Thread by @nateliason

I absolutely loved playing Roller Coaster Tycoon growing up.

And only recently found out it was an absolutely incredible video game development project.

👇👇👇

First off, it was wildly successful.

It was the best selling game of 1999 when it was released, and in 2000 as well as 2001 it was the second best selling game of the year (both years behind The Sims).

By 2002, it had sold 4 million copies.

It's the 32nd best selling PC video game of all time, beating Age of Empires, Diablo, and SimCity.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_b…

The entire game was developed by one guy: Chris Sawyer.

He coded it all himself in his home in a small village in Scotland.

And it gets crazier: he coded 99% of it in ASSEMBLY!

Assembly!

Java and other significantly easier languages existed at the time, I have no idea why he did this to himself.

Then the entire graphics and design end of it was also done by one person: Simon Foster.

They did all of the initial play testing with friends and family in Chris's village.

Hasbro didn't enter the picture until it was almost done to help polish it off.

Now, yes, there have been lots of great single-person-game-creations since then.

DOTA comes to mind.

But Icefrog didn't code DOTA in Assembly. He had the WC3 engine to get him most of the way there.

Same with other new games being built in Unity, Unreal, etc.

For those two years of work, Sawyer made about $30 million in royalties.

You go Chris 👏👏👏