I've seen many where if you donate more than say $100 they send you some stuff for free, nearly $1,000 and you get major rewards and such. Atari on the other hand "have a book about us to remind you who stole your money".....
Atari asking for crowd funding cash after gladly taking the money of customers and giving them shitty profit grabbing sequels for years is peak hilarity.
@@ekki1993 I'd also add valve to it I like valve. Even if they indeed sometimes suck, but at least not for money reasons. Also not all indie developers are normal. Some of them are greedy... And do projects with indie budget but AAA mindset
@@SONGOKU02 Indeed, all those companies are greedy assholes. But Atari straddles and even crosses a very fine line where it more or less seem like some kind of organized crime entity.
@@karlandersson4350 Totally. I can't believe, they are still arround, so many times they where on the edge of bankruptcy. And alone the Driv3r Gate Skandal showed how much they act like a crime syndicate.
Chris Sawyer will forever remain an absolute legend in my eyes. The combined depth, complexity, and simultaneous simplicity of RCT 1 & 2 is just incredible. His vision for the design, aesthetic, and 'feel' all brought to life in a way so well optimized, what a beast of a human being.
Reminds me of Will Wright the creator of Sim City and the Sims another couple great series ruined by the greed of a huge company. Honestly it's kinda crazy how similar their stories are they made a few super successful and fun games then giant company comes in and takes over then they make a bunch of soulless cash grabs and a small developer makes an awesome spiritual successor to the series capitalizing on the failings of the shitty cash grabs, in the case of Sim City at least since City Skylines came in and dunked on Sim City 5 still waiting on the Sims spiritual successor though. (pleaseeeeee be good Paralives I'm rooting for you)
Technically seen it's a copy of Bejeweled, which added the very clever move limit with algorithms that generate the map so that it always feels like just one or two more moves from finishing. Making it very addicting, and having a great source of revenue.
@@Aidiakapi. There are no algorithms to generate the maps. They were manually crafted and every level will be the same for every player for that reason, and I give them that, but it's still lame because many levels have unreasonable objectives and you need to be extremely lucky to beat them, and that's what pushes people to pay them for extra lives or items
@@ddnava96 Afaik that's only half-true. The level layout is fixed, the level seed is fixed, and the statistical tuning/difficulty is set by design, but the content is still algorithm driven.
Yeah, that is a bad sign there. If they had been smart about it (I mean it looked like they did not get that many marks... I mean investors on their hock) they would have used a shell company. A developer fronting making it seem like a passion project and that they barely manage to convince Atari to get them a shot, if only they get this successful fund-raising campaign going. I mean this is very scummy to but it has more success. They copied the suffice level of a crowed sourcing effort without understanding the underlying mechanics. Instead, they thought like the corporate scam artist they are in though that is how you lure people in. But that just show them without their mask on. I mean I do wonder who was behind all this. Or if it maybe even was setup to fail since the incompetence is pretty staggering. Who knows with all the corporate politics that goes around at this old big publishers. Atari (even if is technically not at all the same Atari) has had a long reputation for underhanded practice that actually makes EA look like the good guys in comparison at points. (Though is really hard to compare since a lot of these big publishers, be it EA, Microsoft, Activation or Atari, with many others, have done a lot of shady crappy things.)
"Trust us. We managed to make 2 billion dollars... disappear, without saving any of it to fund development of this game. We're really good with money!"
Great video. RCT 1, 2 and 3 were HUGE parts of my childhood, so I stopped following anything about it after the failure of World and arrival of Planet Coaster. I had no idea it got so... so SO much worse after. What in the hell Atari lol
Planet coaster is amazing. My OCD loves it... my sandbox park is coming together nicely. Ive put in over 20 hours and dont even have the path to the entrance done much less a ride in the park lol
Roller Coaster Tycoon World looks too intense for me. I'm not paying that much for Roller Coaster Tycoon Mobile. Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic was great! I'm not playing Roller Coaster Tycoon World. It's not safe.
"We know what we're doing" Actually, no you don't Atari, and those best selling franchises you mentioned, like Asteroids? Yeah, that was a different company. The ACTUAL Atari, Atari Inc, died in 1984. Everything since then has been various different companies using the Atari name, the current one being a French developer that bought the name and renamed themselves to Atari Interactive. RCT is my #1 all time game. I got the original in a big box for my birthday in 1999. I don't have the box but I still have the original disk (and being British, the Twister ride is actually called TWISTER, not... Scrambled Eggs... I still don't understand that about the North American release). Chris Sawyer is a monumentally talented developer that poured so much passion into his games, and I can't even imagine how angry he must feel at the butchering of RCT.
Haven't played World but seeing physical copies at Walmart now going for $20 has me absurdly curious but idk if I'd want to or not. Agreed on Chris Sawyer, Locomotion was another great game by him. Personally prefer it to OpenTTD as I had a better time getting a hang of it and the TTD Mobile port looks about the same so if you like that port check out Locomotion. Soundtrack is sweet too, it's the kinda music you wanna have when playing Monopoly with your friends or somethin lol
To be fair Infogrames, the company that is now Atari SA, also at one point knew what they were doing with great titles like the Alone in the Dark series and spinoffs. It's not like Atari was bought by a venture capital company or something. Though that Infogrames has fallen so far is perhaps more depressing
@@Mr.ToadJanfu Ohh I love Infrograms and Hasbro Interactive games especially, oddly enough? Their board game adaptations like Monopoly Battleship and Clue.
@@halo3odst it almost was. Europeans put in a lot of pre-ordered for them, but Atari didn't have enough money to make them all (and the games were mostly crap).
RCT: WOW! This is amazing! RCT2: Holy Cow! This is awesome! So much new scenery! RCT3: It's in 3D! You can ride the rides! This is amazing! Check out the lighting! Everything after that: Honestly... what the F@CK! But at least Planet Coaster and Parkitect exist!
Planet coaster is good for architects and not park-tycoons It’s honestly my favorite of all park tycoon games, but the “challenges” are all unbearably easy. It’s more like a park themed Garry’s Mod imo
My elementary school was having a book fair and this game was at the fair. My dad bought it for me since I aced a book report. I still play it to this day. 🥰😍
Same! I remember getting it through the Scholastic book order catalogue! Otherwise I probably never would have convinced my parents to buy it at the store.
Frontier: Makes best RCT game Atari: Gets a new developer Frontier: Develops best amusement park management game that destroys Atari’s offering Atari: :0
The AtariBox VCS 2000 or whatever it’s called now looks great on paper. Streamlining a SteamBox experience for the masses? Great idea! Packing it in a lovely nostalgic wooden cabinet calculated to pull the Gen X heartstrings? Hells to the yes! Giving us a modern Xbox controller AND an old school joystick and packing it with classic games but also saying “but that’s not all folks - it also plays Fallout 4 and Fortnite and stuff!” My inner child just did somersaults. Logistically, though... holy crap everything has just gone wrong or looks super shady and... I mean, this should be the no-brainer idea. Steambox that’s as cheap as a Switch, you can upgrade it forever, pings the nostalgia... how are they screwing this up so badly?!?
Good news, they collapsed a long time ago. Atari, Inc was founded in 1972 and went defunct in 1984. Warner sold the arcade portion of Atari (the only portion that was making money) to Namco, who sold it back two years later, Warner turned into Time Warner, then sold Atari Games to WMS Industries (it almost went back to Atari's co-founder, but alas). Then in 1999 they had to abandon the Atari Games name because Hasbro now owned the rights to Atari. But how did Hasbro acquire the Atari name? Well, Atari Incorporated still kind-of existed. Back in 1984, TTL bought Atari, Inc from Warner and they merged into Atari Corporation. They had a good run making "the next generation of home computers" but by 1988 had lost that battle to Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. And then in 1989 they lost the handheld gaming battle to Nintendo's Game Boy and in 1993 they lost the console gaming battle to the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation. They then created Atari interactive to publish PC games, but they gave up on that and instead sold the Atari Corporation to JT Storage (creator of the double-sided floppy disk) in 1996, who then sold the Atari name and all of its properties to Hasbro Interactive in 1998 for $5 million. At this point Hasbro Interactive is the publisher of RollerCoaster Tycoon, and the owners of the Atari name. They also owned MicroProse (Sid Meier's Civilization, X-COM, and others), Avalon Hill, and Wizards of the Coast. In 2001, Infogrames Entertainment S.A. (The villain of this story) bought Hasbro Interactive, who had gone broke in the dot-com bubble. By now, Atari had gone broke numerous times, and their brand had been bought by way too many companies to count. But they were Infogrames's most recognizable name, and Infogrames exploited the Atari brand by slapping it onto their games. In 2003, Infogrames reorganized Infogrames Inc into Atari Inc, and Infogrames Interactive into Atari Interactive. Then Infogrames quickly lost most of their valuable franchises. They closed down the last MicroProse studio, sold the Civilization franchise, lost the rights to Unreal tournament, sold Transformers, My Little Pony, and Connect Four back to Hasbro, and several others.
In 2007-2009, Infrogrames fired their chairmen, most of their directors, laid off 20% of their workforce, sold Atari Europe to Namco Bandai, and changed their name from IESA to Atari SA. In 2010, the BlueBay hedgefund sold Atari/restructured capital and debt. In 2013, Atari/Atari Interactive declared bankruptcy. And then in 2015, under CEO Fred Chesnais, they announced a turnaround strategy based on re-releasing (i.e. exploiting) their catalog of Atari franchises, with a focus on "download games, MMO games, mobile games and licensing activities, based in priority around traditional franchises." And that's where we stand today. All they really have left is the name Atari, their classic games Adventure, Asteroids, Breakout, Centipede, Missile Command, Pong, and Tank, and the franchises of Jet Fighter and RollerCoaster Tycoon. It's actually quite sad. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_SA#Game_franchises_owned_by_Atari,_SA en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atari,_Inc._(Atari,_SA_subsidiary)_games This information was brought to you by Wikipedia and Procrastination. Edit: Typos
5:15 I think it is. There’s a guy on TH-cam named Marcel Vos, who publishes a lot of RCT videos on the platform. He published one video discussing the games’ learning/difficulty curves, and I think he said one of the pre-made coasters is quite literally coded to crash every time as a means of teaching the player that crashes can happen.
A bit of a late reaction. I don't think it's coded that way. You can just get unlucky to have bunch of heavy guests at ones on the ride causing it to crash cause it takes a hill too fast.
@@michaelvd2140 it is coded this way! Why? Because rct2 has a layout that teaches the players that there are ceratain things in game. Just like the startup tutorial for many games that feel so frustratibg because you "have to" go trough it. In this case, you don't have to (just like the first level in most mario bros games). It feels so free to not have this tutorial (it kind of does, but like game design is layed out to be intuitive and learning without feeling so).
@@joneinarmattiasvisser6113 Sorry but i have to agree with MichaelvD here. I played bumbly beach on rct classic and open rct, and both times i played the scenario not once the coaster there crashed on me (then again it could be only for the original game which disproves me). Its also to note that marcel vos said that the coaster is “very crash prone” and not hard coded so make of that as you will.
it may have been "not fully tested" more than intentional, but there's one (Roman Racers?) that nearly always will regularly crash, killing all occupants.
I've beaten the scenario without the coaster crashing once before. It's probably just random. Or it's because of the extremely short station that can barely fit all the trains.
I just want to give an important update to everyone and say, with absolute pride, that Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 is not only re-released again without Atari’s input like with the iOS version, and not only is it the “Complete Edition”, but it’s also on the Nintendo Switch. Frontier, you absolute *king...*
Some of my favorite memories as a kid was sitting in my Dads lap watching him play the first Rollercoaster Tycoon on the family computer. We'd watch the guests puke and bust out in laughter, fire the handyman and when he would go to grab a drink or to use the bathroom I'd drown the mascots. Hearing the theme music after all these years filled me with so many fond memories.
@@lukebennett1648 0-5 baby 6-12 childhood 13-17 teenager 18 is a young adult you can legally buy cigarettes in the US. I'm not pedantic, didn't know you weren't from the US bud.
