The RollerCoaster Tycoon Review

System Requirements:
Minimum:
• Operating System: Windows ’95
• CPU: 200 MHz Pentium 1
• RAM: 32 MB
• Hard drive space: 167 MB
• Optical disc drive: 4 × speed CD-ROM type
• Video card: DirectX 3 or Glide compatible (3Dfx) type with 2 MB of VRAM. (DirectX 5 comes with the game.)
My Recommendation:
A 500 MHz Pentium 2 or Pentium 3 CPU, and more drive space for screen shots and save files. A newer dual core or multi-core CPU is probably better, because the game will always use all the free oomph of a single CPU core.

Windows XP and later versions of Windows NT require a patch. The game will usually run fine in Windows 7 using just the 256 colours setting. The game will also run without problems on copies of Windows that are installed in VirtualBox.

RollerCoaster Tycoon is one of those brilliantly addictive games that will have you at your computer for hours at a time without even realising it. There are a whole bunch of amusement parks which either need to be built up from pretty much nothing, or overhauled into something a lot more successful. Each park has a goal as well, such as having a certain amount of guests and park rating at the end of a particular season, or perhaps a decent company value.
You can choose whether you want measurements in imperial or metric, and various currencies. As I’m an Aussie, I’ll be using metric with dollars and cents.
You will get money to start using, but it’s a loan from the bank which needs to be repaid, and you get charged interest on it too. So you’ll want to get in some money making rides from the start to eventually pay back the loan. You can only borrow up to a certain amount as well. Loan repayments can only be done in $1000 blocks, so get ready when your cash gets up around $900.
Not all the rides are available from the beginning. You’ll need to pay to research new ideas. You can however choose what kind of things to look into, such as roller coasters, thrill rides, shops, scenery, and ride improvements. You also get to choose whether to spend no money on research, a minimal, normal or maximum amount. Some simple rides only have one basic design, but others can be customised. Roller coasters can be built to your own designs, so long as all the pieces fit together, and stuff doesn’t crash. You can also do certain custom water rides and go-kart tracks. The go-karts are super popular, and if you have an exciting track, people will pay the initial price for an age. Their other bonus, is that they have a low nausea rating, so more people will be inclined to have a go. Queue times can be pretty long though, so don’t make it something like 10 laps. Any rides you design can be saved for future use, however you can’t save a sample picture like the ones that come with the game. Usually a ride’s settings will be saved too, such as the colouring and operation methods. In most cases, you can do a test run of a ride before you open it. That way you can check to see if it’s working as expected, or if it needs adjustments.
As well as keeping the guests amused, you really need to provide toilets, otherwise people will leave the park. You wouldn’t see this happening in real life in Australia, but you can actually charge money for the latrines. I usually make it 10¢ and no more. If you only have a couple of loos, they can eventually make a profit! But like everything, there is a running cost, so you’ll want to keep your income above that, especially for rides. When you 1st open the park, it’s best to charge nothing until you start adding in attractions. Then make it about $1 and work up a little bit at a time as you go. You can charge about $1 for the merry-go-round initially, but over time, people will lose interest, and refuse to pay that much, and you’ll end up reducing it down to 20¢ after a couple of years. People will comment that your park entrance fee is cheap, if it really is, but don’t get too greedy. You still want them to pay for other things once they get in.
If you need to get a certain amount of people in by a certain date, promotions are the way to go. You can offer half priced & free entry vouchers, plus coupons for free food & drinks, and also have advertising campaigns. Offering freebies and half priced stuff is usually the best way to get people in.
People like to eat and drink, so there are a range of shops you should put in. These include an ice cream stall, one for burgers, pizzas, chips, fairy floss, (or candy floss as the Brits seem to call it,) drinks and even popcorn! They should’ve done hotdogs & lollies too. You can name all of these what you like.
Nobody likes stepping in vomit, (unless you’re warped,) so you’ll need handymen to clean the park up on a constant basis. You can set a working area for them, plus whether they sweep, empty bins, water the gardens or mow the grass. You’ll only want them mowing when you’ve got a bunch of other guys doing the other tasks and money to burn. Then again some parks don’t have grass. Even at the best of times, it’s wise to go on a puke patrol, and pick up your little dudes and drop them down in problem areas. Your park can get awards for being tidy, beautiful, safe and of great value. If you’re lucky, you might get an award for the park with the best roller coasters too. Other staff you can have, are security guards, mechanics and entertainers. You really need mechanics to inspect and repair the rides. After a while they’ll wear out, and over time they get more and more unreliable.
One of the worst breakdowns you can have on a roller coaster is a station brakes failure when it has more than 1 train. They can crash and explode and kill people, and that’s not good for its reputation. If you have other poorly designed rides, people might get launched off. It’s also possible for people to drown, so be careful.
A park with this reputation is bound to be appealing.
This is one plop-ular toilet! That’s something like 20 people per minute, or about 1 person every 3 seconds.
Pokey Park is really cramped, but you can purchase more land nearby and construction rights to get to it.
Thunder Rock will have you looking under the ground quite a bit, and rotating the view. This is one of the more unique parks.

