RollerCoaster Tycoon taught me to be a ruthless capitalist

polygon.com:

One fateful day in sixth grade library period, the monotony of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing was interrupted by a life-changing announcement: This unit would be dedicated to playing RollerCoaster Tycoon. Concepts like profit, price, and loans were to be teachable moments, we were instructed. In pairs of two, the first team to beat the assigned objective — paying off the loan and becoming consistently profitable — would get extra credit.

I was thrilled. I’d loved all of the other games we’d played at the school library, with two or three kids per computer screen. Logical Journey of the Zoombinis was a blast. A few of the computers had Adobe Flash, which I typically used to make animations of Kirby eating other Kirbys. I’d never played a simulation game before, but as soon as I slapped my first pathing tile onto RollerCoaster Tycoon’s virtual grid, I was completely hooked. It was my early gateway into the world of management sim games, a genre that has since become a staple in my life. I credit much of it to my love of this classic tycoon game, and the library computers I first played it on.

Computer Lab Week is our ode to the classic “school” games, like Oregon Trail and Number Munchers, that kept us from being productive. Sure, you should be doing homework, but Carmen Sandiego is on the loose!

That semester we got half an hour of RollerCoaster Tycoon time several days a week. Class would breeze by. While the boys designed whimsical coasters doomed to failure — a thing my best friend and I also did, but on a separate save file during after-school hours — we were hellbent on getting that sweet extra credit. We became ruthless capitalists, and we noticed we could charge more for rides that had high excitement without too much