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Someone Made a Calculator Out of Roller Coasters in ‘RollerCoaster Tycoon’

The guy behind that wild 'RollerCoaster Tycoon' calculator explains how he made it.

Fans of the 2002 simulator game RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 will be familiar with over-the-top, extravagant projects such as this enormous theme park city that took ten years to construct. One Reddit user recently managed to take this to the next level, using roller coasters to build a working roller coaster calculator—an accomplishment that has been widely reported over the last few days. The original video managed to accumulate 345,000 views on YouTube, and Schematics Team recently spoke to the man behind the coaster.

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Marcel Vos built the project in OpenRCT2, an open source fork of the game that fixes bugs found in the original, adds some new features, and most importantly for this project, lifts many of the game's limitations on what players can build, allowing users to run wild with intricate and complicated projects like this. The calculator itself can add or multiply single digit numbers, and massive sections of it are underground. In order to input the calculation, the tracks need to be set up to send each train to the correct input number. Tracks run between each integer allowing the output train to run to any of the 200 possible output combinations.

Vos started playing the RollerCoaster Tycoon games when he was only 4 years old, he told Schematics Team. After years of playing the game on and off he got into OpenRCT2 in 2015, and committed himself to exploring the mechanics of the game. “I love playing games and trying to get to the limits of the game and maximise everything I can”. Amazingly, it only took Vos approximately 35 hours to create the finished product.

“It’s completely useless, but it’s fun,” he said.

You can take a look at Vos’s imgur album explaining the calculator project in full detail here, or download the file for yourself.