Rollercoaster Tycoon was the last of an era, not a sudden burst of genius.
Before Doom (1993), almost all games were assembly. Doom was a shock to the industry. You could now write a high performance, multiplatform, sophisticated game in a compiled language ©. When I say multiplatform, I don’t just mean how it was ported to everything later. It was developed on NextStations first. DOS was the first port. So it proved all of the above immediately on release.
We take for granted that C is performant now, but that wasn’t obvious until optimizing compilers got good and someone tried.
Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999) is the last notable title that used ASM. It’s impressive in many ways, but it wasn’t as much of a standout as it seems now. Six years earlier to its release, that was just how games were done.
It’s notable that the only port of Rollercoaster Tycoon was the original Xbox, which was also x86. Nobody wants to rewrite it for anything else.
You couldn’t pay me to write a game in C today. Our expectations of what games have to be are sky high today. You cant get away with the productivity lost writing in c, maybe c++ since its supported by a number of engines. But, im personally not aware of a single engine that uses C. I tried my hand at writing a game without an engine, and it was a hot mess. Writing low level code to make a button with text, no thanks…been there done that, in my game, you could bump into trees and get stuck…not very fun in my opinion, and thats after a few months of writing code.
Since it wasn’t mentioned yet: https://openrct2.io/
And most startlingly: no git
Edit: y’all’re right, version control is for wimps. What’s life without some adrenaline?
./src ./src_1998_11_05_added_people_swimming ./src_1998_11_06_added_death_mechanics ./src_1998_11_06_0_removed_swimming_lol