Sometimes you might get interested in your guests, so you can monitor what they’re doing, as well as name them. You can pick up anybody who isn’t on a ride, and put them somewhere else, which is useful if they’re really hungry, thirsty, or in need of a dunny. Although they may miss what you’re aiming for and just keep walking.
Souvenirs are nice, and if you have shop research enabled, you can get places selling balloons and cuddly toys. Some rides also have a special photo section, so people can purchase a photo of themselves. For parks where it rains a lot, having an information kiosk is great to get people to buy umbrellas. Plus maps are popular too.
Putting trees in around rides is a plus — it increases the excitement level, and that’s always something you want. Rides that are next to each other, or even run through each other can have this effect too. When you’re building paths, sometimes you just want one to run between 2 particular points, but a ride or 2 might be in the way, with it too high to go over. Well, go under! Yep — you can have tunnels below the ground level to get people from one place to another.
One of the parks — Rainbow Valley — doesn’t let you make any changes to the landscape due to local authority restrictions, so this one requires a lot of thought for setting things out, and placing paths. Sometimes you’ll have to put them into weird places in order to work. Fitting in any of the pre-designed roller coasters is nearly impossible, but I did get the “Mini Miner” one in.
When you complete the goals of all the parks, a bonus Mega Park becomes available, and the goal for this is just to have fun! You get a shed load of money for it, it’s absolutely huge, and I think you get every ride and attraction there is from the beginning. This is a great opportunity to make up new roller coaster designs to use in any of the other parks if you start them over.
You can use the map to quickly zip from one area of a park to another by clicking on it. The yellow rectangle will show you the current location.
By selecting a person, a little window will show you what they’re up to. In the case of staff, you can also adjust where they work with the blue footprints, sack them with the bin, adjust what they do in the tab with the hand, and see what they’ve done on the tab with the paper. The pincers will pick them up, and the red arrows will move the main view to where they are.

When you complete the goal for a park, you get to enter in your name for the scenario chart, and all the guests who’ve bought a balloon will release them to celebrate, and everybody will turn to face you and clap. It’s a good idea to make a save file just before the goal is reached, such as on the last day. That way if you need to re-install the game at any stage, you can just reload the save and that park will be completed. You can copy over your old files and stuff in some other method, but from what I recall, it’s quite awkward.
Moving around in the game is fairly easy. You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard, optionally move your mouse cursor to the edge of the screen, or best of all, just right click and drag. The view can be rotated in 90° steps, and there are 2 further out zoom levels as well.
The game will run at 640 × 480 pixels, 800 × 600 & also 1024 × 768 pixels in Windows XP & Windows 7. However, it was also possible to run it at other resolutions, such as 1152 × 864 pixels, when I had Windows ME, so it may vary. You can also choose a “window mode”, and stretch things to more custom resolutions. But considering that everything remains the same size, and that you just see more at higher resolutions, you might want to settle on a setting that’s optimal for the size of your monitor. You don’t want to be squinting. I like it at 1024 × 768 pixels in a full screen mode. That way you can fit enough stuff in, and things aren’t too small to be seen.
Screen shots are saved in PCX format, but even though they’re in 8 bit colour, you can get more space saved by converting them to PNG. A program like IrfanView can batch process a bunch of pictures in a flash. (Even my trusty old copy of Corel Photo-Paint 8, which is older than the game, can do a batch conversion. )
Save files are just over ½ a MB usually, depending on the size of the park, and rides are very small, at just a few hundred bytes, unless you have a very big and complex roller coaster. You will need the CD in your drive to play this, and thankfully this is a game you can backup to a new CD without trouble either.
Paradise Pier has no land. It’s all on the water. Construction space here is limited, and you really need to cram things in.
The finances section shows you what you’re spending money on, what you’re making money on, and promotions too.