"Alright, time to open my brand new coaster-" *Brand new coaster has broken down.* "Brand new coaster looks too intense for me." "I want to go on something more thrilling than brand new coaster." "Just looking at brand new coaster makes me feel sick."
IMO RTC2 is still the definitive RCT experience. It's everything great about the original game plus more. I respect 3 for pushing the envelope at the time, but to me the 3d wasn't quite there yet at the time and the game just never looked as good as the second one (although that vision was more than realized when Planet Coaster launched).
I agree with both of you. I liked RCT2 but i never beat hardly any parks. The first one i beat and loved so much. Theres was something different. I liked all the rollercoasters on the 1st one. On The 2nd, only the 6 flags ones, and yet those parks were too built up To feel like original RCT. I will get RCT2 again tho absolutely. It added everything RCT1 was missing
Jesus christ that investor's pitch timeline... 1999: The original classic 2002: The successful sequel 2004: ATARI TAKES CONTROL -2006: First title peaks. (Not actually an event, just an arbitrary stat milestone.)- *TEN YEAR TIME SKIP* 2017: Atari slaps that branding on a mobile game. 2018: INVEST TODAY!
I still have my boxed copy which works without the need of steam. It's bad they are selling all the first 3 rct games with add-ons i think tied to steam in stores. Since still using windows xp steam doesn't work, but not like i cared about steam much, more like i used gog to get rct 1 and 2 with add-ons, rct3 i have it for a very long time on cd the deluxe edition for europe. Too bad i didn't get it on gog. Also am not sure if a no cd crack works properly for the deluxe edition of rct3
the legal dispute between Frontier and Atari still hasn't been settled. Frontier has been granted all the exclusive distribution rights on RCT3 (by court ruling), but Atari still hasn't paid Frontier what they're owed and the game can't legally be sold as long as the lawsuit is ongoing. But with Atari currently billions of $ in debt, a debt that only keeps getting bigger, they only stay in business because they make just enough money to make payments on it. They've always tried to do everything as cheap as possible, but with the recurring bankrupts they've taken it a step further with their games: everything has to be developed cheap, fast, and with minimal effort. Star Trek Online came out in 2010 buggy and unfinished, and although it's still alive thanks to PWE, it still suffers from all the shortcuts the developers had to take to get it done under Atari's rule. Every game Atari's made since is the same story: they're released unfinished, sometimes barely playable (like RCTW), and because it's cheaper to make a new game than maintain an existing one, they get rid of the games once they've paid for themselves, just to underline how little they care about their customers
That explains why the steam bundle for RCT Classic complete is 1,2,and World. The newest is Chris Sawyer's RCT Classic remaster where he basically moved both his games to the 2nd game engine.
My dad bought rollercoaster tycoon 2 for himself, but I found it and fell in love several sequels and expansion packs later, here I am playing planet coaster. It’s a shame the tycoon brand went downhill so hard, but to me planet coaster is an updated fully realized RTC3 and I love it so much
that rct2 theme song threw me back to sitting in a dark room only illuminated by my gateway at midnight naming all of my caretakers in themes, the nostalgia
Planet coaster is absolutely a game worth picking up. There is so much room from creativity, the soundtrack is great, the graphics look beautiful and there are so many more positive things to say about the game. It's the worthy successor of RCT3
@@Xenelock i disagree. planet coaster felt exactly like a sequel to the RCT franchise. it was super easy to take what ive learned in RCT and apply it to planet coaster. even if you didnt buy any expansions, the steam workshop has plenty of content to add. i loved putting 7/11's and McDonalds into my parks.
RCT 1 and 2: Made by Chris Sawyer. RCT 3: Made by Frontier (great developer) and published by Atari Inc (the good modern Atari, formerly known as GT Interactive). Chris Sawyer acted as a consultant, because he was busy working on another game at the time. 2008: Atari SA (the evil modern Atari, formerly known as Infogrames) buys out Atari Inc. 2013: Atari SA goes bankrupt, changes leadership, and starts to develop new strategies to make money. And that's why there's such a gap in quality. Infogrames is the entire reason the Atari name has such a bad reputation.
Whoa, I was super into the RCT games in like 2002-2008, but then I stopped playing entirely! I knew there was a mobile app version and all that, but I had no idea Atari had so many failed attempts at creating the spiritual successor to RCT3...
carykh Did not expect to see you here. Yeah it’s surprising how much Atari has tried to make something good enough to actually have a decent playerbase, for now we have to stick with fan made projects I guess.
5:18 yes the bumbly beach coaster is set to crash very often. its a part of the excellent difficulty curve so you can learn that coaster crashes can happen
The one thing I noticed that wasn’t discussed here was the flexibility of third party design additions in RCT3. This has been prevalent since 2013, at least as far as I can tell from TH-cam videos. The level of customization that became available for RCT3 made it pretty formidable as a design engine. Some of what I’ve seen and experienced firsthand has made it a more than decent thing to do on a Mac, as Frontier refuses to make PlanCo play on Apple. It can get quite hard to compensate for grid and path constraints, but in a way that challenge is what makes some of the designs I’ve seen out there seem so miraculous. I agree on the flaws of Atari in their development of games that never advanced the graphics and designs (and after c. 2012, customizability) of the RCT engine but it’s worth noting that RCT3 has become a decent alternative to PlanCo. I am all the more mesmerized when I see RCT3 designs use so much customization, knowing that gamers had to work with grid-based building. So, hats off to those folks... and thanks for the informative vid!
"As Frontier refuses to make PlanCo play on Apple." Actually, it's not that they're refusing, it's that they literally cannot make an OSX version due to the lack of a suitable graphics library. The game makes use of a lot of graphical features that aren't implemented in either OpenGL or Apple's own proprietary libraries.
That's a good point. They've been ruining video games almost for the entire length of the medium's existence. Off and on, sure, but they've never stopped ruining completely.
*siiiiiiiiiiiiigh* Atari under Time-Warner made a lot of bad decisions, yes. But they did not single-handedly end an entire industry. There were a lot of hands in that particular pie. 1. There were a LOT of companies making low-quality games, right on down to an actual dog food company. In the modern world, they would be called unlicensed titles, but at the time they idea you would need a license from the hardware manufacturer to publish software was fundamentally alien. The lockouts on the american release of Nintendo's FamiCom (and Atari's own 7800) were both done directly in response to the slew of poor 3rd-party efforts that had dogged the VCS, in an attempt to prevent the same thing happening again. 2. There were a lot of game consoles on the market in 1982. There was the Atari VCS(renamed 2600), the Atari 5200, the Mattel IntelliVision, the Coleco ColecoVision(imaginative name, that one), the GCE Vectrex(later Milton-Bradley Vectrex)... and that's just the short list. To say nothing of the home computer market that was largely competing for the same dollars. It was a chaotic market and making a choice was difficult. This most likely contributed to people choosing to do nothing(or choosing a home computer because it wasn't just a toy and had real practical value, I promise, mom!). 3. There was a general recession that hit in 1982 and slowed non-essential spending in America significantly. 4. Toy stores and department had been assuming this whole "games on the television" thing was a fad since the first Pong consoles hit shelves in '75. And when Christmas '82 ended with them still having video games in stock(mostly titles no one wanted, as the good games sold much faster, but retailers stocked all games equally), they assumed the fad was over, cancelled their orders, returned what they could, and put everything else on the clearance racks in 1983. And that was the actual cause of the crash, retailers bailing out before they lost their shirts riding a a perceived fad into the ground. Note that, in spite of poor stocking practices and a general recession, the american video game market still GREW in 1982. It just did not grow at the unsustainably meteoric rate seen in previous years, which was considered another sign the fad was dying. Yes, I know seanbaby said ET single-handedly killed video games. He was writing a comedy column, not an in-depth historical analysis.
@@CptJistuce And honestly, ET and Pac Man for the Atari 2600 are nowhere near as bad as what their infamy and hate would imply. Much of the hate garnered came from the 1990s when emulators were in their infancy; Pac Man's flickering ghosts would flicker too slow on emulators (the flicker is much faster on actual hardware), and emulators have never come with instruction booklets so playing ET became a jarring experience. The former is actually not that bad when played on original hardware. It could use some polishing here and there as it was Christmas Rushed, but it's still much better than the shovelware that was sold at that time. ET can actually be beaten within 20 minutes if you have the instruction booklet; it's simply just a mediocre adventure game. Says a lot when even the AVGN considers ET to be not as bad as most people have made it.
RCT was actually one of the main inspirations that made me want to become a Disney Imagineer! I’m currently studying at college and continue to move toward my goal of wanting to one day work with theme parks!
That's so cool! I always wanted to be a story writer imagineer for the concepts of rides, I might look into it :) RCT was also my first love for rollercoasters too! Good luck with your dream :D
FWIW, me too! I loved the engineering/science behind this game when I was in 3rd-6th grade (mid 2000’s) and the closest thing my guidance counselor could do my 7th grade year for job shadowing was to send me to the local airport… here I am 15-17years later an airline captain because it all started with this game!
After playing RCT3 scenarios again, I realized just like 6 years ago, how disappointingly easy it was compared to the first two games. I decided to create my own scenario one time and I failed my own challenge twice. I finally beat it after roughly 12 game years.
Not controversial thing at all. The way it was presented was not to say anything bad about it. It is definitely a more simple music when compared to 3.
i remember playing this game as a kid not knowing english very well, just clicking and making my way through the game, i remember it took me like 6 months to figure out how to delete the trees, and about 2-3 years to fully master the game, but what i loved most was the graphics, once it became 3d i was over it
Atari: We’re delisting RCT3 and putting a heartless mobile game on the Nintendo Switch. Everyone: This isn’t fair, we can’t play RCT3 anymore! All we have is the lackluster mobile port. Frontier: haha, our rct3 game goes weeee *(Yeets Complete Edition onto PC and Switch, restoring the balance)*
It's been back for a while now. Thank goodness, RCT3 wasn't RCT1/2 good, but it was close and a solid step forward for the franchise. Everything after 3's expansion packs... Now _that's_ bad.
While other's got it from a cereal box, I got my copy of RCT1 back then from sending in proof of purchases of Totino's pizza in the mail back then. Amazing how far that one game took me.
I'm glad someone else was heartbroken whenever that one rollercoaster would crash! I'd keep retrying the level but it kept happening... One of the few memories from my early childhood
I remember growing up with Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, got it for a cheap price in gamestop, and was super happy, i dont know how many hours i got into that game, but i can tell you it was a lot, later on i went back to gamestop with my dad, and i noticed the 2 dlc's, where it said, buy 2 get 1 free, and i got my dad to buy it. Ended up spending around 600 hours with the dlc's, and it was the best. Years later when i heard of RCTW, my mind got super hyped, so hyped i overlooked soo many flaws with the game, even under the beta i was okay with it. but my disapointment when it came fully out was huge, and i still feel like i got stolen from. Then i got Planet coaster, and damn that is a game, played it for so many hours and loved every min. It felt like i was back to my younger self, and that was such an amazing feeling. Thank you for this amazing video, was actually shocked on how little view count this had, since how much time has gone into it.
I was insanely hyped for RCTW as well. I wanted so badly for it to be good, and thought it was going to be the next big thing. I wanted to find what scraps of good there were in the mess, but it was just really nothing... As of today I’ve almost gotten through the first world of that game for people to enjoy my suffering lul, and it does not at all get better as the levels go on, it just gets worse and worse.... Glad you enjoyed the video!
Not a single mention of OpenRCT2? Still playing it to this day. I understand that it's not an official release like RCTClassic but it IS important to the timeline. Also, not to try and defend Atari, but the investment thing feels like you obfuscated the fact that, based on performance of sales, they'd give you up to 125% of your original investment. Though, with how utterly shady Atari is with royalties, why anyone would believe them and invest, expecting them to be truthful on how much the game made, is anyone's guess.
I got the Complete Edition the day it came out on Switch and I’m in love! It’s one of those things where you know you liked it as a kid, but now with mature eyes, you know your nostalgia is justified.
