I was around 10 the first time I played RCT. A friend of mine brought me a copy disk of his original one. I could install the game but not play since there was a protection against copied CDs with an error message. In a desperate attempt, I bruteforced the exe by clicking 50 times on it and suddenly the game magically started. I was so happy I started a dance of the joy and would then use this trick to play the game.
To this day I still don't know how it was possible to bypass the protection.
Folks may also like the noclip documentary on RollerCoaster Tycoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts4BD8AqD9g . It goes into more detail, particularly about what happened after RCT2, and has some perspectives from people in the OpenRCT2 community.
I was curious what happened to the programmer Chris Sawyer. From Wikipedia:
> He volunteers with the media team at a local primary school. Sawyer travels the world to visit roller coasters as an enthusiast, and gave his "coaster count" at 770 in 2024.
strongpigeon ·19 days ago
[0] https://openrct2.org/
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HeYmaney ·19 days ago
To this day I still don't know how it was possible to bypass the protection.
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DavidPiper ·19 days ago
proxysna ·19 days ago
tim333 ·18 days ago
> He volunteers with the media team at a local primary school. Sawyer travels the world to visit roller coasters as an enthusiast, and gave his "coaster count" at 770 in 2024.
Here's a video of him checking out a roller coaster https://youtu.be/UU73g72NTHc
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