FreeRCT / OpenRCT2

While city-building simulators like Sim City were fun, it was undoubtedly more fun to build and run an amusement park. So many great childhood memories comes from the two games that let me do that. First I played Theme Park (for Sega MegaDrive, even) a lot, and then later RollerCoaster Tycoon. The latter might be a bit hard to run today, but thankfully there are Free open source projects that work on taking care of that!

The most interesting project is FreeRCT. It's homepage appears to be down at the moment and the project has no binary release yet. But a lot of work seems to have been done, and as FreeRCT attempts to create everything from code to graphics from scratch I can image it will take some time before it's complete. I'd love to see it completed though. A fully Free - both code and assets - game of this type would be really fun to have!

Rollercoasters and roads in FreeRCT.

Another alternative is the OpenRCT2 project. It's an re-implementation of the RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 engine, that uses the same data files as the original. Besides being a total recreation of the original game it expands upon it by offering new features such as multiplayer support, fast-forwarding gameplay, OpenGL rendering and more. For me, the most important features is Linux support, which it has! OpenRCT2 is complete and if you have a copy of the original it shouldn't be to hard to get it working!

A slice of scenery from OpenRCT2.