I quite like jurassic world myself, the dinosaurs look really movie accurate and I really like doing the challenge modes. I’m still learning how to make my parks in planet coaster look good and I might get planet zoo if I have enough money
I picked up my first copy of RCT in a cereal box. I also collected ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?”, a Tonka rescue game, a book building game by dream weaver and other games too.
Real Talk: I do absolutely love having Roller Tycoon Classic on my phone tho. That has got to be one of the best games on the Play Store Aaaand I'm lucky enough to have downloaded RCT3 Platinum on my steam account before it was removed from the store, a fact that I was completely unaware of before watching this video
10:11 in RCT2 There is an object limit, granted it's high enough to where you don't need to worry about it unless you're filling the entire map with a single rollercoaster taking up every single tile.
Great video and review of the RollerCoaster Tycoon games. I grew up first playing Transport Tycoon way back on a Windows 3.1 computer in mid 2000's. My family was pretty late getting into the computer game, our first computer was a Tandy from the 1980's that we got in 1999 then we slowly upgraded with free old computers that people were throwing away until by brother bought his own computer in the mid 2000's. The next game in the series I played was RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 and I loved it, used to play it with my brother growing up, brings back some happy nostalgic memories, so glad that it's available on steam. Also I checked steam and RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 Complete Edition is now available through Frontier Developers, I think I might pick it up to try it out.
In second grade, I had a really tough Christmas. I had the flu, and had to stay home from all the fun things my family did over the holidays, culminating in Christmas day, when they had to leave me home while visiting our relatives. In the midst of my sadness, I had two wonderful gifts. A model train set, and Roller coaster Tycoon. I loved it, and later on Rct3. It makes me cringe thinking of how Atari eviscerated this wonderful series. I remember when Roller coaster Tycoon world came out, some people had the foolishness to intentionally buy it over Planet Coaster, to "support the franchise." The franchise is a zombie. If you interact with it today, prepare for it to eat your brains.
@@AcousticHarmonia Yeah, I first heard of Planet Coaster after Nerd Cubed's hilarious video on Roller coaster Tycoon world, where he said to play that instead. There were legitimately people who were MAD at Frontier for "stealing attention" from Roller coaster Tycoon world.
@@armchairrocketscientist4934 That sounds kinda familiar. If it wasn't that channel, I recall hearing about Planet Coaster from at least some TH-cam channel...? People were mad at Frontier for stealing attention? Man how I wish I was paying more attention during those days
It's more of a Nowhere Islands scenario, it was loved, but then Atari flew over, set up camp, burned everything to the ground, and built an empire of lies.
Now while I agree that RCT3 had an intro that was far more relaxing and serene, as compared to the almost circus-style intros of the first two games, the in-game music for the first 2 games, to this day, sets me in a state of tranquility. The music for the first 2 games was, imo, really well done and gave a very fun, relaxing atmosphere. I just wanted to share that
The original music sends me into panic mode and brings back memories of trying to scrape funds with a maxed out loan and frantically placing handymen to keep up with the insane amount of vomit! :) Relaxing? pfffft
@pikachuchujelly7628 oh, uh... I'm... sorry that was your experience... to this day RCT music pops in my jeans when I need to relax, but I guess I can u derstand how it creates anxiety too...
I can't explain it, but my eyes are very sensitive, and this guy, along with others, I can't listen to speak without my eyes twitching, itching, and watering...
Great video! I don't know if you will ever read this comment, but if you want my personal history with this series... it's not an understatement when I say it shaped the person I am today. My love for the first game and the series as a whole has resulted in a huge passion for theme parks and rollercoasters that continues to this day, inspired me to become an engineer and honestly led to some of the most magic moments with friends I had, basically turning theme park visits into open air museum tours with me enthousiastically explaining the technology behind it all. I remember the shock when I first saw that rct world trailer like it was yesterday, and that game became the first one I even refunded on Steam. Also, about rct for Switch not looking like a 65k budget game, that's not even enough money to pay 10 developers 2.5k for 3 months. Not even factoring in playtesters, marketing, publishing etc... So yeah.
I loved this franchise growing up as a kid. Honestly, I’m heartbroken for what the series has become, and how Atari handled it. I hoped for a good, decent RCT4, but then it all went to hell. I don’t know if the series will ever come back from what it had become in the last decade, and tbh I doubt it ever will. Maybe Atari should stop. If they can’t make a good RCT game ever again then I’m afraid this is most likely the end. It had a good run for just 3 games, but then it all crashed and burned and Atari is pretty much to blame. The blame is on them. Like they say in that one superhero film, “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” RIP RollerCoaster Tycoon. 1999 - 2014. I’ll never forget when you were good.
(Could have ended it with "see you in the queue lines) My hole interest in video games started with the first roller coaster my grandmother sent it to me (the first and last thing she sent me for a gift rest was money, shipping cost makes since) I played the crap out of the game on my father's computer. To latter get one for my sister and I. I remember getting RCT 2 for Christmas opening it and running down the hall to install and play it for quite some time. So many memories and fun times playing the game. Thank you for making this video I knew some of the things that happened but nowhere near this much. I also didn't know that plant coaster was " connected" to RCT I thought it was just its own thing. Great video, thank you.
The first time I heard about RCT was in 2nd grade, my friend PJ was talking about the “Death Park” he had made on a rollercoaster simulation game, I ended up making a steam account in either 2014 or 2015 just to buy RCT 3 on my family computer, I made so many memories playing that game, then in 2015 or 2016 I got it for my phone (it didn’t work for my iPad because it was super old) in 2015 I bought RCT4... THE DAY BEFORE IT BECAME FREE! then in 2015 or 2016 I got my first windows computer, the first games I got were RCT1 and RCT2, and I played those games for hours a day, then in 2017 I bought planet coaster, and now this game has turned itself into whatever it is now.
I got into RCT in high-school when my sister had it on her computer and to this day, it has the most calming atmosphere out of all the other games I've played
Roller Coaster Tycoon: When a man's absolutely incredible passion project turns into just a soulless brand owned by corporate shills. Don't forget Parkitect which is a great love letter to the first two games.
I mean this is standard practice for atari. Even back in the 80s they paid developers pennies and actually sued to keep them from putting their names in the credits of the games
Infogrames (before they rebranded to "Atari" and have since added back the Infogrames banner under this new company) isn't Atari, no matter how much they boast about Atari's legacy.
Rct2 is where it's at. Great game from Chris Sawyer. Even today it still is fun, with addition of OpenRCT, a mod adding tonns of features (such as unlimited items selection when creating a scenario lately) while still being true to the original. RCT classic is obviously just the mobile port. While I don't play it often, it's stil fun. Controls a bit finiky, but overall fine for mobile as it is. I also played RCT3 some time ago, it being very good with some elements that arent as charming as RCT2, but not that it made the game worse. Additions of pools was awesome! Always making big pools and stuff so this was a lot of different fun. I started off with waterpark tycoon but that game was not as fun as the waterpark addidtion to RCT3. RCT3 mobile could be good but I haven't played that to know. I like to play sandbox mostly (in many games) so this was not available or I didn't know of it in waterpark tycoon. I normally stay away from tycoon games but RCT 1 & 2 & 3 being good. Planet coaster is very good. It is arguably modern and fun to create parks in. The ride creator is good not for being the parts selection lego style builder of the RCT 1-3 games. It feels like NoLimitsCoaster if you know that game. That is not related to the RCT franchise. It's a very realistic coaster creation software (is this even a game?). You can make coasters that don't exist in real life with tons of custom tracks, cars, scenery and other stuff. The option to build on a grid in olanet coaster (especially scenery) is possible if selected, so it doesn't become frustraiting to place scenerery that alligns exactly. When you want to build a house for example😝 All in all, the RCT2 game is the most nostalgic. RCT3 a modern 3D copy, planet coaster is a different game altogether, with elements that are very cool. Requires a more beefy pc though but all in all good. Rest of the games are BS. Sorry. Have played RCT4 mobile but it was horrible. Worst ride creator ever. No chain lift pieces so trains always go up every hill if not fast enough, as if there was a chain lift on every hill.
I personally grew up in the dynasty of RCT3, I used to absolutely love that game to death and was probably the happiest kid on the planet when I unlocked the tycoon rank and had all the pre-made coaster layouts in Sandbox mode. I played the game for years and years and still occasionally pop in the discs to relive some of that nostalgia. now I notice how flawed the game is and how it's nothing compared to the original two, which I still play to this day with the help of OpenRCT2 (btw OpenRCT2 is a brilliant project and I recommend anyone to give it a try and relive some of that brilliant 90s RCT feeling)
I got my first copy of Roller Coaster Tycoon by sending in a cut-out from a Toaster Strudel box, plus $1.25, in the mail. I still have the disk. One of my greatest memories are of playing that game for hours on end!
I got memory whiplash when you mentioned Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 was released in 2002. I've always associated the first two with growing up in the 90s, I couldn't imagine first playing the second one while in college, but that must have happened since 2 was the first version I played.
I remember back when I was 12 and earned "computer time" on the weekend by doing well at swim meets and cashing in 6 hours on my RCT3 sandbox park. I played the original before this and got too sad when the long coaster in Katie's World would crash but had no qualms about destruction in RCT3, whether because older or just less in game penalty and no red text.. those were good games and everything since RCT3 hasn't been on my radar.
I feel like it's also worth mentioning OpenRCT2 now, which is an open source reverse-engineered version of RCT2 receiving bug fixes, updates and completely new content absent from the original RCT2 to this day. The OpenRCT2 development team even worked together with coaster manufacturers such as RMC to implement their new coaster models which were developed in the 2010s. However it's sad to hear that Chris Sawyer essentially sees OpenRCT2 as an IP violation.
That is sad considering you have to have RCT2 in order to even use opentRCT2 I mean it's basically modded RCT and I would rather give him money for the original games he created than pay atari for crap hoping he one day sees the money.
Chris Sawyer has never said anything about OpenRCT2. There was a post on the forums from some guy claiming to be his business manager, but nothing from Chris Sawyer himself. I doubt he really minds it very much, since he's retired from game development and has a rather strained relationship with Atari.
God damn, what a treasure of a TH-cam recommendation this video turned out to be. I can't wait to see what you make next, and I can't wait to dig into your past work. Please keep up the amazing work whenever creativity strikes!
RCT3 was so far ahead of its time. I have very fond memories playing it for days on end. My little sister would pull up a chair next to me by the computer and pretend to be riding my coasters giving me feedback on them. It was a wonderful time.
I picked up OpenRCT2 a few days ago, and have been playing through the original parks. Last time I played was the original game, and my computer crashed whenever Evergreen Gardens grew over 900 guests. I might actually play through all of them this time around.
RCT2 and 3 made my childhood. Even when I was a teenager years ago, I was still playing RCT3 all the time, as a theme park enthusiast. Naturelly, I was expecting a new start for the license with RCTWorld. But now, it appears that the franchise is dead. I now spend hours on Planet Coaster and Parkitect, as they are the true successors of this wonderful trilogy. I'm glad to see that passionate people are still doing such good games. Still, it's a sad ending for RCT. Your video is awesome :)
To anybody who's enjoyed this video, I've published several new video essays since this one which you can easily find on the channel homepage! RollerCoaster Tycoon is one of the most important series's to me, it's the main game that really got me into the world of gaming at all, so in that way it's the reason this channel even exists. The original trilogy was critically acclaimed, but after that, the series kinda died down, and Atari began to stoop lower and lower when it came to their standards and even their morality in the case of RCT Adventures... These are all thoughts I wanted to share for a long time, so I hope you wound up enjoying it! I'd appreciate hearing what you thought of it! (And yes, I know RCT3 was later rereleased by Frontier considering I have a playthrough of it here. This hadn't happened yet when this video released, this is now the best way to play RCT3) RCT3 Complete Edition Playthrough - th-cam.com/play/PLQtuKItcZ24rMk3p6NDHfcZXK33qh32FL.html (Yes, I know I forgot RCT Joyride...) (Yes I know about Open RCT2, I was focusing mostly on official titles here sorry) (Yes I know about Parkitect, I literally mention it at the end of the video lul) This video has just become the first video on the channel to hit 100k views, that's absolutely insane! There's 5 hours of TH-cam videos uploaded every minute, so thank you so much for taking time out of your day to watch this video! Update as of June 10 2021, half a million views... That's... wow...
