RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 track takes longer to complete than the universe will exist

Theme park management sim and vomit-soaked hellscape creation tool RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 has played host to some real horrorshows. Streamer Marcel Vos is responsible for many of them, having built record-setting tracks like the nightmarish one that takes 12 real years to complete. His latest work puts that in perspective: it takes over three quinvigintillion years to complete. A quinvigintillion is a one with 78 zeros after it.

Vos calls it the Universe Coaster, and it's not exactly a thrill a minute. As his 14-minute video explains, via Kotaku, it begins with a looping coaster that runs along a long, spiral track at a speed of about a kilometer per hour. The track ends in nothing, though there is a decorative skeleton in a top hat, but the coaster doesn't crash at this dead end.

Thanks to a slight incline cleverly placed at the start of the track, which the coaster reverses onto before it descends, RCT2 acts as if the coaster still has a winch attached when it reaches the dead end, as it must have had to back up that incline. It's not only prevented from crashing by this invisible winch, but pulled all the way back along the track by it at the slowest speed possible.

That's just the beginning, as Vos explains. I admit that at some point during the subsequent explanation of how the Wild Mouse coasters synchronize with each other in his setup my brain melted, slid out of my earhole, and now lives on a farm in the country where it can play with all the other brains as much as it wants. You'll have to watch his video to see how it works.

Thanks to the changes in OpenRCT2, the open-source re-implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, it's possible to make tracks that are even longer than this. Vos set himself the challenge of making a track that would be compatible with the older vanilla and classic versions of RCT2, however, and succeeded. You can download a version of the Universe Coaster that runs in RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, as well as one that runs in a custom build of OpenRCT2. I'm not sure why you'd want to, but you can. 

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.