Interview with Chocobogo

In this interview, Red Phoenix interviews Chocobogo, former webmaster of Chocobogo's RCT.

Red Phoenix: Where did your first hear about Hasbro's Rollercoaster Tycoon?

Chocobogo: I read a preview in a Computer Game Mag, and I thought it looked great.  I later received a demo disk and within 5 minutes of playing the demo I decided to buy the full game!

Red Phoenix: Once you played the original Rollercoaster Tycoon, what were your immediate thoughts?

Chocobogo: I was amazed by the playability of the game, it is so easy to get into.  I was slightly disappointed that you couldn't ride your rides like in Theme Park.

Red Phoenix: How addictive was Rollercoaster Tycoon when you bought it?

Chocobogo: Do I really need to answer that?

Red Phoenix: What made you think of building a Rollercoaster Tycoon fan site?

Chocobogo: Well I decided to look on the net for RCT, and there was hardly anything out there!  Only the official site and a few fan sites.  So I decided to start up a RCT site mainly because I wanted to be a webmaster, and also I felt that there was a lot of demand for my site as at the time there weren't many around.

Red Phoenix: What has been the most difficult thing with keeping a fan site up and running?

Chocobogo: The updating definitely.  Especially when you only have a 56k modem, it takes for ever to upload 1MB files to the server!!

Red Phoenix: Chris Sawyer has publicly said that he is not happy with the current status of the official Rollercoaster Tycoon site.  What do you think of the status of the site?

Chocobogo: Well, put it this way, if I thought the official site was any good, I wouldn't have started my own!!  If you look around different forums, you'll see that the general feeling of the official site is that it's not up to standard.

Red Phoenix: From what I understand, Hasbro is responsible for the official site.  It's not had an update since Loopy Landscapes has come out, and the update was really only mentioning the rebate Hasbro is offering due to the fact that Corkscrew Follies is also packaged with Loopy Landscapes.  What do you think Hasbro will actually do with the official site?

Chocobogo: Hopefully give it to me!!!  Only joking, I think they should give it a makeover, as RCT is still booming, they should try to make it more user friendly, then they may have a change of making it popular with RCTers.

Red Phoenix: Maxis' games have had great support lately.  The Sims series and Sim City series both have wonderful official sites, which have been very important in the success of the corresponding game titles.  How important are the Rollercoaster Tycoon fan sites in the success of Rollercoaster Tycoon?  I mean this because the official Rollercoaster Tycoon site has been a pretty poor place ever since they lost the Ride Exchange due to technical difficulties.

Chocobogo: I think its very important to have a big fan site community for any game.  The more fan sites the better the game in most cases.  That's why I tried to promote as many sites as I could, as many of you know I gathered 100's of links to RCT fan sites over the 2 years of running.

Red Phoenix: What do you see in the future of the Rollercoaster Tycoon series?

Chocobogo: Hopefully the eagerly awaited RCT 2 will be released with a whole bunch of new features, the main on being a "ride your own ride" feature.  Many RCTers have had a taste of this using the NoLimits Simulator which I have to say is excellent, the game developers should really look into this.

Red Phoenix: If the Rollercoaster Tycoon series does continue, what new features/changes would you like to see?

Chocobogo: As I mentioned above I think a "ride your own ride" feature would be great.

Red Phoenix: It's been quite some time since we've heard or read an interview with Chris Sawyer.  Do you think it's time for him to do another interview?  Perhaps just to get some of his thoughts on the future of the series, or to get an update on whatever he's working on at the moment.

Chocobogo: He has been pretty quiet.  I think if he remains in the shadows he may cause an RCT depression in that fan sites will lose confidence in the game and close down as we have seen many do already!

Red Phoenix: Chocobogo's RCT has been troubled with bandwidth problems in the past few months.  The last time I checked, it was still down, although it did come back for a few days.  What is the status of the site, and will it ever come back in any way, shape, or form?

Chocobogo: I tried my best to bring the site back, when I finally managed to, it got closed down due to excessive bandwidth just over the few days I re-opened it.
I can't see the site coming back mainly due to the fact I have no means of getting back the 1GB + of data lodged on the server!!
If I could, then yes, maybe you will see a return!!