Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)
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Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)
#2[deleted]
Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)
#3> It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier.
Is the most interesting quote IMO. I often feel like productivity has gone down significantly in recent years, despite tooling and computers being more numerous/sophisticated/fast.
Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)
#4> It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier. Is the most interesting quote IMO. I often feel like productivity has gone down significantly in recent years, despite tooling and computers being more numerous/sophisticated/fast.
Expectations have gone up accordingly.
I think the real constraint must be market timing - as much work as people can do to meet the market (eg. Have the thing done by Christmas), that much will end up being done.
Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)
#5> it just sort of grew gradually and I felt it was better spending my time working on something that was fun to work on even if at the time it looked like there was no possibility of it becoming commercially worthwhile.
The indie ethos, before it was even a thing (or in the very early stages).
Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)
#6> It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier. Is the most interesting quote IMO. I often feel like productivity has gone down significantly in recent years, despite tooling and computers being more numerous/sophisticated/fast.
> it took several years and a small team of programmers to re-write the entire game in C++. It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier.
Expanding the quote because the word "team" is probably relevant to why it took longer to rewrite. At a certain scale there just is a huge advantage in everything being inside one head...
Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)
#7> It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier. Is the most interesting quote IMO. I often feel like productivity has gone down significantly in recent years, despite tooling and computers being more numerous/sophisticated/fast.
> it took several years and a small team of programmers to re-write the entire game in C++. It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier. Expanding the quote because the word "team" is probably relevant to why it took longer to rewrite. At a certain scale there just is a huge advantage in everything being inside one head...
Communication overhead is a big thing in teams. If you have a struggling team, halve the size. It's crazy how well that works. It's not the people but the number of them. Once your people are consumed by the day to day frustrations of having to communicate with everyone else and with all the infighting, posturing, etc. that comes with that, they'll get nothing done. Splitting teams is an easy to implement fix. Minimize the communication paths between the two (or more) teams and carve up what they work on and suddenly shit gets done.
In this case, they probably were trying to not just rewrite but improve the engine at the same time. That's a much more complicated thing to achieve. Especially when the original is a heavily optimized and probably somewhat hard to reason about blob of assembly. I'm guessing that even wrapping your head around that would be a significant job.
Amazingly enjoyable game btw. Killed quite a few hours with that one around 2000.
Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)
#8This game _is_ my childhood. Spent countless hours one summer doing every scenario, learning all the little easter eggs (Michael Schumacher on the Go karts anyone?).
The spirit of this game lives on now in OpenRCT2 [1] - which brings the game into the modern age and is backwards compatible with all the scenarios from the original. It even features multiplayer park building.
Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)
#9This game _is_ my childhood. Spent countless hours one summer doing every scenario, learning all the little easter eggs (Michael Schumacher on the Go karts anyone?). The spirit of this game lives on now in OpenRCT2 [1] - which brings the game into the modern age and is backwards compatible with all the scenarios from the original. It even features multiplayer park building. [1] https://openrct2.io/
You just made my day. Today is going to be really productive.
Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)
#10If you enjoy these types of stories from video game industry veterans, I recommend the My Perfect Console podcast.