A RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 player has engineered what appears to be the game's longest rollercoaster ever, featuring a ride duration so astronomically large that mathematicians lack conventional notation to express it.
Marcel Vos, a self-described RollerCoaster Tycoon enthusiast, spent months designing the "Googol Coaster" within the vanilla version of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, constraining himself to work within the game's standard map size limitations. His 41-minute documentation video reveals not just a gaming achievement but a masterclass in applied mathematics and behavioral manipulation.
The project consumed Vos so thoroughly that he found himself awake at 3 a.m., mentally wrestling with technical obstacles he couldn't solve during waking hours. That obsessive approach paid off: the final ride duration stretches to approximately 10^227 years, rendering the term "googol" (10^100) essentially meaningless by comparison.
Controlling the Chaos
The central engineering challenge wasn't the rollercoaster itself but the guests. "Guests are little bastards and do not like to cooperate," Vos explained, describing his need to orchestrate each visitor's behavior with surgical precision.
To solve this, Vos weaponized the game's guest AI against itself. By carefully calibrating nausea levels and ride tolerance thresholds, he could force guests down specific paths and onto particular rides at exact moments. Simultaneously, he had to maintain happiness levels high enough that guests wouldn't abandon the park, preserve their energy so they'd continue moving through the coaster network, and keep them fed.
One elegant solution involved placing toffee apple stalls next to benches. Guests, programmed to sit and eat when food is nearby and seating available, would automatically rest exactly where Vos needed them to, providing energy recovery at predetermined intervals.
The park itself features 100 identical "super modules," each multiplying the total ride time by a factor of 174. When synchronized across the maximum allowable park space, the compounding effect creates numbers that defy intuition.
Vos described his creation as "by far the most complicated setup I have ever built in any video game ever," and friends who saw it remarked that the layout resembled a computer motherboard or processor chip.
When Vos attempted to contextualize the ride duration in real-world terms, conventional measurements collapsed. A googol proved inadequate. He pivoted to cosmic comparisons: the number of atoms in the universe, or how long it would take to disassemble the universe by removing one atom per year. Even these strained frameworks.
The ride ends with mathematical poetry: the carriage derails and explodes.
Viewer reactions to the video ranged from stunned admiration to dark philosophical reflection. One commenter noted that Vos had created "the ultimate dehumanizing coaster," stripping guests of agency while keeping them just satisfied enough not to leave. Another observed the grim irony that guests had transformed from mere victims into "an active key component in their own suffering."
A third viewer appreciated what may be the project's most absurd detail: despite Vos's obsessive optimization of every square inch of buildable space, the coaster's minimum turn radius left room for an unused plot in the center of the park. Mr. Bones, the game's iconic skeleton decoration, could still fit there, perpetually watching over the machine of suffering.
Comments