Home to classics like SimCity 2000 and modern hits like Planet Coaster; the management sim genre has touched on SeaWorld locations, private prisons and everything in between. One thing management sims rarely were associated with, however, was being played on a controller. In 2000 Bullfrog decided to yet again add to the rare and unpopular practice of porting a management sim to a home console; this time with their cozy windows-bound title “Sim Theme Park”, also known as 5 other names if you are willing to look it up. Released in the US as Theme Park: Roller Coaster, this game is a cozy, much simplified answer to the stimulant-high known as Roller-Coaster Tycoon. Generally viewed with obscurity, but its a fair gamble that a large portion of kids that grew up with a PS2 probably experienced this extremely unique version.

In the 90s, management sims were the new hotness. So many games were hitting the DOS in this burgeoning genre. Peter Molyneux of Bullfrog productions, while working with EA as a publisher, came up with the concept of the game to be known as Theme Park. This title was massively popular and still considered one of the best of the genre. Soon, after the success of Theme Hospital, the team decided to make a follow up that would capture one desire presented by players with Theme Park: players wanted to ride the rides they built in the game. Theme Park World came from this. In a new 3d engine, the title released for Windows, Mac, and Playstation. This title, released soon after, was an enhancement on the original, including higher resolution textures, fully modeled and animated guest and staff with the caveat of limits to park and coaster building and a controller based UX fans of the genre will often find irritating.

Theme Park Roller Coaster keeps things pretty stripped down. Not a lot of story introduction, you are simply introduced to series of islands you unlock as you go along. 8 parks falling under 4 distinct themes opening with Prehistoric World. On starting the game’s extremely aggressive tutorial advisor starts talking for quite a while before you can start building a hiring your way towards meeting revenue, park opening, and attendance goals.

Like a lot of other management sims that have come before and after, the main gameplay is given in a birds eye view where the player is expected to build relevant structures to turn a profit on the park. This includes rides, shops, sideshows, and features. Your main revenue is the ticket at the door, while shops and sideshows work as secondary revenue that can be tweaked to maximize profit. The rides, however will be what gets the guests through the door. Many of the rides are quite simple: just place it, make the queue, and connect the exit. However roller coaster and track rides are designable, as expected. Each park usually has 1 or 2 signature roller coasters and a track ride to populate the park with. Each option themed heavily to whatever park you are in, but often are functionally the same. The game will judge you on a number of factors, including cleanliness, guest happiness, path efficiency, and employee conditions. These all have to be managed in a series of nested menus opened by the “Laptop” button. Allowing you to train, fire, and set patrol assignments for hired employees. Set ticket and merchandise pricing, stage ride upgrades, and research new things to build in the park. It seems like a lot, but the game moves at a fraction of the pace many others do, and the mechanics are so stripped down that it feels more like a relaxed approximation of a simulation than something more difficult. The trick really just is taking a loss by hiring a full set of researchers, unlocking everything on loans, building everything you can and then replacing researchers with actually needed staff. The player then can wait, and by the time the loans are paid off the park will basically just run itself, making money not much of an object late into a single session.

The “story” of this game is really just the story presented by the contextual explanation for the game’s UI. The player learns about potential worker’s strikes and stink bomb pranks via email; Applies for high interest loans on the laptop; and explores their own park via the camcorder. The failure state of a bankruptcy does loom overhead if you hire more than you need, but overall the game’s story is rather bare. The shouts and laughter of guests paired with the colorful and cartoonish look of the attractions makes it feel like more of an interactive wallpaper than a game at times, which is part of the appeal. The closest we get to any story telling are the game’s introductory cutscenes for different park themes. Each featuring a costumed entertainer employee doing some sort of clumsy or embarrassing thing on a dingy looking stage. Not sure what’s implied by seeing an underpaid costume actor getting electrocuted, but the games comedic references to the entertainers does too often make me feel like a sleazy and cheap employer for me to not just laugh along.

This game looks and sounds rather colorful. The rides, sideshows, and shops all have distinct and colorful looks to them that captured my imagination as a child and made the feature of being able to explore your own park extremely enjoyable. The different parks feature a mostly ambient soundtrack, with some musical elements pushed in as you add rides, sound features, and crowd the park with guests. After a solid 5 hour session, the constant reminders from the advisor and the repeated collection of guest sound effects can get old, but these do end up just adding to the whole, “interactive wallpaper” of it all.

