Back in mid-2000s, the internet was full of RCT communities. These were instrumental in bringing people together and finding out a lot of stuff in the game that we take for granted nowadays. It’s hard to imagine now, but the object format of RCT used to be a mystery, as neither Chris Sawyer nor Infogrames provided any documentation. Additionally, the community found many ways to exploit the game and make it do things never envisaged by the original creator. Taking a look through them provides a unique look into how the RCT community grew, discovered how to build ever more beautiful parks, and took the game to where it is today.
Unfortunately, starting in the 2010s, many community sites have gone offline. This includes very big ones like RCT*Mart. It also very nearly included RCTSpace, which would in turn have taken the Technical Information Depot and Amazing Earl’s website with it (as these sites had taken of refuge on RCTSpace years ago). Something had to be done.
I was originally looking for a back-up from RCT*Mart, since I was interested in hosting it. Asking for it on Reddit, I was made aware of RCTSpace’s impending closure by Daphne Preston-Kendall, who had gathered some information of her own and wrote a page about it. Even though RCTSpace had announced their plans to close down the site in October 2021, it was luckily still there when I contacted them (which was a struggle in its own right, as none of the public e-mail addresses still worked. Thankfully, jensj12 had one of the owners as a friend on Steam).
Having gotten hold of them, we set about moving RCTSpace, rct2.com and all the other sites hosted by it to my own server. This mostly went by without a hitch, although transferring the domains took quite a lot of patience with the hosting companies.
The next step was fixing up the sites. Especially rct2.com was in a poor state, with lots of links not working, most content having been cut for being outdated and the front page being blank due to broken integration with the forums. Additionally, most of the sites had encoding problems and some had TLS issues. All these problems should have been fixed, so the sites should work as well as they did in their heydays. I also opened up downloads on the forums to anyone, even without an account. After all, my goal was to preserve all the content, so making it easily accessible is key.
With the RCTSpace network polished up again, the focus shifted to adding other sites. Using backups from the invaluable Web Archive, I added the sites from ToonTowner, Lunatim and UCES. I also added the first version of rollercoastertycoon.com, as well as rollercoastertycoon2.com. These were missing some files (like scenarios and patches), but luckily I had most of these backed up. Some files were also backed up by various other websites.
I also managed to get hold of MidwestBoyInLA, the owner of RCT*Mart, through an old e-mail address that thankfully still worked. At the moment of writing (May 2022), restoring RCT*Mart is still a work in progress. By combining backups from the Web Archive and older backups from MidwestBoyInLA himself, I’m trying to get as much content back up as possible. The self-checkout already works.
I hope to add more sites in the future. There are three ways a site can be added:
All the content creators. Special thanks to rcthelp and Sambo from RCTSpace, MidwestBoyInLA from RCT*Mart, Daphne Preston-Kendall, and of course Chris Sawyer for creating the game in the first place. Also many thanks to the Wayback Machine, without it I could not have restored nearly as many websites.