ROLLER COASTER TYCOON PINBALL MACHINE

During the run of the first RCT, official contest were held where you'd be required to use a certain amount of money and a premade landscape to create a specified coaster type. Prizes were mostly posters and mousepads. I believe the last RCT1 contest had a roller coaster book as a prize. I only entered 3 or 4 of those contests but I ended up winning a prize in 2 of them. Good fun. You can see those designs in the RCT section at this site.

Then on October 15, 2002 Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 was released. In the box was a nice little postcard sized insert announcing "The Ultimate Tycoon Challenge" - with some serious prizes this time. The contest would be broken into three age categories with each group having a Grand Prize, First Prize and 100 "finalists". The finalists received a copy of the RCT board game. First Prize was a Roller Coaster Tycoon pinball machine. The Grand Prize was the pinball machine, a new computer and a trip the the park of your choice in the US (all airfare, hotel, etc included).

I was interested and knew I'd enter but the holidays were right around the bend, I was getting this site ready to go online and I didn't really have the time. Finally the holiday season drew to a close and we had worked out the details on out late January trip to Las Vegas. It was about a week into January when I first sat down to make my entry.

The contest deadline was January 31, 2003. The only problem with that was that I'd be in Vegas on our afroementioned trip. We were leaving on the 26th. This gave me about 20 days to make an entry and submit it. Plenty of time, but I couldn't help wondering about the possible entries that people might have been working on for the past 4 months.

The rules were to design a multi-dimensional coaster using only the roller coaster designer feature in the game. Rides would be judged on creativity, practicality & functionality and ride variables. I could go on and on about the process I went through to create the ride (and I just might someday) but to cut a long story short, I ended up with two rides that I liked almost equally. I began showing these two designs to anyone who'd look and one seemed to be overwhelmingly preferred to the other. Ok. After many tweaks and reworkings I had my entry. I submitted it and waited for the judging results to be announced (supposed to happen on or around March 15).

During those couple of winter months we kept joking about where were we going to go on our prize winning trip (it was either going to be Texas or back to California), where we'd put the pinball machine, and what we'd do with the PC (my daughter would've been the lucky reciprient). It was fun. Every time my wife would ask if we were going to Texas or Cali I'd calmly tell her - "all I want is the pinball machine". It was sort of the truth. Sure the other prizes would have been cool, but we get to plenty of parks on our own (just look at the galleries here) and we had 2 PC's already but I wasn't going to drop the cash on a pinball machine anytime soon.

March 15 rolled around and nothing. People on various forums across the internet began questioning what was happening. Why no word yet? March came and went without a peep.

In early April we were out of town for a few days. We got back late on the first Sunday in April. The next day I woke up and checked the mail. On April 7th I got a rather nondescript envelope containing a letter informing me that I had indeed won the pinball machine. I needed to fill out and notarize the affidavit included and return it for verification. I shot those papers back and we had a good laugh over the fact that I kept saying that was all I had wanted to win.

April 24th - I get a follow-up letter telling me my machine will arrive in 6 to 8 weeks.

May was kind of quiet. In June the real contact began. They called to make sure the machine would fit through our doors. Stern Pinball called a few times to get info and let me know who'd be handling delivery and set-up. Finally on June 30th (over 6 months since I'd submitted my entry) I got a call from TNT Amusements asking if I'd be able to accept delivery of the pinball machine that evening. I can't say enough about the men who brought the machine - incredibly friendly and helpful. If you live in the northeast and are looking for your own video games, I'd recommend them in a heartbeat.

At first they suggested I keep the game boxed (as it was already out of production) and wait a few years to ebay it and score a tidy profit. Tempting, but it was meant to be played. Not everything in life needs to be a smart investment - this was for fun.

I'd always been a hardcore gamer (until the kids came along) but never really got into the whole pinball thing. The most familiar I'd ever gotten with a pinball machine was the Terminator 2 machine at a bar near our apartment in Miami Beach. That was back in 1991. My wife however, is some sort of pinball prodigy and I hate her for it. I'm very competitive when it comes to games. The sillier the game the more I want to win. Pinball ranks pretty high on the silly factor and having the game just 3 days (as of my writing this) I've had my ass handed to me more times than I care to admit. Sigh. (update: since then I have proven myself as undisputable master of the machine - heh!)

As far as my experience goes, it seems like a pretty solid design. Lots of fun and they did a good job of mixing RCT, pinball and the amusement park experience into a fun little game. The cool multiball sequence is worth it alone.

At any rate I put some pics of the machine to the right. Not much different than the other photos you've probably seen except this machine is mine (and my troll has orange hair).

Oh yeah, that winning entry - you can download it here.