A RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 superfan has created what is believed to be the longest rollercoaster ever built in the game — and it’s so long that even a googol can’t be used to describe how many years it takes to ride it.
Self-described “friendly neighbourhood RollerCoaster Tycoon nerd,” Marcel Vos, uploaded one of the most fascinating videos on a video game I’ve ever watched: The Googol Coaster – Longest Ride in RollerCoaster Tycoon. This dense, 41-minute explanation of how the rollercoaster was created is full of mind-bending twists and turns, revealing Marcel Vos to be not just a RollerCoaster Tycoon expert, but a math whiz.
I’m not going to pretend to fully understand the numbers behind the ride, but the gist is that the maximum park size allowed in the vanilla version of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 (the setup must work in vanilla RCT2 — that’s one of Vos’ rules) is packed with “super modules,” each carefully designed to multiply the final ride time by an enormous factor. “At some point, this was on my mind so much that I couldn’t sleep, and laid awake until 3am trying to solve the issue I was working on earlier that day in my head,” Vos says, revealing just how much time and energy went into his creation.
As with real life rollercoasters, Vos designed his video game rollercoaster with guests in mind. “The main problem is that guests are little bastards and do not like to cooperate,” Vos says, explaining in detail how he manipulated the park design to force each guest to behave in exactly the way he needed them to, following paths down to the second, and getting on only the rides he wants them to, when he wants them to.
Vos does this by using the guest’s very stats against them. Nausea level and ride tolerance are key here; Vos can force a guest with a certain nausea and tolerance to choose a ride over another, thus following a certain path. Meanwhile, he must maintain each guest’s happiness level so they don’t leave the park, but also their energy so they never stop working their way through his neverending concoction. And let’s not forget that each guest needs to stay well fed. In one brilliant section, Vos details how he manipulates guests into sitting down at a bench to recover energy by forcing them to buy a toffee apple from a toffee apple stall placed next to the benches, because guests will always sit down to eat or drink if there is a bench nearby. Genius!
With the “super module” designed for maximum ride time, all that was left was to fill a park with them — 100 of them — all synchronized up. Each super module delays the ride time by a factor of 174, which, well… it makes for a very, very long ride. Vos says that friends he showed his park to told him it looked like a motherboard or a computer chip, which made sense, because it’s “by far the most complicated setup I have ever built in any video game ever.”
