Forget “Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride” and any other playground stories you might have heard about RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. A player has now created the ultimate in-game ride, that takes 12 years of real time to complete from start to finish.
YouTube user Marcel Vos shared his coaster, which he dubbed “12 Years of Suffering,” and explained that his previous record had been 232 days. Both tracks make use of “block brakes,” which prevent the next train in a section from entering until the previous train has left. To abuse this feature, a number of trains can be grouped together with several block brakes separating them, while a long, looping track connects them all together. This forces all but one train to wait while the lead train runs the entirety of the track by itself.
Once this was established, Marcel Vos increased the maximum number of trains to 31, essentially multiplying the slowdown effect, and made the coaster as long as possible, using every single bit of landscape data available on an individual park and looping it in on itself — but even this only reached the 232-day mark.
To make the course even longer, he had to turn to a second ride and make use of a synchronization feature. By building another tiny roller coaster next to the enormous one and forcing it to only send the next train after the original coaster has done its full ride, he actually made the tiny coaster ride 20 times longer to complete than the large one.
Yes, that tiny ride you see in the corner of the screen will take 12 full years to complete, or roughly half the time it takes to get through the line for a roller coaster at an actual theme park.
In terms of in-game time, the tiny “Wild Mouse” coaster will take more than 30 million days to complete. This is more than 82,000 years, so you’ll be greeting a pile of fossilized skeletons by the time they actually finish the ride. If you’re like us, however, you’ll probably get distracted and just let wild animals loose in the enclosure to maul the visitors for the hundredth time, instead.
