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The tycoon genre is an interesting one with a rich and varied history, and not just limited to the world of PC gaming. However, how we know the genre as it is today can be traced back to the work of Chris Sawyer, a Scottish developer with a fairly sizable history. He’s not the father of the tycoon genre, not by a long shot, but his work refined familiar formulas and created the still insanely popular RollerCoaster Tycoon series, a game built on the backs of giants like the Sim series and Sid Meyer. Why is it that his take on the tycoon game somehow struck bigger than anyone else? The game doesn’t make any significant changes or innovations to the genre, but it did manage to make said genre far more accessible and user friendly then it had been before.
The tycoon genre was mainly informed and built by the norms of the simulation genre for a long time. Simulation games were and still somewhat are very difficult, niche titles that drew in vastly different audiences than the medium was used to, lit up into major releases by the groundbreaking SimCity series. The thing about simulation games is that they’re very involved, technical titles where seemingly meaningless details are the entire attraction. It’s why the new SimCity EA released a few years back failed to really get the same praise as older titles, as the title simplified everything far too much to the point of alienating old audiences (among other decisions). Many of the simulation giants tried making games of similar style about running a business, which makes perfect sense. Business and city management both revolve heavily around maintaining financial systems and keeping important structures working. However, this doesn’t necessarily translate to a fun time for more casual audiences.
This is what made Chris Sawyer such a pioneer in the genre while doing little to change it on a fundamental level. You can get a feel from this by looking at his major first hit Transport Tycoon, a sim game about running a commodities transportation empire. It was essentially a simplified Sid Meyer’s Railroad Tycoon, while also using elements of the city sim subgenre to create a fairly easy to understand game with a simple goal to pursue. RollerCoaster Tycoon ended up being of similar quality and aim, an experiment with the simplified formulas of Transport Tycoon with the addition of custom creating roller coasters. It’s interesting, because the project started so Sawyer could write off theme park trips as work expenses, but the end result hit an unexpected sweet spot in the gaming world few had found before.
RollerCoaster Tycoon sticks out a lot for a 1999 release, mainly by the virtue of being so technically simplistic while not being a budget release. Where Bullfrog went in a more graphically intensive direction with their later Theme Park Inc release, Sawyer kept things simple here and it paid off in spades. Technology was rapidly evolving at the time, and many companies banked on making games with new technologies, no matter if the game benefited from said technology or not. Many PC titles would end up being playable on only a very select few builds out there, leaving more casual PC users in an awkward position of not having many quality releases to pick from. RollerCoaster Tycoon was so insanely easy to run (even on my old crappy Windows 95 I got from my mother that was four years out of date when the game first released) that anyone could easily pick it up and play it, no matter what PC specs they had. It helped that the core design was easy to learn as well.
Like Transport Tycoon, it took familiar systems and streamlined them. The significant change here were scenarios, where you had a challenge in a particular map to meet, but this wasn’t a big change to any established design work. If anything, it was a further simplification and a way to engage more passive and casual audiences more. Older tycoon and sim games were more about learning something about a subject or playing for a high score in one or two basic difficulties. RollerCoaster Tycoon’s scenario system just creates new smaller scenarios to play with, all relatively short, with simple goals that could be met in a large variety of ways. This encouraged more replay and made new situations to challenge yourself with once you started to learn and understand more about how the game worked and what could be done with it.
There was also a bent towards player expression over handling a wide variety of variables and intertwining systems. You gotta make money, so you build things and change prices based on how people react to them. Building is as easy as selecting a thing on a menu and clicking it on the map. Sure, there’s terrain changing and path making, but both are fairly easy to figure out and do, and some starting scenarios already have this handled a bit while you build on what’s already there before having to worry about changing the landscape. The game is very beginner friendly and wastes no time letting you actually play it, even if you’ve never played a tycoon game before. Even staff management is a simple thing to handle, as you can just pluck any employee you have hired at any time and move them wherever you want them to do a simple task (or you can be me and hire janitors for every pile of vomit you see).
Most gameplay revolves around making the park you want to make, not the most profitable park, simply because there’s so many cosmetic options that impact so little. The game’s main attraction is custom building roller coasters, which takes a little getting used to, but pays off with a surprisingly involved design system. There are so many options, and the game will even let you make death traps just for the hell of it (as Youtube will make clear very quickly was a popular past-time). Even making paths or adding decoration became a way of marking this park as your own, with dozens of possible options and themes to toy with. No one park is ever the same as the last, the player always changes it to their whims and specifications. This was YOUR park, not the park the game wanted you to make.
RollerCoaster Tycoon became the blue print for an entire genre by focusing so much on these aspects. It turned a challenging, complicated concept into a simple one that could be played a variety of different ways, rewarding experimentation and creativity. From Zoo Tycoon to current releases like Game Dev Tycoon, you can see the base ideas of RollerCoaster Tycoon reused over and over. It created an addictive formula that became the base for mobile game development (until it all went to hell via freeium models). For that, it deserves kudos and a place in the gaming history books.
Bi The Dark Side 