Here are some comments on the various parks:

Forest Frontiers
The very 1st park. Unlike the later stages, you need to complete the goal for this by the end of October, year 1. The land is nearly all flat, so building stuff is very easy. You can purchase more land to the right, and access a pond to set up a boats ride. The land is fairly cheap, so buying a strip down there isn’t too much of a worry. There’s also room down there for a few more smaller rides, like a chairlift, some food stalls and a toilet.
Dynamite Dunes
Here in the desert is a mine, and appropriately, a pre-built mine train roller coaster in it. There are a couple of large peaky areas, but pretty much flat land in the rest of the place. This is an easy to do park, with plenty of room for good roller coasters and a lot of small rides. You can buy more land to expand further too. Be sure to add in cool water rides and an ice cream shop, because this place is hot.
Leafy Lake
An easy going park, obviously with a huge lake. There’s also a section of land up the hill, on the opposite side of the entrance, which has plenty of room for about 4 roller coasters. You can buy a little bit more land, but not a great deal. The goal here is to have a park rating of at least 600, with 500 or more guests by the end of year 3. If you do well enough, you should be able to get close to double that amount of people. You’ll probably want 2 or 3 eating areas, and perhaps about 4 toilets, due to the size and layout of the place.
Diamond Heights
This park already has a bunch of great rides present, but you need to double the park’s value by the goal date, rather than having a certain amount of guests. This is an okay one, but not really one of my favourite scenarios.
Evergreen Gardens
This is the 2nd biggest park, next to the Mega Park, but the most beautiful. You will often be getting most beautiful park awards. As there’s so much land, it’s a good idea to reduce paths to just the entry region until things get up and going. There’s naturally tonnes of room for a wide variety of big roller coasters and other small rides. You will also need a few food areas, and a handful of dunnies, so people can poop, piddle and puke. Speaking of puke, you’ll need a large amount of handy men for this joint, security guards and mechanics. You may even want all 3 styles of entertainer costumes being worn.
I had 7 toilets in this park during mid-2024, and the guests were still complaining that they couldn’t find them.
Bumbly Beach
This has quite a British seaside fairground feeling, especially with the style of the local houses surrounding the park. A few rides already exist here, including a great wooden roller coaster. You can buy construction rights into the sea, so it’s a good spot to set up the boats, some food shops, and other water related attractions. I like to set up a monorail ride from one side of the park to the other, and run the track at the border with the houses. Most of the land is pretty flat, and there’s plenty of room for more roller coasters, a good go-karts track and heaps of small rides too.
Trinity Islands
Construction here is restricted pretty tightly to the few islands, although you can get quite a handful of roller coasters into the space. It’s a good idea to join the last island up to the more central one with a path across the water, to improve the flow of guests and staff. I built a monorail track under the island in September, 2024, so that saved some room. That said, I already had another roller coaster above, so it needed to be avoided. Even though the space can seem tight in places, with proper planning, you can make this park work really well.
Katie’s Dreamland
You’re taking over this park, as it has rides present to begin with. There’s a massive mine train roller coaster called The Storm, that goes to the end of the available land, pretty much, and goes up to an enormous height, before sending guests back down at over 90 km per hour. In the middle of this, is more expensive land that you can buy, but it’s best to leave that until you have plenty of money, or only need a thin section of it. Other rides already present, are a small go-karts track, a small miniature railway with 2 stations that are a bit close together, a swinging ship, a suspended single rail roller coaster, and an underground roller coaster with a huge queue line, called Runaway Plumber. Because it’s underground, it’s also popular in wet weather.
So anyway, the income from the initial rides is pretty good to get you started. You’ll also notice that there’s a portion of land with construction rights over the top of Runaway Plumber, but you won’t be able to build much more than paths up there. The place does get a bit of rain, so be sure to have some indoor attractions.
Pokey Park
The initial area for this is almost too small to do anything with, but once you buy the construction rights to build a path over the road, and then buy more land on the other side, you can start getting in a few roller coasters. You can probably get 3 or 4 in there, depending on their size, the boat ride, go-karts, and a few smaller attractions. This is another joint where you need a particular value at the goal date, rather than a certain amount of guests.