I want to add that they are trying to hide that RCT4 is truly RCT4. When I saw it on the storepage, it was just called "Rollercoaster Tycoon", and I literally thought ti was some terrible ripoff of the RCT franchise. To think it is an actual game that is actually part of the RCT franchise...
@Eli Suryana Well I mean buying a game from any 3rd party isn't exactly going to support the game creators anyway, meaning in terms of profit towards those involved in the game there is no difference between pirating and buying from some 3rd party
Regarding the whole "irregular use of proceeds" thing, that actually is a StartEngine boilerplate disclaimer. The whole site is configured to act as a "Producers"-style scam, and a lot (but not all!) of the projects have that same disclaimer. So Atari is being extra scammy here.
I grew up with Rollercoaster Tycoon and it was a lot of fun to play even though I never used to have any of the DLC's. I would always get stuck on some of the challenges but it was still so much fun to play and just create cool rides. I didn't actually know Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 existed until much later (read 2016) and Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 was discovered before that. I loved both Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 3 a lot and from the little bit of interaction with 2 liked the additions that they brought to the game. Glad to hear that the game can be purchased again! And Planet Coaster is also pretty fun if not a lot more interesting in the way you build buildings and such :D Great video and was pretty neat to learn about that.
I thought I'd add in some context that was missed out when you were discussing the history of the games/company, which adds more explanation to why "Atari" are a company full of scumbags. I posted this on the old RollerCoaster Tycoon World forums, and it gained a lot of traction. I've tried searching for my post on the forums but it, or the thread, must have been deleted. So basically, the original RCT was designed by Chris Sawyer and published by Hasbro. When RCT2 was released it was published by Infogrames, and what had happened between the two releases was that Infogrames wanted to expand through acquisition, and had bought out Hasbro. However, the deal made meant that Infogrames didn't have full control over Hasbro until around 2005. The same thing happened with Atari. Infogrames were in the process of buying Atari out whilst RCT3 was being developed by Frontier. At this point, Infogrames didn't only owned a small section of the RCT franchise, and Atari (Original), as well as Frontier still had substantial control over it. Once RCT3 had been released, Frontier went their separate way, and Atari was fully taken over by Infogrames. Infogrames, gaining the naming rights and everything, changed their name to Atari. So, even though they published all the monstrosities that followed RCT3 (RCTWorld and onwards), and bragged in their crowdfunding videos about earning billions over the years, they never actually did any of that shit. Hence why every single game released by Atari in the past decade has been utterly terrible. It's not the original Atari company, it's Infogrames working under the Atari name. Nice bit of history for people there, it's interesting to know what shit goes on behind the scenes!
I picked up a triple pack of the disc versions of RCT 1-3. Was extremely disappointed when I couldn't get RCT3 on Steam. At least I still have the discs, so I've got RCT3. Really enjoy playing it, despite how little I have done so lately.
You /could/ get RCT3 on steam a while ago. Sadly, however, Atari lost the license to distribute it for legal reasons (shady reasons on Atari's part, in fact. They apparently were not paying Frontier what they owed.) If you had bought it on steam before they lost the rights, you'd have it on steam forever.
Dude you sounded like you were recounting from my own personal life when you talked about how rollercoaster tycoon had a big impact on your childhood. Including having a friend at school you'd talk about and play RCT with. 17 years later and I'll still pick up RCT2 triple thrill pack and remenise about my childhood. I wondered what happened to the new games, I never bothered to look into them. Shame what happened to one of my favorite childhood games.
Honestly when Atari was being sued over the unpaid royalties, Frontier should have just offered to drop the lawsuit in exchange for ownership of the Roller Coaster Tycoon IP.
OpenRCT2 is what I’d recommend playing over RCT Classic if you already own RCT1 & 2 since it’s basically the same as Classic but is a free mod that is still getting updated.
Kudos to Frontier for preserving RCT 3 through the complete edition after gaining the rights to it. They could've easily just replaced it with Planet Coaster and buried it as abandonware, but it's available and I've had my fun with it.
The sad thing is that ET, after you've invested the time to learn how to play it, is more fun than most of the shovelware Infogrameess has been tossing out
Atari didn't solely cause the crash with its _ET_ game, but _ET_ was a product of the gold rush mentality that helped to cause the crash. Many developers were churning out subpar games and many companies were suddenly selling consoles. Home computers falling in price delivered yet another blow to console and console game makers.
Normal developers: if you invest 20$ you'll get a free copy
Atari: if you invest 750$ you will get 5$ discount
lol
I've seen many where if you donate more than say $100 they send you some stuff for free, nearly $1,000 and you get major rewards and such.
Atari on the other hand "have a book about us to remind you who stole your money".....
Atari asking for crowd funding cash after gladly taking the money of customers and giving them shitty profit grabbing sequels for years is peak hilarity.
"Normal developers" really only applies to non-corporate ones. Which limits it to pretty much only indie devs.
@@ekki1993 I'd also add valve to it
I like valve. Even if they indeed sometimes suck, but at least not for money reasons.
Also not all indie developers are normal. Some of them are greedy... And do projects with indie budget but AAA mindset
EA: We're the worst game company of the 2010's.
Atari: Hold my stolen cash.
Konami: Pachinko? Pachinko?! PACHINKO?!
Rockstar: That guy has a huge problem with Casinos.
@@WakoDoodle Valve: Hold my Steam Machine
@@WakoDoodle Whatever Konami, activision or EA has done, Atari is still on top of the worst. They are kinda mafia like....
@@SONGOKU02 Indeed, all those companies are greedy assholes. But Atari straddles and even crosses a very fine line where it more or less seem like some kind of organized crime entity.
@@karlandersson4350 Totally. I can't believe, they are still arround, so many times they where on the edge of bankruptcy. And alone the Driv3r Gate Skandal showed how much they act like a crime syndicate.
Chris Sawyer will forever remain an absolute legend in my eyes. The combined depth, complexity, and simultaneous simplicity of RCT 1 & 2 is just incredible. His vision for the design, aesthetic, and 'feel' all brought to life in a way so well optimized, what a beast of a human being.
Not to mention how good and responsive the UI is. I don't know of any other designer that made a sorta windows-based UI feel so good to use.
Chris Sawyer is without a doubt a GOAT in simulation
Reminds me of Will Wright the creator of Sim City and the Sims another couple great series ruined by the greed of a huge company.
Honestly it's kinda crazy how similar their stories are they made a few super successful and fun games then giant company comes in and takes over then they make a bunch of soulless cash grabs and a small developer makes an awesome spiritual successor to the series capitalizing on the failings of the shitty cash grabs, in the case of Sim City at least since City Skylines came in and dunked on Sim City 5 still waiting on the Sims spiritual successor though. (pleaseeeeee be good Paralives I'm rooting for you)
@@darksaiyan2006 NOT TO mention he wrote the games on his own in Assembly. One of the most difficult programming languages.
@@Haganu it’s hard to even call assembly a language. Its cryptic
Basically, Planet Coaster is RCT4. Parkitect is RCT2.5 . The other games don't count.
What other games?
RCTW and after.
And RCT Classic is RCT1+2 Definitive Edition.
@@thet00nedl00n. It was a joke lol
oof.
"Candy Crush was a copy of Bejeweled"
I'M SO GLAD TO FINALLY FIND SOMEONE ONLINE WHO KNOWS THAT!!!!
Isn't this common knowledge Bejeweled was a huge game
@@zjackshot. I guess it is for some, but it's uncommon to see someone acknowledging that
Technically seen it's a copy of Bejeweled, which added the very clever move limit with algorithms that generate the map so that it always feels like just one or two more moves from finishing. Making it very addicting, and having a great source of revenue.
@@Aidiakapi. There are no algorithms to generate the maps. They were manually crafted and every level will be the same for every player for that reason, and I give them that, but it's still lame because many levels have unreasonable objectives and you need to be extremely lucky to beat them, and that's what pushes people to pay them for extra lives or items
@@ddnava96 Afaik that's only half-true. The level layout is fixed, the level seed is fixed, and the statistical tuning/difficulty is set by design, but the content is still algorithm driven.
So basically
"I want to go on RCT again!"
"RCT2 was great!"
"RCT3 is really good value!"
"Just looking at RCT Adventures makes me feel sick!"
"I'm not playing that much to invest on RCT Switch"
"Im not going on RCT4 Mobile - it isn't safe"
@@vanapotamus6348 Nice
"I want to go on something more exciting than RCT World."
"I'm not paying that much to go on RCT Joyride"
Atari: "We've made over 2 billion dollars on our best franchises!"
Also Atari: "Can you spare $250 *cough* (minimum)??"
Wait, are you saying that bragging about what an amazing and financially successful company you are is NOT a good opener for a crowdfunding video?
haha yeah thats probably what they are saying because they are such big idiots
The amount of funding they got makes me lose hope on human brain
Yeah, that is a bad sign there. If they had been smart about it (I mean it looked like they did not get that many marks... I mean investors on their hock) they would have used a shell company. A developer fronting making it seem like a passion project and that they barely manage to convince Atari to get them a shot, if only they get this successful fund-raising campaign going. I mean this is very scummy to but it has more success. They copied the suffice level of a crowed sourcing effort without understanding the underlying mechanics. Instead, they thought like the corporate scam artist they are in though that is how you lure people in. But that just show them without their mask on. I mean I do wonder who was behind all this. Or if it maybe even was setup to fail since the incompetence is pretty staggering. Who knows with all the corporate politics that goes around at this old big publishers. Atari (even if is technically not at all the same Atari) has had a long reputation for underhanded practice that actually makes EA look like the good guys in comparison at points. (Though is really hard to compare since a lot of these big publishers, be it EA, Microsoft, Activation or Atari, with many others, have done a lot of shady crappy things.)
in reality Atari made over $2 :P
How not to start a crowd-funded project: "We've made over two billion dollars worldwide"
I was thinking the same thing lol
Especially if you end up making a glitchy mess
"Trust us. We managed to make 2 billion dollars... disappear, without saving any of it to fund development of this game. We're really good with money!"
I know if i see that i think “well then use that 2 billion worldwide”
@@SallinKari Capitalism in a nutshell.
Great video. RCT 1, 2 and 3 were HUGE parts of my childhood, so I stopped following anything about it after the failure of World and arrival of Planet Coaster. I had no idea it got so... so SO much worse after. What in the hell Atari lol
woah
Wasn't expecting Piemations of all people to comment on a video on Rollercoaster Tycoon.
Didn't know Piemations was here out of all famous TH-camrs
Did somebody say pieeeee
i refunded rct world right after i bought it.. it was terrible, just after that i bought planet coaster. and i still play it lol
I knew not to waste my money on RCTW, planet coaster kicks butt in so many ways
Planet coaster is amazing. My OCD loves it... my sandbox park is coming together nicely. Ive put in over 20 hours and dont even have the path to the entrance done much less a ride in the park lol
What’s so great is that it’s more realistic! The scale is a bit sticky but it’s so liberating compared to RCT3!!
No u need to throw the CD out your window from your attic and and land it in a trash can lol
I was mistaken n thought plannet coaster was a revamp of roller coaster tycoon
Roller Coaster Tycoon World looks too intense for me.
I'm not paying that much for Roller Coaster Tycoon Mobile.
Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic was great!
I'm not playing Roller Coaster Tycoon World. It's not safe.
😥
Planet coaster is a good value!
I'm not paying that much for a micro transaction from Roller Coaster Tycoon Mobile.
Nice peep meme
@@johngriswold4303 it is good just like RCT or rct2
RCT3 also introduced the ability to use elephant-grade tranquilizers on your guests
more effective that security guards what can I say
have an angry guest? Elephant tranq em!
@@mattbatcraz Jokes on you Im into that shit.
