Creating Coasters

Authenticity is key for Planet Coaster lead artist Sam Denney.

- Andy Kelly

One Christmas, a young Sam Denney received a Bump and Go: a police car with a flashing light that drove itself around, changing direction when it bumped into something. Most kids would be content with that, but an inquisitive Denney took the toy apart because he wanted to know how it worked. And, luckily, because he’d requested a soldering iron for the previous year’s Christmas present, he was able to put it back together again.

Today, his obsession with how things work continues: both in the motorcycle he tells me is almost always lying in pieces in his garage, and in his work on Planet Coaster, Frontier’s deep, customisable theme park sim. As I talk to Denney he builds roller coasters on a blank Planet Coaster park, zooms in, and explains how they work in incredible, excruciating detail. Most of it goes over my head, but his enthusiasm is strangely infectious.

One he builds is a faithful replica of a classic coaster that’s a hundred years old, and he focuses the camera on the red leather seats, taking great pride in the fact that you can see the ‘bum prints’ of the thousands of people who have ridden it over the years. But the detail in Planet Coaster isn’t just superficial: the mechanisms that actually operate the rides are completely accurate, and they prevent players from building anything that wouldn’t work in real life.