Jimmy Maher, writing at The Digital Antiquarian, about my favorite game as a kid:
Back in 1994, MicroProse had published a game called Transport Tycoon, by a lone-wolf programmer named Chris Sawyer, who worked out of his home near Glasgow, Scotland. Building upon the premise of Sid Meier’s earlier Railroad Tycoon, it tasked you with building a profitable people- and cargo-moving network involving not just trains but also trucks, buses, ships, ferries, and even airplanes. Written by Sawyer in pure, ultra-efficient Intel assembly language — an anomaly by that time, when games were typically written in more manageable higher-level languages like C — Transport Tycoon was as technically impressive as it was engrossing. When it sold fairly well, Sawyer provided a modestly upgraded version called Transport Tycoon Deluxe in 1995, and that also did well.
But then Chris Sawyer found himself in the throes of a sort of writer’s block. He had planned to get started right away on a Transport Tycoon 2, but he found that he didn’t really know what to do to make the game better. In the meantime, he took advantage of the royalty checks that were coming in from MicroProse to indulge a long-running fascination with roller coasters. He visited amusement parks all over Britain and the rest of Europe, started to buy books about their history, even joined the Roller Coaster Club of Great Britain and the European Coaster Club.
One day it clicked for him: instead of creating Transport Tycoon 2, he could leverage a lot of his existing code into a Rollercoaster Tycoon, making the player an amusement-park magnate rather than a titan of transport.