You start with land taking up only 3 360 m², making this smaller than Paradise Pier. In August, 2024, the extra land I bought, brought it up to 12 020 m², but there was still a bit more available. I got in 4 roller coasters in the extra space, 2 of which were pretty small, plus the go-karts, an iffy river rapids ride, the boat hire, top spin, and the 3D cinema.
White Water Park
This place is a doddle. With the water rides already in place, you’ll be making money from the beginning, so adding extra stuff isn’t too much of an issue, since you’ll eventually be hauling that cash in. You get 31 670 m² with no additional land to buy. In my October 2024 play, I got in 8 roller coasters, some of which were only small, for a total of 43 attractions. The water slide can be a pain in the bum though, because every time it breaks down, it usually cocks up in some fashion, requring you to reset it.
The goal is to get 900 guests in by the end of October, year 3 with a rating of @ least 600. I could do that in April, year 2 with a rating over 900! So you don’t exactly need to worry about promotions to bring in more guests if you’re doing it right.
Millennium Mines
Thankfully the goal for this place as an amusement park is less than 1000 years. It starts with a $4 entry fee and a train ride that tours the old mine area. I like to ditch the entry fee, and knock the price up on this. Once you start getting a few roller coasters in, this place is a real money maker, with heaps of room. The landscape is a bit uneven, but it’s pretty good to work with. You may need to change things and add more water if you want the boats ride somewhere, as the only spots with water are pretty small. Some time ago, I blew way too much money on landscaping and adding in water, so leave this until you have more cash. It can rain a bit here too, so be sure to have a few under cover rides, like the dodgems, haunted house, merry-go-round, etc.
Karts & Coasters
There are only wooden roller coasters and 2 go-kart tracks in this park, but they’re really good. The land is thickly covered in trees, so you’ll need to remove a lot to get more new rides in. This is one of my less favourite parks, because it’s a bit hard to see what you’re doing with all the plants. If you make the scenery transparent, it makes things a bit clearer though. One of the go-kart tracks has a very long exit path too, so it’s a good idea to add another path that’s closer to it, so that mechanics don’t have to take a long route to get in to fix it.
Mel’s World
Things start out with a bunch of great roller coasters from the beginning, so making money in this park is pretty quick, which will allow you to build other great roller coasters without much of a waiting period. There’s also a lot of land, so adding in a lot of rides is no problem. This is definitely a fun park.
Mystic Mountain
While this looks like a regular kind of park, it does have some limitations you need to be aware of. The amount of land you get isn’t overly huge, and while you can expand it to more than twice the size, the extra land costs $90 per block! On top of that, you can only borrow up to $15 000 from the bank. It also rains quite frequently. So you’ll want to plan things well, squeeze in as many roller coasters as you can that make good money, then fill in the gaps with smaller rides, and only buy more land when you really need it and can afford it. Start with one big roller coaster that will appeal to a lot of people, then maybe add in a skinny, open ended powered launch one that hauls in the money quickly. Add a lot of covered rides too, for rainy conditions. I think I got about 6 roller coasters in here on my October 2024 play of this, a small go-karts track partially under one of them, and several other small rides.
Pacific Pyramids
This is one of my favourite parks. The goal is to have at least 1000 guests with a park rating of at least 600 by the end of year 4. The land is a mixture of flat areas and low, hilly dunes. It doesn’t rain too much, and there’s plenty of affordable extra land to expand the joint to a much larger size. The joint is Egyptian styled, with a few pyramids, and an elevated section with some sphinxes. You can squeeze the ferris wheel up there with them, and have paths leading up to it. I often like to put a food court kind of area on the hill that has the tunnel leading back down.
Crumbly Woods
This joint has already been running for about 14 years, so the rides are getting a bit long in the tooth, and people are bored with them. Even slapping a $1 entrance fee on the park will get a message saying it’s too much for guests to pay! I would recommend leaving the entrance fee as free, and getting what money you can out of the older attractions to build up money for your new rides. You might still get a few cents out of the older ones by the goal date, but you’ll need to look at if their running costs are going to be too much against their puny income. That said, the roller coasters present do look really impressive. It’s a shame that you may have to dump them for something else.
Paradise Pier