"RCT3 but if a guest thinks a negative thought they get tranquillized"
"We know what we're doing"
Actually, no you don't Atari, and those best selling franchises you mentioned, like Asteroids? Yeah, that was a different company.
The ACTUAL Atari, Atari Inc, died in 1984. Everything since then has been various different companies using the Atari name, the current one being a French developer that bought the name and renamed themselves to Atari Interactive.
RCT is my #1 all time game. I got the original in a big box for my birthday in 1999. I don't have the box but I still have the original disk (and being British, the Twister ride is actually called TWISTER, not... Scrambled Eggs... I still don't understand that about the North American release). Chris Sawyer is a monumentally talented developer that poured so much passion into his games, and I can't even imagine how angry he must feel at the butchering of RCT.
Haven't played World but seeing physical copies at Walmart now going for $20 has me absurdly curious but idk if I'd want to or not. Agreed on Chris Sawyer, Locomotion was another great game by him. Personally prefer it to OpenTTD as I had a better time getting a hang of it and the TTD Mobile port looks about the same so if you like that port check out Locomotion. Soundtrack is sweet too, it's the kinda music you wanna have when playing Monopoly with your friends or somethin lol
To be fair Infogrames, the company that is now Atari SA, also at one point knew what they were doing with great titles like the Alone in the Dark series and spinoffs. It's not like Atari was bought by a venture capital company or something. Though that Infogrames has fallen so far is perhaps more depressing
@@Mr.ToadJanfu Ohh I love Infrograms and Hasbro Interactive games especially, oddly enough? Their board game adaptations like Monopoly Battleship and Clue.
Say what you want, i still wish the jaguar had been a success.
@@halo3odst it almost was. Europeans put in a lot of pre-ordered for them, but Atari didn't have enough money to make them all (and the games were mostly crap).
RCT: WOW! This is amazing!
RCT2: Holy Cow! This is awesome! So much new scenery!
RCT3: It's in 3D! You can ride the rides! This is amazing! Check out the lighting!
Everything after that: Honestly... what the F@CK!
But at least Planet Coaster and Parkitect exist!
Parkitect is for the classic fans and planet coaster is for the fans of the 3rd game
I think the only good Atari-era one was RCT Classic since it was RCT1 & 2 for Modern devices (And Mobile)
Planet coaster is good for architects and not park-tycoons
It’s honestly my favorite of all park tycoon games, but the “challenges” are all unbearably easy. It’s more like a park themed Garry’s Mod imo
My elementary school was having a book fair and this game was at the fair. My dad bought it for me since I aced a book report. I still play it to this day. 🥰😍
Same! I remember getting it through the Scholastic book order catalogue! Otherwise I probably never would have convinced my parents to buy it at the store.
Same here!
Same, book order.
Man I want to play this again so bad!
Lol apparently the scholastic book fair got all of us.
Frontier: Makes best RCT game
Atari: Gets a new developer
Frontier: Develops best amusement park management game that destroys Atari’s offering
Atari: :0
Atari is beyond ridiculous, can’t wait for the day this dying corpse of a company becomes defunct
And what about their vapor ware next gen console?? Where is that 4 years later??
honestly the last good game Atari made was Tenkaichi 3
@@larrychilders6599 that's not even an Atari developed game, it's a Spike developed game
The AtariBox VCS 2000 or whatever it’s called now looks great on paper. Streamlining a SteamBox experience for the masses? Great idea! Packing it in a lovely nostalgic wooden cabinet calculated to pull the Gen X heartstrings? Hells to the yes! Giving us a modern Xbox controller AND an old school joystick and packing it with classic games but also saying “but that’s not all folks - it also plays Fallout 4 and Fortnite and stuff!” My inner child just did somersaults.
Logistically, though... holy crap everything has just gone wrong or looks super shady and... I mean, this should be the no-brainer idea. Steambox that’s as cheap as a Switch, you can upgrade it forever, pings the nostalgia... how are they screwing this up so badly?!?
Good news, they collapsed a long time ago. Atari, Inc was founded in 1972 and went defunct in 1984.
Warner sold the arcade portion of Atari (the only portion that was making money) to Namco, who sold it back two years later, Warner turned into Time Warner, then sold Atari Games to WMS Industries (it almost went back to Atari's co-founder, but alas). Then in 1999 they had to abandon the Atari Games name because Hasbro now owned the rights to Atari.
But how did Hasbro acquire the Atari name? Well, Atari Incorporated still kind-of existed. Back in 1984, TTL bought Atari, Inc from Warner and they merged into Atari Corporation. They had a good run making "the next generation of home computers" but by 1988 had lost that battle to Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. And then in 1989 they lost the handheld gaming battle to Nintendo's Game Boy and in 1993 they lost the console gaming battle to the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation. They then created Atari interactive to publish PC games, but they gave up on that and instead sold the Atari Corporation to JT Storage (creator of the double-sided floppy disk) in 1996, who then sold the Atari name and all of its properties to Hasbro Interactive in 1998 for $5 million.
At this point Hasbro Interactive is the publisher of RollerCoaster Tycoon, and the owners of the Atari name. They also owned MicroProse (Sid Meier's Civilization, X-COM, and others), Avalon Hill, and Wizards of the Coast.
In 2001, Infogrames Entertainment S.A. (The villain of this story) bought Hasbro Interactive, who had gone broke in the dot-com bubble.
By now, Atari had gone broke numerous times, and their brand had been bought by way too many companies to count. But they were Infogrames's most recognizable name, and Infogrames exploited the Atari brand by slapping it onto their games.
In 2003, Infogrames reorganized Infogrames Inc into Atari Inc, and Infogrames Interactive into Atari Interactive.
Then Infogrames quickly lost most of their valuable franchises. They closed down the last MicroProse studio, sold the Civilization franchise, lost the rights to Unreal tournament, sold Transformers, My Little Pony, and Connect Four back to Hasbro, and several others.
In 2007-2009, Infrogrames fired their chairmen, most of their directors, laid off 20% of their workforce, sold Atari Europe to Namco Bandai, and changed their name from IESA to Atari SA.
In 2010, the BlueBay hedgefund sold Atari/restructured capital and debt.
In 2013, Atari/Atari Interactive declared bankruptcy.
And then in 2015, under CEO Fred Chesnais, they announced a turnaround strategy based on re-releasing (i.e. exploiting) their catalog of Atari franchises, with a focus on "download games, MMO games, mobile games and licensing activities, based in priority around traditional franchises."
And that's where we stand today. All they really have left is the name Atari, their classic games Adventure, Asteroids, Breakout, Centipede, Missile Command, Pong, and Tank, and the franchises of Jet Fighter and RollerCoaster Tycoon. It's actually quite sad.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_SA#Game_franchises_owned_by_Atari,_SA
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atari,_Inc._(Atari,_SA_subsidiary)_games
This information was brought to you by Wikipedia and Procrastination.
Edit: Typos
5:15
I think it is. There’s a guy on TH-cam named Marcel Vos, who publishes a lot of RCT videos on the platform. He published one video discussing the games’ learning/difficulty curves, and I think he said one of the pre-made coasters is quite literally coded to crash every time as a means of teaching the player that crashes can happen.
A bit of a late reaction. I don't think it's coded that way. You can just get unlucky to have bunch of heavy guests at ones on the ride causing it to crash cause it takes a hill too fast.
@@michaelvd2140 it is coded this way! Why? Because rct2 has a layout that teaches the players that there are ceratain things in game. Just like the startup tutorial for many games that feel so frustratibg because you "have to" go trough it. In this case, you don't have to (just like the first level in most mario bros games). It feels so free to not have this tutorial (it kind of does, but like game design is layed out to be intuitive and learning without feeling so).
@@joneinarmattiasvisser6113 Sorry but i have to agree with MichaelvD here. I played bumbly beach on rct classic and open rct, and both times i played the scenario not once the coaster there crashed on me (then again it could be only for the original game which disproves me). Its also to note that marcel vos said that the coaster is “very crash prone” and not hard coded so make of that as you will.
it may have been "not fully tested" more than intentional, but there's one (Roman Racers?) that nearly always will regularly crash, killing all occupants.
I've beaten the scenario without the coaster crashing once before. It's probably just random. Or it's because of the extremely short station that can barely fit all the trains.
I just want to give an important update to everyone and say, with absolute pride, that Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 is not only re-released again without Atari’s input like with the iOS version, and not only is it the “Complete Edition”, but it’s also on the Nintendo Switch.
Frontier, you absolute *king...*
Nice! I can confirm.
I like RCT 2 better
Ok I want RCT3 now, 'cause it's on the Switch
Is there no RCT 3 mobile for android? I cant find it in playstore
@@vibewithmabel than get openrct2 or parkitect
I still play RCT3 to this day. So good.
SAME I love the pools and water slide the most
me too! I still have a physical copy of the game & its expansion packs
Same.
Same, but i play Planet Coaster the most because it’s basically a better and newer version of RCT3
@@Oujix
not really. It has its limitations.. some worse than rct3.
Some of my favorite memories as a kid was sitting in my Dads lap watching him play the first Rollercoaster Tycoon on the family computer. We'd watch the guests puke and bust out in laughter, fire the handyman and when he would go to grab a drink or to use the bathroom I'd drown the mascots. Hearing the theme music after all these years filled me with so many fond memories.
RCT 1 and 2 are probably my most played games ever. They brought me so much joy in my childhood
Ikr, god its so nostalgic
Those two were my childhood from years 14-18
@@lukebennett1648 14-18 is not childhood years buds lol
@@DUDEfreestyle if you're going to be pedantic then 18 isn't. You're considered a child under 18 in my country.
@@lukebennett1648 0-5 baby 6-12 childhood 13-17 teenager 18 is a young adult you can legally buy cigarettes in the US. I'm not pedantic, didn't know you weren't from the US bud.
"Alright, time to open my brand new coaster-"
*Brand new coaster has broken down.*
"Brand new coaster looks too intense for me."
"I want to go on something more thrilling than brand new coaster."
"Just looking at brand new coaster makes me feel sick."
"I want to get off brand new coaster"
"I'm not paying that much for Brand new Coaster"
"I'm hungry"
*surrounded by food stalls*
"I'D RIDE IT!"-Still me on what must be my 20th playthrough
Brand new coaster with 15 intensity: *just vibing*
IMO RTC2 is still the definitive RCT experience. It's everything great about the original game plus more. I respect 3 for pushing the envelope at the time, but to me the 3d wasn't quite there yet at the time and the game just never looked as good as the second one (although that vision was more than realized when Planet Coaster launched).
nah roller ocaster tycoon classic is the definitive rct
I agree with both of you. I liked RCT2 but i never beat hardly any parks. The first one i beat and loved so much. Theres was something different. I liked all the rollercoasters on the 1st one. On The 2nd, only the 6 flags ones, and yet those parks were too built up To feel like original RCT. I will get RCT2 again tho absolutely. It added everything RCT1 was missing
@mission2858 Parkitect is REALLY good too it leans more towards rct2 aesthetic than planet coaster tho
Classic is the definitive version on mobile, but the PC version has a few UI bugs that weren't present in the original games.
RCT3 walked so Planet Coaster could run
Jesus christ that investor's pitch timeline...
1999: The original classic
2002: The successful sequel
2004: ATARI TAKES CONTROL
-2006: First title peaks. (Not actually an event, just an arbitrary stat milestone.)-
*TEN YEAR TIME SKIP*
2017: Atari slaps that branding on a mobile game.
2018: INVEST TODAY!
Technically it had been in control when the current Atari (Atari SA) was Infogrames.
