Chris Sawyer

Chris Sawyer is a Scottish video game designer and programmer who is best known for creating the Transport Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon series. He is also the founder of 31X, a mobile game development company.

Career

Sawyer first entered the games industry in 1983, writing games in Z80 machine code on the Memotech MTX home computer, and then the Amstrad CPC series home computer. Some of these were published by Ariolasoft, Sepulcri Scelerati and Ziggurat.

From 1988 to 1993, Sawyer worked on MS-DOS conversions of Amiga games and was involved in many projects, including Virus, Conqueror, Campaign, Birds of Prey, Dino Dini's Goal and Frontier: Elite II. He also contributed to the MS-DOS version of Elite Plus.

Sawyer's first management simulation game, Transport Tycoon, was released by MicroProse in 1994 and became a classic of the tycoon series of games. A year later, he improved and extended the game, giving it the title Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Sawyer immediately sought to create a sequel. However, while still working on the basic game engine, Sawyer developed an interest in roller coasters, and changed the project into what would become RollerCoaster Tycoon, originally called White Knuckle before release.^[1] After creating RollerCoaster Tycoon, he resumed work on the sequel for Transport Tycoon, but again postponed it to create RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. Upon completing that project, he resumed his work on the Transport Tycoon sequel, finally releasing it in 2004 as Chris Sawyer's Locomotion.^[2]

Sawyer also served as a consultant for Atari in the development of RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. In November 2005, Sawyer sued Atari, claiming that they had failed to pay him certain royalties.^[3] Sawyer and Atari settled out of court for an undisclosed amount in February 2008.^[4]

Sawyer wrote most of his games in x86 assembly language,^[5] using only the services of freelance graphics designer Simon Foster and composer Allister Brimble as needed.

In 2010, Sawyer founded 31X, a video game developer focused on mobile games. He created the company specifically to develop Transport Tycoon for iOS and Android.^[6] Jacqui Lyons serves as the company's executive producer.

On March 2016, Sawyer announced that he was working to port RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 to mobile platforms, also stating that the game would be written in C.^[7][8] The port, RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, was developed with the help of Origin8 Technologies, and was released for iOS and Android devices in December 2016, containing combined features from the first two RollerCoaster Tycoon games.^[9][10]

Sawyer has a degree in Computer Science and Microprocessor Systems.^[11]

Works

References

External links

• Chris Sawyer Software Development
• Chris Sawyer's profile at MobyGames
• Interview with Sawyer on Locomotion from GameSpot
• Interview with Sawyer from Eurogamer