This time you only have construction rights on the water, so landscaping is not permitted. This is a very cramped space of 9 410 m², so small rides will need to go in right next to each other. It’s vital to save room for a few roller coasters! My best play of this was October 2024. I got in 31 attractions, 4 of which were roller coasters. One was custom made to fit, and the other 3 were ones I’d made before. Place your boats ride on the outside, so that guests can row off into the sea, outside of the boundary in which you’re allowed to build. There is a bit of room beyond the paths, but it’s not much. Place your toilet building right in the middle. You’ll only need the one then, and if you charge 10¢ per piddle, this will really make some good profit too! Remember: Too many toilets are a DRAIN on your money. Unless you charge some ridiculous price.
Lightning Peaks
What makes this park a bit of a misery, is the huge amount of rain it gets, and the very hilly landscape. There’s a very thin hill, up from the entramce, and 2 chairlifts already present. The area’s supposed to be popular with hikers, but now you have the chance to make something more out of it. You can fit some slender stuff in at the entrance ramp area, like part of a go-karts track, the ferris wheel, and some shops. It is possible to make this into a successful amusement park though, and it’s certainly not as painful as Rainbow Valley.
Ivory Towers
The previous management of this park really must’ve been up in their ivory towers, because they had no idea what was going on at ground level. The place is a dump, with large amounts of rubbish, vandalism & vomit. So the 1st thing you’ll need to do is up the handy men count, and get the place tidy. There are a few good rides to begin with, but you’ll want to slap more in. There’s a bit of room, but not a huge amount. You’ll also find a path that goes nowhere, so it can be best to cut this off until you need that area.
Rainbow Valley
The park that would make any player groan at the thought of having to tackle it. While you get a good, wide amount of room along the waterway, the local council has forbidden any kind of landscaping. No changing the land height or removing of trees. Considering this is loaded with trees, it makes it a right pain. You have to build paths in all kinds of weird directions to join things up. You can however, build underground in places, so not all hope is lost. I actually got one of my best go-kart tracks ever, designed to the landscape of this park. You can can just get one of the wooden wild mouse roller coasters fitted in at one end, but a lot of stuff you will need to custom design. Don’t get any notions of putting your own trees in — you’re not allowed to take them out either!
Thunder Rock
This is pretty much the last park to complete, before the Mega Park, but it’s not actually that difficult. It starts with a chairlift that brings guests to the top level of the rock, and a path also leading up, since people will need to walk if they can’t afford the ride, or if it breaks down. I like to start with a big roller coaster on the top, and a smaller, powered launch one also, to make money. Use the upper space for your roller coasters, and keep the ground level for other rides. You can’t develop downward any further than the ground level either. Despite not having any water, you do get the boat ride for this park, so if you want it, keep a little space at the top, and add your own water in for it. As time goes on, add extra underground paths to the top on the other sides to allow guests and staff to move more quickly between locations. In terms of ground level rides, consider putting entry and exit paths underground, if you want to save some space. Make room also for a path to surround the entire ground level fence.
Mega Park
As I already said, this is the big reward for completing all the other parks. The place looks like a kind of testing stage for when they made the game, because there are a lot of odd drops and things in the landscape. The joint takes up 140 350 m², so it’s almost the entire maximum size of the land. You also get a thin strip of land with construction rights outside the entrance, which is good for a transport ride to pass through. Other than that, there’s no extra land available, because it’s already huge! The joint can be a bit overwhelming to begin with. You’ll be like: “Hmm. How am I going to start this thing off?” The 1st thing I like to do is break off the paths to just keep it a small area to begin with. You want to keep the guests near the entrance, and not wandering off into unused spaces, because otherwise they won’t go to the rides. They’ll just be walking. Once you need more room for another ride, connect paths up as you go, and break ones further along. After a few game years, you’ll probably open the park right up as it begins to fill with attractions. You may need 5 or 6 eating areas, and potentially 7 toilets, due to the size, plus around 15 handy men, 12 mechanics and 8 security guards, as time goes on. There is room here to fit pretty much every ride there is. I had about 5 transport rides in October 2024, 4 of which came together towards the middle of the joint. It’s good for trying out new roller coaster designs, but you’ll still want to have other rides making money, even though you do get a huge maximum loan of something like $40 000, I think it is. On my recent play, I had just over $30 000 with no loan, when I called it quits on year 8, but in the past, when I charged an entry fee, I had about $140 000 or so.

