Half Gamer Half Crab

Theme Park, made by Bullfrog, is one of gaming's venerable old men. Originally released in 1994, it wasn't one of the progenitors of the management and building genre, but it certainly had some of the most wide-reaching effects, both on the genre and on me personally.

I first played Theme Park on the PC. However, this was a family machine, and for me to get time on it was rare, so I ended up getting the Mega Drive version instead. Once the PS1 was released and I got one, I got a copy for that as well.

Theme Park is a strategy game, where you take managerial command of, well, I hope I don't actually need to spell it out. You control the placement of rides, amenities like souvenier stores, food stalls, and so forth, and can create a park layout with very few restrictions. That's one of the keys to Theme Park's success, and what it taught me about games which might seem less than obvious when you consider the more competitive side. What's compelling about Theme Park is designing and building a park which is not just profitable, but also aesthetically pleasing. Building a park with sensible themed areas, for instance surrounding your Haunted House with a creepy, graveyard kind of place, proved far more rewarding than simply achieving the objectives. At the same time the objectives places a constraint that made design more rewarding. If you could do what you wanted to do, despite the constraints of budgets, objectives, staffing, and so forth - that was the real mark of success in Theme Park.

That's something which has always compelled me in games. I don't usually enjoy straight-up sandbox modes for very long, because the lack of challenge renders it somewhat stale. To face a challenge, succeed, and see the fruits of my success - therein lies the greatest appeal of any strategy game, to me. And for me Theme Park was the first time this was demonstrated to me.

Of course, it can be hard to get that balance of challenge and freedom just right. Theme Park isn't perfect here. For instance ensuring you have the handymen to keep the park clean, and assigning them properly, can be a chore. Balancing micromanagement is difficult for developers, because it needs to remain engaging and fun, but to also allow to some extent for challenge, but more importantly for customization in how things are done. In Theme Park you could maintain a very small business, or you could construct something vast - that freedom of objective is something strategy games ought to aim for.

If you see Theme Park around, give it a try if you haven't before. There's a remake of it on the DS, which was pretty decent for the most part, but you really want to be playing the old PC version. (A candidate for something on GoG.com.) There aren't many games I played so intensely that, upon closing my eyes, I could see sprites. Theme Park is one of those games.