RollerCoaster Tycoon: A Surprisingly Violent Series

The RollerCoaster Tycoon series is a great way for aspiring theme park designers to create their own parks, modify them, and possibly run them into the ground (seems to happen with my parks anyway).  It is loads of fun to be able to design and test your own roller coaster, as well as seeing how the park's guests (or "peeps" as they are called in RollerCoaster Tycoon 3) react to your masterpiece.

However, as innocent as this game may seem, it has a violent side, involving the mistreatment or death of the guests.  Bet you weren't expecting that twist were you?  And we're not even talking about a first-person shooter.  Let's take a look at some of the evil and hilarious ways you can ruin your guests' day as they visit your digital recreation of Action Park.

RCT 2 Guest Drowning

In RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, visiting guests to your theme park were completely at the mercy of your park's safety standards.  If you weren't careful they could die, leaving remaining guests to ponder if they should trust any of your rides.  Of course, if slaughtering your guests was your main goal, you could always speed up the process by picking up guests one-by-one and dropping them into a body of water, or by using the terrain tools to collapse a walk path into a man-made lake.  Eventually they'll get tired of treading water and sink down to Davy Jones' Locker.  I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I employed this tactic in one of my parks, if only to see how good my guests were at swimming.

Peep Bowling

In what I'm assuming was an attempt at making the series less morbid, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 did not let you kill peeps.  However, this did not stop sadistic gamers from trying to cause as much harm as possible to unknowing park guests.  Here is where Peep Bowling comes in.  Peep Bowling describes the act of aiming an unfinished ride's dead-end track directly at a walk path, causing the ride's trains to go flying into a crowd, scattering peeps this way and that.  One can only imagine what ESRB rating RCT 3 would have earned had it displayed graphic injuries to the peeps as a result of this sadistic pastime.

Roller Coaster Crashes

As you already know, park guests in RCT 3 put Superman to shame with their durability, meaning that coaster crashes in this game merely resulted in peeps being launched to all corners of your park.  However, in RCT 2 crashes were usually fatal, resulting in the ride's closure, and a lack of guest confidence in that ride until you made major modifications to it.  You could really get creative with these crashes in RCT 2, building coasters with no brakes that would allow trains to fly into the station and collide with trains that were being loaded.  You could even design coasters in such a way that the trains would collide midway through the ride, the sky's the limit!  Whichever way you planned it out, you were rewarded with spectacular explosions and high body-counts.

Death Coaster 1 has crashed!

Well, that about sums up the evil ways you can harm park guests in the RollerCoaster Tycoon series, who knew this game was so dark?  Have you guys ever attempted to destroy your guests/peeps in these games?