The SECRET of Rollercoaster Tycoon (I had no idea)

I can't believe I didn't know this until recently! Rollercoaster Tycoon is one of the greatest games of all time, and I had no idea. Games back then had to be PERFECT. Programming them in C would have limited the amount of features in the game. Chris Sawyer wrote the game ENTIRELY in Assembly, which is absolutely wild.

[Sevenhens]

For context, console games before the PS1, N64, and Sega Saturn were written in mostly assembly (before 1995 basically). But PC games had a head start with higher level languages like C (like Wolfenstein in 1992 and Doom in 1993), so Roller Coaster Tycoon releasing in 1999 written in pure ASM is crazy.

[avarnyx]

he wasn't the head programmer
he was the only programmer

[thatsalot]

You know how big of a chad he is when c is too slow for him.

[thesheq]

Fun tidbits- there’s a large group of people who still play this game and are updating it for 2022 world. A new save format has been introduced, dev tools, etc

[lonelyshpee]

When you can beat C at writing optimal ASM code, you know you've made it as a programmer.

[youruncle]

Chris Sawyer was a nutcase he absolutely wanted his games running on all cheap computers god bless that maniac

[wiserdivisor]

> LeT Me tEL yUo e sECriT
> Says the most well-known fact about RCT

[humble]

Learned this about a week ago. Still blows my mind that he actually did it.

[jan-lukas]

Even today in very specific cases you have to write a single function or so on assembly to get maximum performance, but it's crazy that back then the entire project had to be done in assembly to get good enough performance

[programinc]

C is slow... when you hear that, you know something is up.

[Airland_combat]

I was born in 2003. I remember playing this still. Just proves you don't gotta be a 90s baby to remember this absolute masterpiece. My brother funny enough as it is. Got me hooked on rollercoaster tycoon. See, he'd come down in the summertime. I'd get up when my Mom went to work and my brother would be asleep still. I'd end up sitting down watching TV or putting on a movie. I even played games like COD WAW final fronts on PS2. But, besides the point. I watched him play this and he walked me through it. Then I basically got hooked on it. From there on. I got hooked on to similar games, sim city for instance. My Dad had sim city 4. Great games some of these early 2000s late 90s games were. Simple, yet fun.

[sethate]

I remember being amazed by how little this game needed to run. Lots of action being processed very efficiently. This makes sense. More games should be done this way now.

[SameAsAnyOtherStranger]

Does C et al write to assembly or straight to binary? If it writes to assembly, I would think having C compile an assembly program that could be parred down to less general instructions and appropriated only the memory resources needed would be...easier.

[RadenVijaya]

Pentium II starts at 300MHz, not 66. Pentium 1 released in 1994 cmiiw, and in 1999, Pentium 3 already existed at 500MHz

[dianathomas]

That's amazing. I had no idea. We love all the RCT's.

[themannyzaur]

This series is a hit with the boys
Always something to learn on this channel and i look forward to the next one 🔥🔥🔥

[LoperamideTV]

The true last boss of game programming.

[Cleanblue]

Would you get such an advantage still today, or have C compilers been optimized to a point where it is unreasonable to try to outperform it?

[CC.unposted]

I can write basic programs
Only
In assembly and im bigginer

The problem is that it can easily make your system crash so I use VM from Orcal because it's fast
But I can't find one OS which can work on low Power
Like I can only give 2 cores to it rest for meso my other programs run smoothly

[Gadgets_Repair_And_Simulators]

"GPUs didn't really exist"
They did exist and they were glorious.