I find it funny how the time skip started before I was even born, and ended after I knew how the series plummeted in quality.
i'm really glad i bought RCT3 back then, since atari yeeted it off the steam store
I got it for 3€ at Saturn (German BestBuy)
mren It blew my mind when I realized Saturn and Media Markt were the same company. Yeah, I was a little slow that day. 🤣😳
BruinPhD2009 : )
I still have my boxed copy which works without the need of steam. It's bad they are selling all the first 3 rct games with add-ons i think tied to steam in stores. Since still using windows xp steam doesn't work, but not like i cared about steam much, more like i used gog to get rct 1 and 2 with add-ons, rct3 i have it for a very long time on cd the deluxe edition for europe. Too bad i didn't get it on gog. Also am not sure if a no cd crack works properly for the deluxe edition of rct3
I'm glad I bought it too! But unfortunately, my new laptop doesn't have a disk reader XD.
the legal dispute between Frontier and Atari still hasn't been settled. Frontier has been granted all the exclusive distribution rights on RCT3 (by court ruling), but Atari still hasn't paid Frontier what they're owed and the game can't legally be sold as long as the lawsuit is ongoing. But with Atari currently billions of $ in debt, a debt that only keeps getting bigger, they only stay in business because they make just enough money to make payments on it. They've always tried to do everything as cheap as possible, but with the recurring bankrupts they've taken it a step further with their games: everything has to be developed cheap, fast, and with minimal effort. Star Trek Online came out in 2010 buggy and unfinished, and although it's still alive thanks to PWE, it still suffers from all the shortcuts the developers had to take to get it done under Atari's rule. Every game Atari's made since is the same story: they're released unfinished, sometimes barely playable (like RCTW), and because it's cheaper to make a new game than maintain an existing one, they get rid of the games once they've paid for themselves, just to underline how little they care about their customers
That explains why the steam bundle for RCT Classic complete is 1,2,and World. The newest is Chris Sawyer's RCT Classic remaster where he basically moved both his games to the 2nd game engine.
Im glad i got rct3 on steam years ago then
My dad bought rollercoaster tycoon 2 for himself, but I found it and fell in love several sequels and expansion packs later, here I am playing planet coaster. It’s a shame the tycoon brand went downhill so hard, but to me planet coaster is an updated fully realized RTC3 and I love it so much
I wish Planet Coaster could do the water park thing, but apparently the engine won’t handle it. :(
@@sycoraxrock Well we can hope for the future, Frontier got it right once, maybe they will do it again.
planet coaster is basically as close as we can get to RCT4
@@sycoraxrockThe just announced sequel _will_ have that!
that rct2 theme song threw me back to sitting in a dark room only illuminated by my gateway at midnight naming all of my caretakers in themes, the nostalgia
Planet coaster is absolutely a game worth picking up. There is so much room from creativity, the soundtrack is great, the graphics look beautiful and there are so many more positive things to say about the game. It's the worthy successor of RCT3
@@Xenelock umm if you played the RCT3 trilogy you should be able to recognize how far Planet Coaster expanded the genre of park simulators.
@@Xenelock i disagree. planet coaster felt exactly like a sequel to the RCT franchise. it was super easy to take what ive learned in RCT and apply it to planet coaster. even if you didnt buy any expansions, the steam workshop has plenty of content to add. i loved putting 7/11's and McDonalds into my parks.
History of Rcts
1990’s-2014
RCT 1
RCT 2
RCT 3
2014+
The Abominations
2016: Planet Coaster becomes the *true* successor to Rct3
Nemesis Dylan 2016 Planet Coaster Saved Rollercoaster Tycoons.
DerpyHuman22 I’ll add that in :)
@@MeltedToast84 thanks lol
RCT 1 and 2: Made by Chris Sawyer.
RCT 3: Made by Frontier (great developer) and published by Atari Inc (the good modern Atari, formerly known as GT Interactive). Chris Sawyer acted as a consultant, because he was busy working on another game at the time.
2008: Atari SA (the evil modern Atari, formerly known as Infogrames) buys out Atari Inc.
2013: Atari SA goes bankrupt, changes leadership, and starts to develop new strategies to make money.
And that's why there's such a gap in quality. Infogrames is the entire reason the Atari name has such a bad reputation.
Rollercoaster tycoon classic was a 2016 release that was good. Granted it was basically an upgrade version of 2
Whoa, I was super into the RCT games in like 2002-2008, but then I stopped playing entirely! I knew there was a mobile app version and all that, but I had no idea Atari had so many failed attempts at creating the spiritual successor to RCT3...
carykh
Did not expect to see you here.
Yeah it’s surprising how much Atari has tried to make something good enough to actually have a decent playerbase, for now we have to stick with fan made projects I guess.
Hey it’s Cary
Huh
And then Planet Coaster happened...best spiritual successor to the RCT series ever!
Get Planet Coaster.
5:18 yes the bumbly beach coaster is set to crash very often.
its a part of the excellent difficulty curve so you can learn that coaster crashes can happen
The one thing I noticed that wasn’t discussed here was the flexibility of third party design additions in RCT3. This has been prevalent since 2013, at least as far as I can tell from TH-cam videos. The level of customization that became available for RCT3 made it pretty formidable as a design engine. Some of what I’ve seen and experienced firsthand has made it a more than decent thing to do on a Mac, as Frontier refuses to make PlanCo play on Apple. It can get quite hard to compensate for grid and path constraints, but in a way that challenge is what makes some of the designs I’ve seen out there seem so miraculous.
I agree on the flaws of Atari in their development of games that never advanced the graphics and designs (and after c. 2012, customizability) of the RCT engine but it’s worth noting that RCT3 has become a decent alternative to PlanCo. I am all the more mesmerized when I see RCT3 designs use so much customization, knowing that gamers had to work with grid-based building.
So, hats off to those folks... and thanks for the informative vid!
"As Frontier refuses to make PlanCo play on Apple."
Actually, it's not that they're refusing, it's that they literally cannot make an OSX version due to the lack of a suitable graphics library. The game makes use of a lot of graphical features that aren't implemented in either OpenGL or Apple's own proprietary libraries.
Well, regarding compatibility, it’ll be interesting to see how parallels handles the graphics.
It is hard to trust Atari at all.
"We know what we are doing!" they say, after crashing the entire video game industry in the 80s
That's a good point. They've been ruining video games almost for the entire length of the medium's existence. Off and on, sure, but they've never stopped ruining completely.
They were responsible for drowning the market in shovelware titles?
The actual Atari died in 1985. Now it’s just people using the name for clout.
*siiiiiiiiiiiiigh*
Atari under Time-Warner made a lot of bad decisions, yes. But they did not single-handedly end an entire industry. There were a lot of hands in that particular pie.
1. There were a LOT of companies making low-quality games, right on down to an actual dog food company. In the modern world, they would be called unlicensed titles, but at the time they idea you would need a license from the hardware manufacturer to publish software was fundamentally alien. The lockouts on the american release of Nintendo's FamiCom (and Atari's own 7800) were both done directly in response to the slew of poor 3rd-party efforts that had dogged the VCS, in an attempt to prevent the same thing happening again.
2. There were a lot of game consoles on the market in 1982. There was the Atari VCS(renamed 2600), the Atari 5200, the Mattel IntelliVision, the Coleco ColecoVision(imaginative name, that one), the GCE Vectrex(later Milton-Bradley Vectrex)... and that's just the short list. To say nothing of the home computer market that was largely competing for the same dollars. It was a chaotic market and making a choice was difficult. This most likely contributed to people choosing to do nothing(or choosing a home computer because it wasn't just a toy and had real practical value, I promise, mom!).
3. There was a general recession that hit in 1982 and slowed non-essential spending in America significantly.
4. Toy stores and department had been assuming this whole "games on the television" thing was a fad since the first Pong consoles hit shelves in '75. And when Christmas '82 ended with them still having video games in stock(mostly titles no one wanted, as the good games sold much faster, but retailers stocked all games equally), they assumed the fad was over, cancelled their orders, returned what they could, and put everything else on the clearance racks in 1983. And that was the actual cause of the crash, retailers bailing out before they lost their shirts riding a a perceived fad into the ground.
Note that, in spite of poor stocking practices and a general recession, the american video game market still GREW in 1982. It just did not grow at the unsustainably meteoric rate seen in previous years, which was considered another sign the fad was dying.
Yes, I know seanbaby said ET single-handedly killed video games. He was writing a comedy column, not an in-depth historical analysis.
@@CptJistuce And honestly, ET and Pac Man for the Atari 2600 are nowhere near as bad as what their infamy and hate would imply. Much of the hate garnered came from the 1990s when emulators were in their infancy; Pac Man's flickering ghosts would flicker too slow on emulators (the flicker is much faster on actual hardware), and emulators have never come with instruction booklets so playing ET became a jarring experience.
The former is actually not that bad when played on original hardware. It could use some polishing here and there as it was Christmas Rushed, but it's still much better than the shovelware that was sold at that time.
ET can actually be beaten within 20 minutes if you have the instruction booklet; it's simply just a mediocre adventure game. Says a lot when even the AVGN considers ET to be not as bad as most people have made it.
1. Railroad Tycoon by Sid Meier started the Tycoon craze.
2. Infogrames bought the Atari brand. They were not a "part of Atari".
RCT was actually one of the main inspirations that made me want to become a Disney Imagineer! I’m currently studying at college and continue to move toward my goal of wanting to one day work with theme parks!
That's so cool! I always wanted to be a story writer imagineer for the concepts of rides, I might look into it :) RCT was also my first love for rollercoasters too! Good luck with your dream :D
FWIW, me too! I loved the engineering/science behind this game when I was in 3rd-6th grade (mid 2000’s) and the closest thing my guidance counselor could do my 7th grade year for job shadowing was to send me to the local airport… here I am 15-17years later an airline captain because it all started with this game!
for the funding campaign, I'm surprised there wasn't a class-action lawsuit being attempted.
That's my thought also.
After playing RCT3 scenarios again, I realized just like 6 years ago, how disappointingly easy it was compared to the first two games. I decided to create my own scenario one time and I failed my own challenge twice. I finally beat it after roughly 12 game years.
Yeah, these type of games need high difficutly modes.
Oof, that was a controversial thing to say about the music from RCT1 & 2. That was the music of my childhood.
The music is a classic, but a lot does have the theme park feeling to it like he said.
@@tails183 I would place a merry go round every now and then just to keep the music going.
Not controversial thing at all. The way it was presented was not to say anything bad about it. It is definitely a more simple music when compared to 3.
@@mardy3732 same lol
Anyone remember Thrillville and Thrillville: Off the Rails, also made by Frontier?
bruhhh… you just brought back a memory...
CopperFox Great games!
Two of my all time favorites, never realize that it was Frontier.
I personally loved SimCoaster as a child. RIP Bullfrog Studios.
I loved it! It's quite different from Rollercoaster Tycoon and honestly has its own unique charme!
i remember playing this game as a kid not knowing english very well, just clicking and making my way through the game, i remember it took me like 6 months to figure out how to delete the trees, and about 2-3 years to fully master the game, but what i loved most was the graphics, once it became 3d i was over it
Atari: We’re delisting RCT3 and putting a heartless mobile game on the Nintendo Switch.
Everyone: This isn’t fair, we can’t play RCT3 anymore! All we have is the lackluster mobile port.
Frontier: haha, our rct3 game goes weeee *(Yeets Complete Edition onto PC and Switch, restoring the balance)*
It's been back for a while now. Thank goodness, RCT3 wasn't RCT1/2 good, but it was close and a solid step forward for the franchise. Everything after 3's expansion packs... Now _that's_ bad.
"When the game disc was included in a cereal box"
AAAAaaaaayyyyy!
I remember the Checks FPS game that came in the box.
Thats literally what introduced me to the game, got instantly hooked after that and bought rct deluxe and rct2 deluxe. Best marketing campaign ever
I can't even remember where I got RCT1, I was so young. I think it was a serial box though.
While other's got it from a cereal box, I got my copy of RCT1 back then from sending in proof of purchases of Totino's pizza in the mail back then. Amazing how far that one game took me.
Mine came in a magazine
I'm glad someone else was heartbroken whenever that one rollercoaster would crash! I'd keep retrying the level but it kept happening... One of the few memories from my early childhood
Man still hearting comments 2 years later. Gotta respect that.
