Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)
medium.com151 points by areoform 9 hours ago
151 points by areoform 9 hours ago
This game _is_ my childhood. Spent countless hours one summer doing every scenario, learning all the little easter eggs (Michael Schumacher on the Go karts anyone?).
The spirit of this game lives on now in OpenRCT2 [1] - which brings the game into the modern age and is backwards compatible with all the scenarios from the original. It even features multiplayer park building.
I can wholeheartedly recommend Marcel Vos' YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBlXovStrlQkVA2xJEROUNg
He is basically reverse engineering and explaining RCT's logic and design, but does it via entertaining videos.
I initially found his channel when he build a working calculator from roller coasters in RCT2.[1] It's been fun since then learning about how guests decide to enter a toilet or why guests will always get stuck in certain maze designs etc.
Speaking of which, I wonder what Chris would think of OpenRCT2 and OpenTTD, which reimplemented his games with different programming languages and outright different graphics (which allowed the latter to reach its 1.0 milestone not requiring the original Transport Tycoon assets).
The are no direct statements but one from his agency [1]
> The project has no blessing or support from Chris Sawyer and our view, it is both unethical and unlawful, involving infringements that may in some territories be criminal as well as a violation of Chris Sawyer's rights and those of his licensees - all of which remain reserved.
> RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, distributed by Atari, contains RCT and RCT2 rebuilt for modern operating systems under Chris's own direction.
[1] https://forums.openrct2.org/topic/5646-how-is-openrct2-legal...
I was involved in the early days of OpenTTD and one of the big issues was the first version was basically just a decompiled version of the original TTD binaries. Giving any kind of blessing would basically relinquish control of IP - that due to publisher contracts he may or may not actually be able to do. Legally this is the only thing he can say.
I'm unfamiliar with OpenRCT2 but I can't imagine the RCTC rebuild has nearly as many features; them making the comparison just makes their project look worse.
It has feature parity, and more. It's an incredibly faithful recreation to the original - and the features they have added in my opinion are primarily QoL improvements and nothing stupid.
Why would implementing a compatible game engine be unlawful? The code he wrote is copyrighted but the concepts and functional elements embodied by his code shouldn't be protected.
A user naively snitching on the project between their 2nd and 3rd posts is a really great bit.
Snitching? Talk about making a tiny email a big deal. Atari already knowing about OpenRCT2 since before the email makes the forcible induced drama even more cringy.
I can't recall the source so take this with a grain of salt (I think some members of the OpenTTD forum managed to contact him), but I remember him not being happy about it.
He perfected the games according to his vision, so it makes sense for him not to like people rewriting his code and adding new features.
He doesn't like them. Basically the games were finished as in an art piece is finished (don't tell George Lucas!) and the later projects (OpenTTD/OpenRCT2) are "remixing" those.
You just made my day. Today is going to be really productive.
Beware that you still need a copy of the original RCT2 game in order to play OpenRCT2. You can still buy it on GOG [1] though.
Chris Sawyer is my hero. I spent countless hours on his games when I was a child, and maybe that's the reason why I've became a programmer.
I'm sad that Chris Sawyer is such a reserved person, his public appearances are super rare [1] and he has no internet presence, except for a website that hasn't been updated in ages [2].
I wish he had a blog where he shared how he made his games.
[1] One of the few: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU73g72NTHc [2] https://chrissawyergames.com/
I get a different feeling from Sawyer being a reserved person, it actually gives me hope and joy, that he can enjoy something he's obviously great at, and doesn't need to compromise on "getting famous" or "being recognizable" in order to get there.
Sometimes you get the impression that you have to be on social media to have an impact on the world, or that if you don't share your development tips on a blog you aren't as good as someone who does. And it's not right, but it's a really easy trap to fall into.
But for me Sawyer proves that this is not needed at all. He's enjoying his relatively anonymous life (compared to what it could have been) yet have accomplished games that will probably always been remembered as long as there is humans alive.
> It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier.
Is the most interesting quote IMO. I often feel like productivity has gone down significantly in recent years, despite tooling and computers being more numerous/sophisticated/fast.
> it took several years and a small team of programmers to re-write the entire game in C++. It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier.
Expanding the quote because the word "team" is probably relevant to why it took longer to rewrite. At a certain scale there just is a huge advantage in everything being inside one head...
Communication overhead is a big thing in teams. If you have a struggling team, halve the size. It's crazy how well that works. It's not the people but the number of them. Once your people are consumed by the day to day frustrations of having to communicate with everyone else and with all the infighting, posturing, etc. that comes with that, they'll get nothing done. Splitting teams is an easy to implement fix. Minimize the communication paths between the two (or more) teams and carve up what they work on and suddenly shit gets done.
In this case, they probably were trying to not just rewrite but improve the engine at the same time. That's a much more complicated thing to achieve. Especially when the original is a heavily optimized and probably somewhat hard to reason about blob of assembly. I'm guessing that even wrapping your head around that would be a significant job.
Amazingly enjoyable game btw. Killed quite a few hours with that one around 2000.
>Communication overhead is a big thing in teams. If you have a struggling team, halve the size. It's crazy how well that works.
I wish my managers would get this. Currently our product shit the fan due to us being understaffed and badly managed due to clueless managers, and what they did was add two more managers to the team to create more meetings and micromanage everrying.
I'm sorry you have to deal with that. "The Mythical Man Month" should have been required reading for your managers.
Found this part strange because in other interviews he seemed to imply (for RCT classic) that there was almost some kind of VM-like structure that was running the original code underneath as-is
Expectations have gone up accordingly.
I think the real constraint must be market timing - as much work as people can do to meet the market (eg. Have the thing done by Christmas), that much will end up being done.
> 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.
The indie ethos, before it was even a thing (or in the very early stages).
If you enjoy these types of stories from video game industry veterans, I recommend the My Perfect Console podcast.
I also recommend about RCT reading/watching:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44758842
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39792034