Did you know that this game simulates the weight of each guest, and it can affect your coasters? Each person can weigh between forty-five and seventy-six kilograms, and if a cart is filled up with low-weight guests, it will lose speed more quickly than if guests had high weight values, where it will maintain speed for much longer. It won’t make a difference most of the time, but in coasters like the bobsleigh, it can be the reason a cart flies off the track after working flawlessly for years. This is never explained or mentioned in-game, but it’s a useful thing to know when designing coasters.

Did you know that each coaster type has hidden criteria that, if not met, incur severe stat penalties? The most common requirements are hitting certain benchmarks for drop height, number of drops, maximum speed, ride length, and maximum negative or lateral G forces. For each missed criteria, the coaster’s excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings are usually cut in half, so failing just one of them can make for a cost-inefficient coaster, and missing two leaves you with a money sink. However, the game never mentions any of these stat requirements, nor the fact that they even exist. It can be useful to look them up before designing a coaster, so reloading a save or aimlessly making random tweaks isn’t required.

Did you know that guests will regularly pay more than $10 for a ride on each coaster? The price they'll pay isn't just affected by the excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings, but the age of the ride and whether there’s another of the same type in the park. Also, each stat weighs differently into the price calculation depending on the coaster type, so there isn’t an easy formula to figure out how much each ticket should cost. However, the bonus given to a new and exciting ride is significant enough that visitors will often pay the full $20, way more than anyone would actually pay in real life, especially when framed with the knowledge that this game came out in 2002. The way the optimal price is determined isn’t explained anywhere in-game and is mostly figured out through trial-and-error, but once you get the hang of it, even the toughest scenarios become trivial.

You may have discovered a little pattern in these facts, in how Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 is a simulation game that’s uninterested in explaining how its simulation works. Players are just told to build a park with so many guests or earn a certain amount of money per month, and that's it. It’s fine to let players discover some things on their own, with ride prices probably being the best example, but when designing a compelling coaster can take so much fine-tuning, it would be helpful to give players an understanding of how they’re being evaluated. It’s good to know why coasters might randomly crash, it would be nice to know how scenery actually affects your park, and so on. Since so much is left totally ambiguous, it makes sense that the majority of players simply ditched scenario challenges and made the most lethal or silly coasters they possibly could. I suppose that might be true to the game’s title, being “Roller Coaster Tycoon” instead of “Theme Park Tycoon”, with the most fleshed-out elements being those that surround the coasters themselves, and the rest of the game is just a shallow framework to let you keep building. If you wanted to revisit this game after remembering it fondly from your childhood, the coaster madness absolutely holds up, but if you were looking at it as a tycoon game, there are much better choices out there.

Addendum: I found the best information about how RCT2’s mechanics work from an excellent Youtuber named Marcel Vos. He has videos breaking down all the interesting little details about the game which go otherwise unexplained, and they're definitely worth checking out. Also, for running it on modern systems, check out OpenRCT2, an open-source re-implementation of the game with some light-touch new features, bug fixes, and compatibility improvements. It’s probably the best way to play the game nowadays.