Rollercoaster Tycoon

So this is something that happened to me and my sister way back in the day when we got our first family computer. For Christmas that year we were asking for a butt load of PC games. one of the most advertised games at the time was Rollercoaster Tycoon. I haven't actually looked when this game had come out but I am guessing either shortly before the first version of The Sims or a little bit after. What I do know is, her and I loved Sim City so much that Rollercoaster Tycoon seemed awesome as hell.

Christmas morning we received that game as a "family game" meaning that her and I would have to share it, as my other sister really wasn't into video games of any kind. We were fine with that, since her and I have been best friends for a very long time. I also received the game Riven that year, I think, which was a follow up to Myst but I digress. This was a long time ago and I am not going to look up facts and dates and such I just know that when I got Riven it was on Christmas and since it is the title of an old game I might have gotten it around the same time.

This is not one of those stories where the Rollercoaster Tycoon came in some bizarre box, or was clearly bootlegged. I am sure my parents got it at the store as my dad made more than enough money at that point not to be a cheap ass for Christmas and try to rip us off. Christmas was a big thing to him and that was the one day of year he WASN'T a cheap ass, so yeah I just remember the box as being normal. It sat in the bottom desk drawer where the computer sat and among our other games. The box was unremarkable, seriously.

Of course we played that game all the time. Sometimes she would play and I would watch or vice versa. A lot of the time we would play alone when it was our designated computer time. We each got two hours a day on the computer to use for fucking around on the internet (you know with all the parental blocks included) or playing games. The only exception was if you had homework, then you could be on all you wanted.

Her and I did, and still do, have this morbid fascination with death and violence and all that. Seeking out horror movies with themes of the paranormal or violent imagery that we so crave. Being that young we really had yet to see some horrific stuff so we kind of had to create it.

Now, the best thing about Rollercoaster Tycoon was that you could purposefully build rollercoasters or modify other rides to kill the customers in the park. Trust me, it wasn't long before we were doing that and laughing our asses off about it. If I remember correctly, the game was painfully easy, in way of earning enough money from a small park to level up to a bigger park so you could buy more rollercoaster space. Once we had all the areas to choose from, we got creative.

Now, it was basically a birds eye view of the park, you would click on each ride or building in order to see it's status, and to open the park you clicked on the main gates and pressed the "open" button. Very easy. You could see little people walking around down there, the park workers had some sort of uniform and you couldn't really click on them, but the customers you could click on each and every one to see their mood.

They had a variety of faces for the mood. There was happy, sad, excited, one look like the guy was constipated....that was usually used to signify he needed a bathroom and couldn't find it, and several variations of a nauseous face leading up to the point where the little dude would lean over and puke a yellow puddle on the path way and you'd have to send a janitor to clean it up.

By far, the most creepy face though, were the angry faces. They started out as a little red and bulgy, leading up to a really puffed out and angry red face. We would always look at these and laugh, but it would be a nervous laughter, cause there just wasn't something right about the expressions. Our goal quickly became to piss off as many people in the park as possible to see what would happen, hoping there might be a riot or explosions or some shit.

None of that ever happened, but what did happen is far more creepy and something I can't even try to explain at this point. One night my parents were out, and being that I was the oldest of the three daughters, I was left to babysit. Now, keep in mind we are NOT that far apart in age so I barely had to watch either one of my sisters do anything, and I was in the TV room on the other side of the house watching probably something on Teen Nick as I had to still be young enough to enjoy that shit.

My sister, the one who played the game along with me, calls me into the computer room frantically. She sounded scared and excited at the same time. There were giggles behind her voice, so I knew that it couldn't be all that serious but it also startled me. I came running into the computer room. She had been playing Rollercoaster Tycoon for a few hours at that point. Being that it was a weekend there really was no time limit on the computer for each one of us unless the other wanted to get on and pulled the two hour limit card.

"Look!" She said and sat down at the computer, pointing at all the little people things moving about the park frantically. As I leaned in I could see their little heads were all a deep red color. This meant they were ALL angry, but this was something I had never seen before, it was down right eerie. The normal theme music wasn't even playing in the background it was just silent, well other than the angry screams and nonsensical mutterings of the customers.

I think at this point I should mention that, like The Sims game, the little customers all had their own language, it sounded like they were talking but in some fucked up, backwards ass way, which became more freaky when they were angry. So all we could hear at that point where angry cries and shouts in a made up language. Being a bit creeped out, I got the nervous giggles as well.

"You haven't seen the funniest thing yet." She said to me and clicked on a random guy in the crowd. I didn't know if I wanted to see what she found funny, she had always had a weirder sense of humor than mine, an almost sick one, and I just got the feeling that this couldn't be good, but I looked on anyway. His stats came up in a little box in the top corner of the screen along with a small avatar of his face so we could see his emotional state.

I am telling you right now, that this guy looked downright demonic. His face was beet red, his eyes were bulging and staring both of us down. Hell, he looked like he was about to jump out of the computer and kill the two of us where we stood. She was still giggling, but the fucked up part to me was, it wasn't just ONE guy who looked like this in her park, it was like 50,000 guys who all looked the same. I had her click on a few more to check it out.

I had gotten customers angry before, but never did I get them pushed to that state and my heart started pounding in my chest. I laughed nervously, if she was as phased as me by this she wasn't showing it. "How the hell did you make them so angry?" I asked her.

"Well, I took away their bathrooms and food places, locked them in the park and surrounded them with rides that only kill. Then I sped up the time and just watched things be destroyed for about an hour. That's how I got them to be that angry." She smiled at me. Inside I was panicking because, it just wasn't right, her demeanor was still to perky even though her voice sounded a tad nervous. It was like she was getting some sick pleasure out of watching this. I forced another laugh, not wanting to let onto her that a video game that was meant for kids was scaring me so much.