The game really only has one character and that is the advisor. A sometimes irritating little ant voiced by Terry McGovern (THX 1138, DuckTales) for the US version, and Lewis McLeod (Star Wars Episode I) in the UK version. Both voices are quite fine, it just is the repeated and unactionable advice to build more food shops that will get on the player’s nerves. Other than that, the parks are in a way their own character. Lost Kingdom, Halloween World, Wonder Land, and Space Zone all have very distinct “vibes” to them, themed buildings, unique entertainer and costumed guest models along with a sound scape that gives each one its own personality. My favorite is by far Wonder Land, a really cozy and springy riff on classic Lewis Carroll complete with giant pencil and brick decor. Halloween World I find the most abrasive even if it does go for its theme the hardest, the sound effects really just add up after a while in that one.

Some of the best aspects of this game include just how relaxed it feels to play in real time. As mentioned before, after a certain game state is hit, right around the middle of the park’s development it really does become this background image you tweak a little here and change a little there. I can imagine the version of the game released for Mac and Windows to be quite a blast on a second monitor. The game is colorful and quite enjoyable to look at, and just complex enough to require some thought but not so complex that it is stressful to play.

This games does not however come without some pretty glaring flaws. To start, it is capital B buggy. I remember as a kid suffering crashes all the time destroying literal hours of work. I did not suffer so this time, but I did encounter a unique one while trying to get certain roller coaster rankings, if you’re not paying attention your park will suddenly empty out, and you’ll hemorrhage money until you save and restart the park again. I have no idea what causes it but randomly all guests will get stuck outside the entrance and stay there doing a walking cycle in place. It can be very frustrating when you’ve taken one of the game’s more expensive loans, and need to stay afloat until everything is researched. The game can also just be super fickle when it comes to certain in game goals. I did not mention it much before but the game has the goal for getting “Ultimate Coaster” awards on every unique coaster in the game to unlock them in a sandbox mode. There’s now, 26 years later a trick to cheese this, but even then it is so sensitive and the game’s UX doesn’t help at all. The rankings judge you based on three differing types of Gs, speed, duration, and length, but oddly the way it calculates Gs is so busted that any excitement beyond mild drops is a no-no if you want the coaster to be considered good. Apparently in Theme Park Roller Coaster universe lateral Gs can literally stop a high speed train cause even a normal corkscrew design can mess up the whole track. This also isn’t helped by the games UX just generally requiring a lot of getting used to. A lot, and I mean a lot of QoL elements from more traditional sim games of the same era are missing. Context for the following: coasters are designed in two stages in this game, first, with setting track, and second with tweaking pylon height and angle. If you mess up track placement on a coaster by making it less than 200m (sub-optimal length according to the game) you have to open the coaster, set the queue, reselect the coaster, edit the track and undo until you can set a good length, which you don’t get to see until after the pylon editing phase. This isn’t the only weird UX choice. Structures are not moveable. This can be really tough cause the game first gives you single bathroom stalls to build and encourages you to research and build super restrooms to replace them. But if your guests need to vomit or otherwise use the restroom, they will have to wait on a broken path while you navigate several nested menus to delete the stalls and finally build a proper super restroom. This can cascade into vomit or litter being left all over while you do the build, which wears out your janitors, who themselves have weird pathing AI and trouble getting to the break room, so then they go on strike because you ran out of training options to reset their tiredness and- In short, the game is just missing a handful of things that would make park management much easier than it is. These strange choices leave an otherwise cozy game feeling as stressful as that run on sentence probably read.

I cannot say definitively if this game had any serious social impact or will have one. I learned a bit of how a loan worked as a kid from this so that’s kind of cool. The real impact is what this game actually represents for those familiar with Bullfrog Entertainment. By this point, the now famous talent at the company had parted ways to start their own thing, and Bullfrog was struggling to compete with the cultural behemoth that was Roller-Coaster Tycoon. EA had acquired the studio a couple years earlier and Bullfrog became one of the first victims of one of my least favorite industry trends: studio shuttering by publisher. The remaining talent at Bullfrog was looped into EA UK and the rest really is history. As someone who grew to love old pc games like Dungeon Keeper, Theme Hospital, and even Populous; seeing that bullfrog balloon in the opening of my PS2 copy of Theme Park Roller Coaster feels like a tragedy. While it wasn’t the last game, it really does feel like the swan song of a studio ended far too soon.

Theme Park Roller Coaster is quite far from perfect. It has some excellent elements. Exploring the park does offer a bit of childlike wonder to the management sim genre that was actually adopted as a sub-genre convention moving forward. This game walked so Planet Coaster could run into becoming a tool for real life amusement park experience preservation. But with its bugs, build height limits, and apparently simplified coaster building compared to the PC counterpart this game is best played as a calm interactive background than praised as a titan of the genre. Even then however its undeniable just how “cute” the game is about its flaws almost like a kid showing you their crayon drawing. Like yeah, its not going in the Sistine Chapel but getting mad at the bad line work rendered in green crayon just feels wrong, you know?
Final Score: 6/10