Factorio.
There’s so many wrong things about 3D games, I’m surprise I didn’t read an article about that yet
3D is harder than 2D for a multitude of reasons.
Because of this, heavy heavy code reuse is common and likely the folks who wrote it are gone, leaving only behind an ABI and a doc. This is why so many games have very similar design components to them. It worked for the business before (or a similar one), someone said sales go up, they pull in the ABI, now everything’s an open world, scavenger, PVP, base building, inventory management, shooter, looter, micro transaction scooter, rpg (with aimbot if you use a controller)
Oh Masters of Orion… such a die hard fan base :D and such an amazing game. I think it’s still the OG of 4X for me.
Man, I can still remember the magic I felt when first discovering that game on my cousin's laptop in 1999. Such a simple game yet allowed enough creativity for an 10 year old boy to be imaginative.
There does come a point where there isn't much else to do with the game once you get good enough at it, so I started having fun doing "experiments". One of the things I did in RCT was build "prisons" where I leveraged things like the carousel to work as a one-way door into the park to allow guests to come in but prevent them from leaving; it lead to a barren cement building with a turbo drop coaster designed to be intentionally dangerous so I could "execute" prisoners. There was puke everywhere after a while. What a disturbing mind I had.
> There was puke everywhere after a while. What a disturbing mind I had.
I think you were not the only one exploring those sides of those sort of games! I don't remember if it was SimCity 2000 or 3000 that I played the most, but I remember some of these tycoon/management/simulation games let our destructive sides really come out by letting us unleash volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes and similar, all at the same time :)
I always used the Do Not Enter marquee signs such that once guests entered the park they could never leave. Great for helping meet the total park population scenarios.
Similar things come to my mind with The Sims. Once the game was “over” (maybe you’ve reached the top job) you could still do all sorts of things… Some of them a bit masochistic.
I paid a guy at school $10 for a burned CD ROM of this game in 6th grade. Best money I ever spent
If you liked micro-prose, they are back in full form with Highfleet. Maybe not "back", but it's one of the most engaging engineering / action games I've played and it has a very microprose feel
Well, if it has a very microprose feel then it was by luck, because they picked it up late in development and it's a single russian guy's brainchild. He also made hammerfight, another excellent (if janky as hell) game.
Highfleet really is a great game though.
Nu-MicroProse has been seeking out games similar in spirit to those published by old MicroProse trying to become the continuation of what it used to be. It might have been luck that there was a guy developing that kind of game at the time, or it might have been that there's a growing desire for that sort of game that MicroProse is coming along at the right time to pick up
Related:
RollerCoaster Tycoon was the last of its kind [video] (242 points, 7 months ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42346463
Sid Meier founded MicroProse and started with the Tycoon genre with Railroad Tycoon having been inspired by SimCity and Empire.
Your comment makes it sound like he started the company to make Tycoon games, but those came like a decade later.
That is an uncharitable interpretation. None of that should be controversial.