All up, RollerCoaster Tycoon is a classic, and still great to play now in 2024. I got my copy around the 2nd of May, 2003, but I’d played a friend’s copy before that. Anyway, there are loads of ways to tackle the parks, and you’ll want to spend hours on it at a time. Once parks get busy, so will you! There’s so much stuff to oversee, you won’t have time to stop for long.

Graphics: Lots of little details, but it’s pretty much all 2D sprite action. Don’t expect super fancy effects, like changing lighting conditions, cloud shadows and reflections. It’s well done for a game of this type, and it’s really out-shone by the addictiveness of it. The menu style is sensible as well, and you do get a few Windows related dialogue boxes for naming and saving stuff. 80%
Sound: The fairground organ style music really suits the game, and there are loads of other noises, like people laughing, being sick, cheering and screaming. Sometimes you hear voices that sound like: “Loogin googin” and something that sounds uncannily like: “I’m a trainee.” There’s also rain, thunder, and even stuff for changing the landscape, like water noises, dirt and plenty of ride effects. You also get the audio positioned in stereo to where you are. 90%
Animation: The detail in the animations is impressive, considering how tiny some stuff is. People will bend over to puke, they walk smoothly and there are neat staff animations too. Some rides have noticeable changes in the animation, where there aren’t quite enough frames to make it perfectly smooth. Mostly very good though. 85%
Playability: Easy to play when you know how. You can change key assignments too. 90%
Lastability: There’s a truckload of stuff you can do, including things to carry on with when you park does reach its goal. If you like landscaping as well, there’s plenty keep you hooked for months. 95%
Overall: A superbly made game that you should at least try once in your life. And then there’s RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 and the expansion packs as well! 92%

You can also get RollerCoaster Tycoon for the XBOX.

Name a character Chris Sawyer, and he’ll stop to take a lot of photos. If you have the go-karts track, name a person Damon Hill or Michael Schumacher, and they'll be super good, and most likely win. If you name a person Simon Foster, they’ll crack out an easel and paint pictures. There are other names you can try too, like: Melanie Warn, John Wardley and Katie Brayshaw.

• Check out a bunch of my rides I made here. (Last update: 15th of January, 2025.) You may find some dodgy ones in there too, which seemed to be good in some parks, but sucked in others. There are a lot of go-kart tracks, and wooden wild mouse ones, but as of September, 2024, there should be a few others. Some may require ride improvements to allow for their track pieces or choices of train types. None of them require expansion packs. All of them are for the original base version of the game.

• Try out 10 unique parks that I made. These are just loaded as save files, and there’s no particular goal, except to have fun. But in the “read me” file I do mention various outcomes to try for. These are for the base version of the game. I only have the Windows XP patch, so hopefully they should work without any other 3rd party patches. Click here to see what you’re going to get. This picture shows 6 of the parks. The 6th one, Park In Da Nile, has rides, but not all the ones shown in the screen shot. The 7th one is called The Zig Zag Railway, because I was thinking of the place in the Blue Mountains. This probably looks nothing like it, but it’s still an interesting park, with lots of room. My 8th one is called Sun Nova Beach, and the 9th one is my Mini Park. I think there was a small one officially in one of the add-on packs, but I’m not sure. This one of mine only has a space of 5000 m², so you can fill it up by the time you get to year 2. Number 10 is The Intersection, which goes across 2 roadways. Anyway, save often, and let me know if your game crashes. From my own tests, these should be okay.
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