I remember growing up with Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, got it for a cheap price in gamestop, and was super happy, i dont know how many hours i got into that game, but i can tell you it was a lot, later on i went back to gamestop with my dad, and i noticed the 2 dlc's, where it said, buy 2 get 1 free, and i got my dad to buy it. Ended up spending around 600 hours with the dlc's, and it was the best. Years later when i heard of RCTW, my mind got super hyped, so hyped i overlooked soo many flaws with the game, even under the beta i was okay with it. but my disapointment when it came fully out was huge, and i still feel like i got stolen from. Then i got Planet coaster, and damn that is a game, played it for so many hours and loved every min. It felt like i was back to my younger self, and that was such an amazing feeling.
Thank you for this amazing video, was actually shocked on how little view count this had, since how much time has gone into it.
I was insanely hyped for RCTW as well. I wanted so badly for it to be good, and thought it was going to be the next big thing. I wanted to find what scraps of good there were in the mess, but it was just really nothing... As of today I’ve almost gotten through the first world of that game for people to enjoy my suffering lul, and it does not at all get better as the levels go on, it just gets worse and worse....
Glad you enjoyed the video!
RCTW hurt all my feelings when I got it. I ran back to the early versions for solace.
Not a single mention of OpenRCT2? Still playing it to this day. I understand that it's not an official release like RCTClassic but it IS important to the timeline.
Also, not to try and defend Atari, but the investment thing feels like you obfuscated the fact that, based on performance of sales, they'd give you up to 125% of your original investment. Though, with how utterly shady Atari is with royalties, why anyone would believe them and invest, expecting them to be truthful on how much the game made, is anyone's guess.
Pretty sure there was multiple mentions of 2
Atari is now bankrupt and someone else bought them out.
RCT3 is getting an updated PC version and a Switch port, and it won't be published by Atari this time around. 😀
@@thesexyblondguy openrct2 is like a mod... but also a more stable thingie to run rct2 on modern pc's etc without any issues
@@MikoooCW key word, "open." Didn't even know that was different. RCT1 crashes on me but regular 2 hasn't yet.
Rc3 intro while listening "summer air" is pure magic
Oh my god, that RCT 3 music hit me right in the feels.
The RCT3 soundtrack is amazing it’s my favorite roller coaster game soundtrack
I got the Complete Edition the day it came out on Switch and I’m in love! It’s one of those things where you know you liked it as a kid, but now with mature eyes, you know your nostalgia is justified.
I love how Frontier Developments assigned their company to revive Park Sims.
Really love their new games!
I quite like jurassic world myself, the dinosaurs look really movie accurate and I really like doing the challenge modes. I’m still learning how to make my parks in planet coaster look good and I might get planet zoo if I have enough money
Just realized that they're those behind Thrillville. Man, maybe moving out from RCT is the best choice for them...
I picked up my first copy of RCT in a cereal box. I also collected ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?”, a Tonka rescue game, a book building game by dream weaver and other games too.
Real Talk: I do absolutely love having Roller Tycoon Classic on my phone tho. That has got to be one of the best games on the Play Store
Aaaand I'm lucky enough to have downloaded RCT3 Platinum on my steam account before it was removed from the store, a fact that I was completely unaware of before watching this video
I can see in on Steam now, though?
Same. Sad it was removed but I got it before it was removed
10:11 in RCT2 There is an object limit, granted it's high enough to where you don't need to worry about it unless you're filling the entire map with a single rollercoaster taking up every single tile.
Great video and review of the RollerCoaster Tycoon games. I grew up first playing Transport Tycoon way back on a Windows 3.1 computer in mid 2000's. My family was pretty late getting into the computer game, our first computer was a Tandy from the 1980's that we got in 1999 then we slowly upgraded with free old computers that people were throwing away until by brother bought his own computer in the mid 2000's. The next game in the series I played was RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 and I loved it, used to play it with my brother growing up, brings back some happy nostalgic memories, so glad that it's available on steam. Also I checked steam and RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 Complete Edition is now available through Frontier Developers, I think I might pick it up to try it out.
In second grade, I had a really tough Christmas. I had the flu, and had to stay home from all the fun things my family did over the holidays, culminating in Christmas day, when they had to leave me home while visiting our relatives.
In the midst of my sadness, I had two wonderful gifts. A model train set, and Roller coaster Tycoon.
I loved it, and later on Rct3. It makes me cringe thinking of how Atari eviscerated this wonderful series. I remember when Roller coaster Tycoon world came out, some people had the foolishness to intentionally buy it over Planet Coaster, to "support the franchise."
The franchise is a zombie. If you interact with it today, prepare for it to eat your brains.
I bought it on launch... I think I only got two hours in...? I didn't know Planet Coaster existed at the time
@@AcousticHarmonia Yeah, I first heard of Planet Coaster after Nerd Cubed's hilarious video on Roller coaster Tycoon world, where he said to play that instead.
There were legitimately people who were MAD at Frontier for "stealing attention" from Roller coaster Tycoon world.
@@armchairrocketscientist4934 That sounds kinda familiar. If it wasn't that channel, I recall hearing about Planet Coaster from at least some TH-cam channel...?
People were mad at Frontier for stealing attention? Man how I wish I was paying more attention during those days
@@dieziegel Yes, because Atari decisively pushed it to that date to "compete."
Rollercoaster Tycoon lived long enough to become a villain...🙁🙁🙁🙁
It's more of a Nowhere Islands scenario, it was loved, but then Atari flew over, set up camp, burned everything to the ground, and built an empire of lies.
@Rafael Suprayogi nah theres a giant fake city and infinite bathrooms
Those aren't Rollercoaster games, those are a bunch of fetuses who escaped abortion.
It technically isn't RCT though. The names stay while the people behind them change. Those are the real villains.
Now while I agree that RCT3 had an intro that was far more relaxing and serene, as compared to the almost circus-style intros of the first two games, the in-game music for the first 2 games, to this day, sets me in a state of tranquility. The music for the first 2 games was, imo, really well done and gave a very fun, relaxing atmosphere. I just wanted to share that
I've always thought the guitar music for RCT 3's menu was an odd choice
The original music sends me into panic mode and brings back memories of trying to scrape funds with a maxed out loan and frantically placing handymen to keep up with the insane amount of vomit! :) Relaxing? pfffft
@pikachuchujelly7628 oh, uh... I'm... sorry that was your experience... to this day RCT music pops in my jeans when I need to relax, but I guess I can u derstand how it creates anxiety too...
"Sell the ip.
Even EA would treat RCT with more respect."
- TheDeadYoshi
Best comment the release trailer could have.
Atari should just hand it off to Frontier to settle royalty disputes.
@@reillywalker195 Y E S
You can’t spell steal without EA
@@vijfsnippervijf i can! Kraść.
Is it just me or does this guy sound like he's subtly crying the entire time?
Cannot unhear it now
I can't explain it, but my eyes are very sensitive, and this guy, along with others, I can't listen to speak without my eyes twitching, itching, and watering...
lol why is this so accurate
He uses vocal fry and hasn't fixed it for this video
Canadian-ness if you ask me.
Great video! I don't know if you will ever read this comment, but if you want my personal history with this series... it's not an understatement when I say it shaped the person I am today.
My love for the first game and the series as a whole has resulted in a huge passion for theme parks and rollercoasters that continues to this day, inspired me to become an engineer and honestly led to some of the most magic moments with friends I had, basically turning theme park visits into open air museum tours with me enthousiastically explaining the technology behind it all.
I remember the shock when I first saw that rct world trailer like it was yesterday, and that game became the first one I even refunded on Steam.
Also, about rct for Switch not looking like a 65k budget game, that's not even enough money to pay 10 developers 2.5k for 3 months. Not even factoring in playtesters, marketing, publishing etc... So yeah.
I loved this franchise growing up as a kid. Honestly, I’m heartbroken for what the series has become, and how Atari handled it.
I hoped for a good, decent RCT4, but then it all went to hell. I don’t know if the series will ever come back from what it had become in the last decade, and tbh I doubt it ever will.
Maybe Atari should stop. If they can’t make a good RCT game ever again then I’m afraid this is most likely the end. It had a good run for just 3 games, but then it all crashed and burned and Atari is pretty much to blame. The blame is on them.
Like they say in that one superhero film, “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
RIP RollerCoaster Tycoon. 1999 - 2014. I’ll never forget when you were good.
F
F
well, i guess we should move to planet coaster, the same company has developed the RCT3, and their work for roller coaster games are masterpiece
Technically Planet Coaster fits the gap of a decent RCT4 (same developers as RCT3), but it's less management focused and more design focused.
VestedUTuber indeed, plus i think parkitect might be the perfect balance, the only problem is the lack of 3d graphics that rct3 would give
Atari: WE know what we're doing. We've made *wait for it* over 2 billion dollars
Also Atari: Please fund our kickstarter to make game :(
I love it when TH-cam recommends small channels. Great video!
Once you get to RCT3D you can hear your emotion while talking about the Fall of RCT. Love it
One of my earliest memories (age 5) of computers in general is watching my oldest brother (aged 10) play RCT2.
I refuse to believe this guy only has 7k subscribers. Your content is amazing!!
7k was hit just earlier today actually, haha
And appreciate the kind words
(Could have ended it with "see you in the queue lines)
My hole interest in video games started with the first roller coaster my grandmother sent it to me (the first and last thing she sent me for a gift rest was money, shipping cost makes since) I played the crap out of the game on my father's computer. To latter get one for my sister and I. I remember getting RCT 2 for Christmas opening it and running down the hall to install and play it for quite some time. So many memories and fun times playing the game.
Thank you for making this video I knew some of the things that happened but nowhere near this much. I also didn't know that plant coaster was " connected" to RCT I thought it was just its own thing.
Great video, thank you.
The first time I heard about RCT was in 2nd grade, my friend PJ was talking about the “Death Park” he had made on a rollercoaster simulation game, I ended up making a steam account in either 2014 or 2015 just to buy RCT 3 on my family computer, I made so many memories playing that game, then in 2015 or 2016 I got it for my phone (it didn’t work for my iPad because it was super old) in 2015 I bought RCT4... THE DAY BEFORE IT BECAME FREE! then in 2015 or 2016 I got my first windows computer, the first games I got were RCT1 and RCT2, and I played those games for hours a day, then in 2017 I bought planet coaster, and now this game has turned itself into whatever it is now.
4 is terrible.... God is it terrible
I got into RCT in high-school when my sister had it on her computer and to this day, it has the most calming atmosphere out of all the other games I've played
Agreed
Roller Coaster Tycoon: When a man's absolutely incredible passion project turns into just a soulless brand owned by corporate shills.
Don't forget Parkitect which is a great love letter to the first two games.
You give him too much credit. Chris Sawyer still owns RCT, and chooses to keep renewing the license with Atari. He let this downward spiral happen.
@@deadturret4049 god, aren’t you disgusting, he literally made the ip including the first two games, no he deserves the credit stop being sour
@@juliet4093 oh yes im so digusting for pointing out that somebody is complicit in the destruction of a once great series
I mean this is standard practice for atari. Even back in the 80s they paid developers pennies and actually sued to keep them from putting their names in the credits of the games
Infogrames (before they rebranded to "Atari" and have since added back the Infogrames banner under this new company) isn't Atari, no matter how much they boast about Atari's legacy.
Rct2 is where it's at. Great game from Chris Sawyer. Even today it still is fun, with addition of OpenRCT, a mod adding tonns of features (such as unlimited items selection when creating a scenario lately) while still being true to the original.
RCT classic is obviously just the mobile port. While I don't play it often, it's stil fun. Controls a bit finiky, but overall fine for mobile as it is.
I also played RCT3 some time ago, it being very good with some elements that arent as charming as RCT2, but not that it made the game worse. Additions of pools was awesome! Always making big pools and stuff so this was a lot of different fun. I started off with waterpark tycoon but that game was not as fun as the waterpark addidtion to RCT3. RCT3 mobile could be good but I haven't played that to know.
I like to play sandbox mostly (in many games) so this was not available or I didn't know of it in waterpark tycoon. I normally stay away from tycoon games but RCT 1 & 2 & 3 being good.
