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.”
Perhaps the most fun part of the video is the bit where Vos works out just how long his rollercoaster would take to ride in real life years. The number is so big it’s impossible to wrap your head around. It turns out a googol (10 to the power of 100) is nowhere close. Vos ends up thinking about the time it would take in terms of atoms in the universe, or how long it would take to rebuild the universe if you extracted a single atom from it each year. Things start to go a bit weird here, but it’s a lot of fun to try to keep up.
How does the ride end? Perhaps in the only way it could: with the carriage flying off the track and blowing up.
The comments on Vos’ video are a lot of fun, too. “Genuinely speechless,” said one viewer. “I can’t even call this ‘hell’ because the guests aren’t truly suffering, as they are kept within the threshold of necessary happiness. I think you could say you created the ultimate dehumanizing coaster, completely stripping away from the guests every possible recourse to genuine agency, even their own internal feelings.
“The only truly human moment they experience after entering this is when they die approaching the end of the road.”
“It’s darkly humorous that the guests have gone from merely being victims of the perpetual torment machine to an active key component in their own suffering,” said another.
“My favorite part of this whole endeavor is that despite the enormous effort to use every possible square inch of space at maximum efficiency, because of the minimum turn radius of the coaster there will always be room for Mr. Bones in the center,” another said.
RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 has long been a playground for incredible — and nightmarish — video game achievements. But, for me, Marcel Vos has created the greatest.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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