A guide to the Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 archives

During RCT 2 ’s first period of popularity, back in 2002–2006 or so, just after the game came out, there was quite a large community of what we would today call ‘content creators’, not only making scenarios and roller coaster layouts as Chris Sawyer envisaged, but also scenery and new ride objects and graphics for the game, despite the lack of documentation for the file formats needed to do this.

Now with the coming of OpenRCT2 there’s a resurgence of interest in the game, but unfortunately many of the sites hosting this old content have now gone offline. This page is an attempt to locate copies of all their creations, usually in the Internet Archive WayBack Machine. Unfortunately the WayBack Machine is quite temperamental in what it does/doesn’t archive, so some things are lost even from there. I’m trying to get those back.

Sites and creators, in alphabetical order

Amazing Earl

By far the most renowned scenery and ride creator was Dan Wolfe, aka Amazing Earl. As recently as last week (as of the time of writing) all his content was still online at ae.rctspace.com but it’s since disappeared. Fortunately I started compiling this archive just in time and was able to create a mirror of the site and all downloads there. (If I notice that the original site becomes available again, I will of course remove the mirror in light of the copyright notices on the original.)

Buggy (Mike Young)

Buggy worked with the Amazing Earl on some of the first custom real rideable rides created for the game. He also created quite a bit of stuff of his own, which is still online at his site.

Lunatim (Tim Fort)

Tim Fort created rides and parks for all three RCT games. He also later appeared on America’s Got Talent . Sadly he passed away in 2016. His website with all his creations is available in the WayBack Machine. (Thanks to Stu on the RC&F Discord server for the information about Lunatim.)

RCT Fun

This website is online again at a new address since 2017. It includes most of the creations of Marjan de Goede (Mama Bear), who died in March 2019.

RCT Mart

This community-run site seems to have gone offline a few years ago (around 2016). Most of the content is on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine. (Note that it takes a few moment for the site to load, because most of it is images, and the WayBack Machine is quite slow. Hey, it’s authentic to the internet speeds we had at the time!) This includes the content downloads and Fossil’s Dig Site, a popular strategy site. If you happen to spot a broken download link, or you have a copy of something which is not available there, please get in touch and let me know.

RCT2.com

This site was mainly a web forum. With the coming of RCT 3 it became part of RCTSpace, a network of community sites about the games. As of writing, it’s still limping along but currently has a broken SSL certificate. I’m trying to get all the content that was there but much of it seems to be gone. Appeal: Do you have an archive of the downloads that were available from the download section of the forum? Please get in touch.

RCT2.com Vacation Park of the Month

The most coveted prize for park makers, and the catalyst for the creation of quite a few scenery objects. All of the brochures for the winning parks are still online at vp.rct2.com, but I haven’t yet worked out how to get the actual parks back. They’re neither archived nor currently available at their original URLs, and they eventually moved to the RCT2.com downloads page. Appeal: Do you have the files for these parks? Please get in touch.

UCES (User Created Expansion Set)

All of the descriptive material surrounding this community project is still available on the WayBack Machine version of rct2uces.com. The download is available from the archived RCT Mart.

More to come …

How to install this stuff

If you’re on a Mac or Linux box, installing RCT 2 with Wine will work, and the data files will be picked up correctly by OpenRCT2. This also applies to the installer for UCES, which works fine.

For loose object files (.DAT, .SC6, etc.), you need to place them in the right directory in the place you installed RCT 2 (for me, it was C:\Program Files\Infogrames Interactive\RollerCoaster Tycoon 2\ — you access the C: drive on Wine by going to ~/.wine/drive_c ). .DAT files belong in the ObjData folder.

Tip-offs