| Sawyer has said RollerCoaster Tycoon began as a sequel to Transport Tycoon in 1996. He had rewritten the isometric world so that track could run on bridges over bridges, and while watching vehicles on those bridges he wondered what they would be like as roller coasters. He adapted the code he had written, had basic roller coasters running within a month or two, and abandoned the sequel. OpenRCT2's readme says the engine of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 was based on Transport Tycoon. | answer on the Transport Tycoon sequelanswer on the Transport Tycoon sequel | Publisher |
| Sawyer told Arcade Attack that Bullfrog's Theme Park was a fun game but its roller coasters were "rubbish", which got him thinking, and that a book called "White Knuckle Ride", with photos of big roller coasters, made him think how fun it would be to build one in a Transport Tycoon-like isometric world. | answer on the Transport Tycoon sequelsame answer | Interview |
| Sawyer recalled that sales started slow but steady and that it was a shock, a few months later, to learn the game was among the top-selling PC games of the year, with players from strategy fans to grandparents. | RollerCoaster Tycoon was named as the best selling PC game in 1999…same answer | Interview |
| Sawyer calls RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 his favorite, but thinks the original and its expansion packs may have been better games: the sequel's free-form play took away some of the challenge, and the original's scenarios were better. RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, which recreates the sequel, brought back the original's scenario structure, for 95 scenarios in all. | answer on his favourite RollerCoaster Tycoon gamesame answersame answersame answersame answersame answer | Interview |
| Sawyer has said he wanted the guests "uncontrollable": they can't be forced to do anything and make up their own minds from what they see, feel and experience, run by "quite a primitive algorithm". Testers complained that guests got lost too easily in odd-shaped parks. | answer on inspiration and objectivessame answersame answer | Interview |
| Sawyer has said the game grew out of two spare-time interests while he worked on conversions: playing Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon, and an isometric game world he had been building. He wondered whether an isometric view would be better than Railroad Tycoon's overhead map, and whether other kinds of transport should be in it, and he tried putting little trains into his isometric world. | answer on his early inspiration | Interview |
| In development the game went by other names, among them "Chris Sawyer's Transport Game" and I.T.S., "Interactive Transport Simulation". Sawyer put an advertising hoarding reading "Coming Soon - Chris Sawyer's Transport Game!" inside a space port in his PC conversion of Frontier: Elite II. | answer on his early inspiration | Interview |
| Sawyer said that because MicroProse had published Railroad Tycoon, MicroProse felt "Transport Tycoon" would be an appropriate name for his game. | answer on his early inspiration | Interview |
| Sawyer's agent, Jacqui at Marjacq, showed the game to several publishers. Sawyer said they came very close to signing with another before a visit to MicroProse's offices in Chipping Sodbury decided him for MicroProse. | answer on his early inspiration | Interview |
| Sawyer recalled that MicroProse's producer had him plan what was left; his estimates added up to over two years, so he divided them all by four, then beat them, and the game was ready to publish four or five months later. He added that some ideas that didn't work out for the original went into the Deluxe version. | answer on how he made Transport Tycoonsame answer | Interview |