Planet coaster is very good. It is arguably modern and fun to create parks in. The ride creator is good not for being the parts selection lego style builder of the RCT 1-3 games. It feels like NoLimitsCoaster if you know that game. That is not related to the RCT franchise. It's a very realistic coaster creation software (is this even a game?). You can make coasters that don't exist in real life with tons of custom tracks, cars, scenery and other stuff.
The option to build on a grid in olanet coaster (especially scenery) is possible if selected, so it doesn't become frustraiting to place scenerery that alligns exactly. When you want to build a house for example😝
All in all, the RCT2 game is the most nostalgic. RCT3 a modern 3D copy, planet coaster is a different game altogether, with elements that are very cool. Requires a more beefy pc though but all in all good.
Rest of the games are BS. Sorry. Have played RCT4 mobile but it was horrible. Worst ride creator ever. No chain lift pieces so trains always go up every hill if not fast enough, as if there was a chain lift on every hill.
I personally grew up in the dynasty of RCT3, I used to absolutely love that game to death and was probably the happiest kid on the planet when I unlocked the tycoon rank and had all the pre-made coaster layouts in Sandbox mode. I played the game for years and years and still occasionally pop in the discs to relive some of that nostalgia. now I notice how flawed the game is and how it's nothing compared to the original two, which I still play to this day with the help of OpenRCT2 (btw OpenRCT2 is a brilliant project and I recommend anyone to give it a try and relive some of that brilliant 90s RCT feeling)
There was always something so satisfying about getting the Tycoon rank for all the scenarios, was a really good game for completionists
I got my first copy of Roller Coaster Tycoon by sending in a cut-out from a Toaster Strudel box, plus $1.25, in the mail.
I still have the disk. One of my greatest memories are of playing that game for hours on end!
I got memory whiplash when you mentioned Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 was released in 2002. I've always associated the first two with growing up in the 90s, I couldn't imagine first playing the second one while in college, but that must have happened since 2 was the first version I played.
"Hi, my name is Todd and i´d like to pitch a game to you..."
"Get TF out!"
Did that guy even pass communcation 101?
That's like saying;
"I'm here to convince you that..."
In any essay.
I remember back when I was 12 and earned "computer time" on the weekend by doing well at swim meets and cashing in 6 hours on my RCT3 sandbox park. I played the original before this and got too sad when the long coaster in Katie's World would crash but had no qualms about destruction in RCT3, whether because older or just less in game penalty and no red text.. those were good games and everything since RCT3 hasn't been on my radar.
I feel like it's also worth mentioning OpenRCT2 now, which is an open source reverse-engineered version of RCT2 receiving bug fixes, updates and completely new content absent from the original RCT2 to this day. The OpenRCT2 development team even worked together with coaster manufacturers such as RMC to implement their new coaster models which were developed in the 2010s. However it's sad to hear that Chris Sawyer essentially sees OpenRCT2 as an IP violation.
That is sad considering you have to have RCT2 in order to even use opentRCT2 I mean it's basically modded RCT and I would rather give him money for the original games he created than pay atari for crap hoping he one day sees the money.
Chris Sawyer has never said anything about OpenRCT2. There was a post on the forums from some guy claiming to be his business manager, but nothing from Chris Sawyer himself. I doubt he really minds it very much, since he's retired from game development and has a rather strained relationship with Atari.
God damn, what a treasure of a TH-cam recommendation this video turned out to be. I can't wait to see what you make next, and I can't wait to dig into your past work. Please keep up the amazing work whenever creativity strikes!
I got RCT for my 11th birthday (I’m 32 now). I was so excited, I couldn’t fall asleep that night in anticipation of playing it the next day.
This is the best TH-cam video I've seen. So much depth, detail, and real emotion.
There are lots of such videos, about cod, about dbz and more
RCT3 was so far ahead of its time. I have very fond memories playing it for days on end. My little sister would pull up a chair next to me by the computer and pretend to be riding my coasters giving me feedback on them. It was a wonderful time.
Roller Coaster Tycoon: the original amusement park murder simulator.
I picked up OpenRCT2 a few days ago, and have been playing through the original parks. Last time I played was the original game, and my computer crashed whenever Evergreen Gardens grew over 900 guests. I might actually play through all of them this time around.
RCT2 and 3 made my childhood. Even when I was a teenager years ago, I was still playing RCT3 all the time, as a theme park enthusiast. Naturelly, I was expecting a new start for the license with RCTWorld. But now, it appears that the franchise is dead.
I now spend hours on Planet Coaster and Parkitect, as they are the true successors of this wonderful trilogy. I'm glad to see that passionate people are still doing such good games. Still, it's a sad ending for RCT.
Your video is awesome :)
To anybody who's enjoyed this video, I've published several new video essays since this one which you can easily find on the channel homepage!
RollerCoaster Tycoon is one of the most important series's to me, it's the main game that really got me into the world of gaming at all, so in that way it's the reason this channel even exists.
The original trilogy was critically acclaimed, but after that, the series kinda died down, and Atari began to stoop lower and lower when it came to their standards and even their morality in the case of RCT Adventures...
These are all thoughts I wanted to share for a long time, so I hope you wound up enjoying it! I'd appreciate hearing what you thought of it!
(And yes, I know RCT3 was later rereleased by Frontier considering I have a playthrough of it here. This hadn't happened yet when this video released, this is now the best way to play RCT3)
RCT3 Complete Edition Playthrough - th-cam.com/play/PLQtuKItcZ24rMk3p6NDHfcZXK33qh32FL.html
(Yes, I know I forgot RCT Joyride...)
(Yes I know about Open RCT2, I was focusing mostly on official titles here sorry)
(Yes I know about Parkitect, I literally mention it at the end of the video lul)
This video has just become the first video on the channel to hit 100k views, that's absolutely insane! There's 5 hours of TH-cam videos uploaded every minute, so thank you so much for taking time out of your day to watch this video!
Update as of June 10 2021, half a million views... That's... wow...
I want to add that they are trying to hide that RCT4 is truly RCT4. When I saw it on the storepage, it was just called "Rollercoaster Tycoon", and I literally thought ti was some terrible ripoff of the RCT franchise. To think it is an actual game that is actually part of the RCT franchise...
@Eli Suryana Well I mean buying a game from any 3rd party isn't exactly going to support the game creators anyway, meaning in terms of profit towards those involved in the game there is no difference between pirating and buying from some 3rd party
Regarding the whole "irregular use of proceeds" thing, that actually is a StartEngine boilerplate disclaimer. The whole site is configured to act as a "Producers"-style scam, and a lot (but not all!) of the projects have that same disclaimer. So Atari is being extra scammy here.
@MagiColorful Moon Wat? I forgot RCT Joyride, I didn't forgot RCT3D, it's discussed in this video
I definetly thing rct3 is better because u could download rides that are not in the game and u can download coasters that a more realistic
I grew up with Rollercoaster Tycoon and it was a lot of fun to play even though I never used to have any of the DLC's. I would always get stuck on some of the challenges but it was still so much fun to play and just create cool rides. I didn't actually know Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 existed until much later (read 2016) and Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 was discovered before that. I loved both Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 3 a lot and from the little bit of interaction with 2 liked the additions that they brought to the game.
Glad to hear that the game can be purchased again! And Planet Coaster is also pretty fun if not a lot more interesting in the way you build buildings and such :D
Great video and was pretty neat to learn about that.
When I met my wife in 2002, I was playing RCT2. Loved watching me play and it got her into PC gaming as she just came on consoles.
I thought I'd add in some context that was missed out when you were discussing the history of the games/company, which adds more explanation to why "Atari" are a company full of scumbags. I posted this on the old RollerCoaster Tycoon World forums, and it gained a lot of traction. I've tried searching for my post on the forums but it, or the thread, must have been deleted.
So basically, the original RCT was designed by Chris Sawyer and published by Hasbro. When RCT2 was released it was published by Infogrames, and what had happened between the two releases was that Infogrames wanted to expand through acquisition, and had bought out Hasbro. However, the deal made meant that Infogrames didn't have full control over Hasbro until around 2005. The same thing happened with Atari. Infogrames were in the process of buying Atari out whilst RCT3 was being developed by Frontier. At this point, Infogrames didn't only owned a small section of the RCT franchise, and Atari (Original), as well as Frontier still had substantial control over it. Once RCT3 had been released, Frontier went their separate way, and Atari was fully taken over by Infogrames. Infogrames, gaining the naming rights and everything, changed their name to Atari. So, even though they published all the monstrosities that followed RCT3 (RCTWorld and onwards), and bragged in their crowdfunding videos about earning billions over the years, they never actually did any of that shit. Hence why every single game released by Atari in the past decade has been utterly terrible. It's not the original Atari company, it's Infogrames working under the Atari name.
Nice bit of history for people there, it's interesting to know what shit goes on behind the scenes!
Wait, Atari is gone?
EnjoyCocaColaLight has been for about the 80’s.
@@smilerpunk922 But.. but dude wtf?!
Thanks for connecting the dots. It's mindblowing what a little power can do.
I had this game prior to the cereal box, but also got it in one of those as well. Probably the best thing to ever be included in a cereal box, ever.
24:21 i love how they didn't even bother matching the size of the image to the switches screen size
I picked up a triple pack of the disc versions of RCT 1-3. Was extremely disappointed when I couldn't get RCT3 on Steam.
At least I still have the discs, so I've got RCT3. Really enjoy playing it, despite how little I have done so lately.
You /could/ get RCT3 on steam a while ago. Sadly, however, Atari lost the license to distribute it for legal reasons (shady reasons on Atari's part, in fact. They apparently were not paying Frontier what they owed.)
If you had bought it on steam before they lost the rights, you'd have it on steam forever.
@@bradennelson2436 Kinda happy I bought it on Steam while it was there, much easier there carrying a Disk Drive with me with my laptop.
Dude you sounded like you were recounting from my own personal life when you talked about how rollercoaster tycoon had a big impact on your childhood. Including having a friend at school you'd talk about and play RCT with. 17 years later and I'll still pick up RCT2 triple thrill pack and remenise about my childhood. I wondered what happened to the new games, I never bothered to look into them. Shame what happened to one of my favorite childhood games.
How do you not have more views? This is amazing! Glad you were recommended to me.
TIL: Never passing money to Atari.
Never trust your money to a company that nationally devastate the game industry back in pre-NES era.
Honestly when Atari was being sued over the unpaid royalties, Frontier should have just offered to drop the lawsuit in exchange for ownership of the Roller Coaster Tycoon IP.
The original game is still amazing, I can't even count how many hours I've put into RCT over the years
im surprise you didnt mention openrct2
Yeah, the (Open)RCT2 community is still alive and well, suprisingly enough...
isnt done by the company but by people...nothing atari has done for it
OpenRCT2 is what I’d recommend playing over RCT Classic if you already own RCT1 & 2 since it’s basically the same as Classic but is a free mod that is still getting updated.
@@benuscore8780 Marcel Vos gets 130K views on his OpenRCT2 videos so very much alive and well.
@@Saucy-ws6jc it is a fantastic mod but not part of the official library of games... it just falls under rct2 ...but i was surprised as well
Kudos to Frontier for preserving RCT 3 through the complete edition after gaining the rights to it. They could've easily just replaced it with Planet Coaster and buried it as abandonware, but it's available and I've had my fun with it.
www.eurogamer.net/atari-has-bought-rollercoaster-tycoon-3-for-7m#:~:text=Bumper%20ride.&text=Video%20game%20publisher%20Atari%20has,around%20a%20fiver%20on%20Steam.)
23:30 "We know what we're doing" Didn't Atari caused the video game crash of 1983 with their godawful ET game?
The sad thing is that ET, after you've invested the time to learn how to play it, is more fun than most of the shovelware Infogrameess has been tossing out
Atari didn't solely cause the crash with its _ET_ game, but _ET_ was a product of the gold rush mentality that helped to cause the crash. Many developers were churning out subpar games and many companies were suddenly selling consoles. Home computers falling in price delivered yet another blow to console and console game makers.
The mind boggling part of it is that Atari didn't learn their lesson with ET. They rushed Roller Coaster Tycoon World to compete with planet coaster.