"Well don't you think you should let them out now?" I asked, making it sound like it was a joke. She shook her head and looked at me.

"Maybe I can make them angrier." Her eyes were kind of evil at that point. This was my baby sister we are talking about though. The youngest in the family, the girl we called the animal whisperer because she could communicate with any animal we brought in the house and heal them. Yet here she was looking completely fucked up and evil. I didn't draw attention to it and quickly thought up some excuse to leave.

"If it takes an hour of sped up time to do that, call me if anything else happens, I am in the middle of a show." I said and then left the computer room before she could stop me, although I don't think she tried to. With my heart still pounding I plopped down on the couch by the TV and started to watch again. Not ten minutes later did I hear a loud POP, glass cracking, and a loud scream. It was coming from the computer room.

I ran back in there, my sister was fine but the monitor was smoking and the screen was cracked. She just sat there, stunned, but from the sound of the scream still resounding in my ears I knew she had been then one to make it. I looked at her, she looked completely terrified, a change from her earlier look of evil maniac. I grabbed her and shook her a bit.

"What the hell happened?" I demanded, my main concern was for her but in the back of my mind I knew my dad was going to kill us for blowing up the computer. I thought it was more important to help her though. Her blank, but still some how terrified eyes looked at me and she clearly said something in that made up language from the game. I can't even begin to replicate the sound or even phonetically spell it out here, but if you ever played any one of The Sims games, it sounded like that, only more....evil. "Hey! HEY!" I shook her again and she came around quickly.

Her head turned and she saw the monitor with the cracked screen and the fact that it was smoking almost as if she had no idea that it had happened before. "What happened? Oh God! Dad is going to kill us!" She screamed getting up from the chair. I am sure I gave her an odd look at that point, but it seemed that she hadn't remembered the past ten minutes or the scream she made, or anything before I had yelled "HEY!" at her.

"Laura! Laura! Listen to me...what HAPPENED?" I stressed.

"I don't know, how would I know how computers work?" She screamed back at me, as if I had caused this or something. I just felt chills running through me.

Needless to say when my parents got home they were PISSED. My dad had gotten the computer from work and started bitching about how we were stupid and had ruined it and how we wouldn't be getting a new one for a long time, but even when we did, her and I wouldn't be allowed on it for even longer. That was actually fine with me, because before they had gotten home I had prodded Laura relentlessly about what had happened and she honestly didn't seem to remember a damn thing. It was weird. In any case, I didn't think I wanted to go on a computer again at that point.

Cut to quite a few years later, she was seventeen and I was twenty one. I had moved out of the house when I was 18, when I went to college, but I still came home all the time to see her. My parents were out again that night, her and I had rented Madagascar and we were watching it. The whole time she was complaining about back pain. She worked in a library after school at that point her her job was lifting and shelving all sorts of books so hearing her complain about her back was not out of the ordinary.

She ended up going to sleep way earlier than she usually did on the weekends and I was a little worried and would go up to check on her every so often. By this time, I should mention, that game and the incident was far from our minds, I doubted she remembered any of it but it was a weak memory for me anyway.

As I was spending the whole weekend with my parents, Laura began to get worse and worse. It was odd, she went through a lot of pain, several varying stages of nausea, you know like the little guys in the game, and at one point her face was even green like theirs. Once she started vomiting from what she claimed was the pain in her back, my parents took her to the ER. They sent her home twice until one night we were all woken up by her screaming in horrible pain.

For the third time, in the middle of the night, we rushed her to the ER. They finally found out what was wrong (I was really the only one super worried as my parents thought she was being dramatic and that it wasn't that bad) turns out she had a huge cyst on one of her ovaries and it was twisting her fallopian tube with the weight of it. There really was no telling when this had developed, the doctor only could say it had to have started at a young age.

Next she was rushed into emergency surgery but we were assured she would be absolutely fine they just had to remove the ovary. When she woke up, I was with her, my parents had gone to get coffee, and inform my other sister as to what had happened. I was half asleep when the doctor came in, holding a folder in his hand. Laura was doped up out of her mind, but remember how I said we were both rather morbid and always looking for gross stuff?

Well the doctor said that they had removed the cyst, which was the size of a tennis ball, and ovaries are only supposed to be the size of a prune at most. He had pictures of the removed ovary they had taken for documentation and he asked if we wanted to see them. Of course, we both did, cause hell yeah that would be gross and cool at the same time.

He handed over the folder, nonchalantly, and then was paged out of the room. Laura, in her drugged up state, handed the folder to me and I opened it. What I saw scared the fuck out of me. Luckily she was too drugged on her Demorol drip to notice the terror in my eyes. As one would expect, the removed organ was purplish and red, sitting in a metal tray. What scared me was, it looked EXACTLY like the head of the angry man in that avatar of the angry man from the game. Before I could even point this out to her she had gone back to sleep and I just shut the folder and set it aside.

All I know is, she has seen the pictures since, showed them to countless people to brag about how she had part of her body removed and to explain why all of her teachers automatically passed her from the finals that were happening the week of the surgery. I refused to ever look at the pictures again, and if she ever saw the face or made the correlation to the fact that it looked like the head of the angry guy in the game, she never mentioned it.

To this day, I am not exactly sure what happened to make the computer explode like it did. My best guess is that the little people in there rioted but came after her in an attempt to fix things. Whatever happened, though, there is no accounting for what I saw. Just take into account the fact that the doctor said that the cyst would have developed when she was younger, and that there was really no rhyme or reason why it would happen. Don't ask her about any of these events because she can barely recall having the game let alone playing any of it. I just thought I would share my story, and though I am still an avid gamer, I stay the fuck away from anything with Rollercoasters involved.