You might think you’re a skilled Roller Coaster Tycoon player. Perhaps you’ve built dozens or even hundreds of perfectly profitable parks. Or maybe you’ve beat every built-in scenario a dozen times. But your skills won’t help you with a new map designed to take millions of years to complete.
Released in 2002, Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 is a popular PC theme park builder that’s still actively played and modded by many players today. One of those players is popular YouTuber Marcel Vos, who enjoys experimenting with the original 20-year-old version of the game and its modern, open-source ports. Earlier this year, Vos created a digital theme park ride that will outlast the entire universe. Now his newest creation is an RCT2 challenge that will take you 100 million years to finish.
“100,000 Millenniums Mines Park” is the name of Vos’ new RCT2 scenario that, on the surface, seems pretty simple. You start out with a few rides and a very easy objective: Make a park worth $US1,000 ($1,388) and pay back your bank loan. That’s a very easy mission that basically anyone, even people who’ve never played RCT2, could complete in an hour or less. However, this crafty custom scenario — which uses no mods — is hiding some secrets.
Why this Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 map takes so long to finish
The first nasty secret is that you start the map massively in debt, owing over 214 million to the bank. Not only is this a lot of money to pay back, but it also means you can’t build anything in the park as you don’t have any money to build with. Even if you sell everything that’s there, you’ll still have hundreds of millions of dollars of debt to repay.
The next devious hidden detail involves the two rides that seem to be bringing in money from park visitors. This is a lie. These rides are not actually connected to the correct walkways, meaning nobody in the park can reach the rides.
The last and biggest secret is where the third ride in this park, a roller coaster, actually goes once the track enters the cliffs. This is where Vos reveals a gigantic spiral of roller coaster track, almost all of which is flat, too. So passengers in the one and only coaster car move very, very slowly through this massive maze.
And once they reach the end, the roller coaster doesn’t have enough speed to get back to the ride’s start where more guests are waiting. Instead, the empty cart rolls backward 8X slower than it moved forward. The total journey takes nearly 1,820 in-game years to complete, which equals about 70 real-world days. And because this ride is awful, you can only charge .40 cents ($0.56) per ride. Remember you have to pay back over 200 million dollars. You can probably see how this is going to take a long, long time.
Completing this scenario — assuming you don’t cheat or use mods to speed things up — will take over 960 trillion in-game years, which translates to an astounding 100,117,219 real-life years. It should also be noted that this scenario can only be played in OpenRCT2, a modern port of the game that fixes some of the glitches found in the original version that would happen when numbers like money owed and years passed got too big.
And even if you use OpenRCT2’s speed-up tools and mods to advance time 1,000X faster than normal, you’ll still need nearly 100,000 years to complete this nightmarish scenario. If you want to tinker with it, Vos has shared 100,000 Millenniums Mines Park online for anyone to download and play. In other news, I’m happy Marcel Vos isn’t an actual God with superpowers because we would all be screwed.
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