Atari announced today that it plans to revive RollerCoaster Tycoon, a series of video games in which you invite people to a theme park and figure out how to properly murder them. But RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile, as it will be called, isn’t the proper PC game that fans might have expected.
Instead it will be on iOS in coming weeks for $2.99, and it looks a lot like FarmVille.
Rollercoaster Tycoon fans are not pleased.
That’s just a taste of the massive outpouring of negative reactions that hit the web today.
There’s a happy ending here though: Atari responded to the deluge of negativity by promising that yes, there’s a PC incarnation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 planned for later this year. Diehard fans can pretend that this mobile one doesn’t exist, and perhaps go nutty once again later this year, when we all discover that “PC experience” could mean “Facebook game”.
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10 responses to “RollerCoaster Tycoon Is Back, And Fans Aren’t Happy”
oh an old IP coming to mobile and most likely including FTP business models.
let’s all rage about it.
or we could just not play it?
$2.99 to buy with in game micro transactions..
The problem is that its not the vast majority of people that makes money for these games; its the vast minority that just has way too much money (ie: the whales). The rest of us have to suffer with games targetting them 🙁
Why not both!
So it’s a lower resolution then 3, seems to have much lower texture quality and animations AND STILL runs at a far worse frame rate? Even for a mobile game this looks horrible.
Man I loved using roller coasters like artillery in RCT, was so much fun.
fingers crossed the PC incarnation isnt just a facebook version of the shitty mobile game lol
“Rollercoaster Tycoon is back and fans aren’t happy.”
Me: Gee. I wonder if they made it into a shitty mobile ‘game’ which is largely waiting/microtransactions.
Article: Yup.
OK, the real question I would love to see an exec answer is: Why are they pillaging beloved old IPs to fill out into the mobile space?
Is it: 1) because they see that mobile makes money, and they know fans loved this old IP, but don’t realize that the mobile market and the PC game market are completely different markets, even though they both deal with there-aren’t-big-enough-air-quotes-for-this ‘games’?
Or is it: 2) because they DO know that the mobile market is a different market to the PC market, but they don’t give a shit about alienating PC gamers if it means that some bare hint of brand recognition is the critical leg-up they need to rise even a little above the rabid pack of competition that is the cut-throat mobile market?
While I wouldn’t be happy with option 2, at least I can understand it. Big corporations are assholes who will step over their own grandmothers for profit, let alone your nostalgia. But option 1? I really hope it’s not that. Ignorance is preventable, people.
Well I’d bet my bollocks on it not being option 1, lets put it that way.
I still play Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. That was released 10 years ago. I got the garbage 3DS game played it for about a week and forgot about it. Get Frontier back and get them working – this isn’t worth my time.
That’s Rubish… the rest of us have to suffer through nothing. Don’t buy it if you don’t like it.