| 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. | p. 96, "What inspired you to make RollerCoaster Tycoon instead then?"p. 96, same answer | Publisher |
| Sawyer has said he bought himself out of the Transport Tycoon 2 contract and worked on "Project White Knuckle" full time, funding it himself and keeping it under wraps. The game kept the name White Knuckle through development, even after Hasbro Interactive became involved; when Hasbro bought MicroProse, the "Tycoon" connection made it RollerCoaster Tycoon. | p. 96, "So it was more of a passion project…" | Interview |
| Sawyer has said that people in the games industry told him a roller-coaster game would only ever be a niche game, and that the negative reactions gave him serious doubts during its two years of development. | p. 96, "So it was more of a passion project…" | Interview |
| Sawyer's site says RollerCoaster Tycoon is 99% x86 assembly, with some C to interface with Windows and DirectX, built with Microsoft Macro Assembler 6.11c, Visual C 5 and the DirectX 5 SDK. In a 2015 interview he said Transport Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon on the PC were "entirely" programmed in x86 assembler code. | p. 95, answer on x86 assembly | Publisher |
| Sawyer said assembly let him make the simulation more detailed: it needed so much processing that it had to be highly optimised, which he thought impossible in a high-level language. The cost is that assembly can't be recompiled for another platform. | p. 95, "Do you think working in assembly language made Transport Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon better games?"p. 95, same answer | Interview |
| Sawyer said the RollerCoaster Tycoon engine was then adapted for a new transport game, Chris Sawyer's Locomotion (2004), so the code went full circle from the abandoned Transport Tycoon 2. | p. 96, answer on Locomotion | 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. | p. 94, "What was the inspiration for the game?" | 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. | p. 94, "What was the process of development for the game like?" | Interview |
| Sawyer said he had a fully playable version running, in low resolution with his own hand-drawn graphics, by the time his last conversion contracts ended. Simon Foster then replaced his bitmaps with new high-resolution ones of the trains, trucks, buildings and scenery. | p. 94, "What was the process of development for the game like?"p. 94, same answer | 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. | p. 95, "How did you come to work with Microprose?" | Interview |
| Sawyer said MicroProse suggested some changes but few made it into the game, though he did add their suggested references to other MicroProse games, Submarine and UFO among them. | p. 95, "Was there much input from MicroProse?"p. 95, same answer | Interview |
| Sawyer has said Transport Tycoon was written entirely in x86 assembly language, which is why the 2013 mobile version had to be rewritten rather than recompiled. | p. 95, answer on assembly language | Interview |
| Sawyer has said RollerCoaster Tycoon grew from the abandoned Transport Tycoon 2 project, and that Chris Sawyer's Locomotion (2004), built on the RollerCoaster Tycoon engine, felt like the spiritual successor to the Transport Tycoon games, though it didn't carry the Tycoon name for technical reasons. | p. 96, answer on Locomotionp. 96, same answer | Interview |
| Retro Gamer's 2015 sidebar on Transport Tycoon Deluxe says the complete version came with improved signals for complex train systems, and a world editor. | p. 97, Transport Tycoon Deluxe 1995 sidebar | Interview |