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- Fav Game - Jul 15th, 2022 - Source: Morning Brew [link](https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/rollercoaster-tycoon-popular-for-reason) - ‘RollerCoaster Tycoon’ is still popular—for good reason - Long before gamers could lick flowers in _Goat Simulator_, _RollerCoaster Tycoon_set the gold standard for simulation games. By taking _SimCity_’s financial strategizing and combining it with the sheer joy of building a theme park from the cotton candy stand up, it became the bestselling PC game of 1999. 23 years later, the game still has a rabid fanbase and its players continue to push the boundaries of how pukey a park’s footpaths [can get](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd-8mxuvLjs&t=189s)—not just because of nostalgia, but because the game itself is a hyperrealistic design marvel: Actual roller coaster engineers [told the Brew](https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/what-it-s-like-to-build-a-theme-park-from-8-industry-professionals) they and their colleagues play it._ RollerCoaster Tycoon_ was programmed by one designer, Chris Sawyer, over the course of two years almost entirely using a rudimentary coding language called x86 Assembly—a feat that still makes coders’ [heads explode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=expgMekxlvU). **The game was able to run its complex code on weak hardware with few bugs, and none that halted the gameplay.** And the final product didn’t just run smoothly on your family’s virus-infected IBM, it [obeyed the laws](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bkfarl/roller_coaster_tycoon_had_physics_so_accurate/) of physics so precisely that one Redditor said, “The game wasn’t just a game, it was almost an Operating System.” One example: A YouTuber [made a coaster](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QotjNlDr0WU) in 2019 that takes patrons over 800,000 in-game years to complete. Numerous other players have created similarly torturous and creative coasters in recent years…all in a game that Sawyer [told The Ringer](https://www.theringer.com/2019/4/1/18286916/rollercoaster-tycoon-game-20th-anniversary-legacy) was “quite a big risk at the time” to release because it was considered too niche.—_JW_