Have you ever waited for a few hours to ride a popular roller coaster? Perhaps. But I can guarantee you that nobody has ever waited the entire life of the known universe. Well, unless you are the unlucky digital folks stuck on a new wild and complicated Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 creation from YouTuber Marcel Vos.
Released in 2002, Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 is a popular PC theme park builder that is still actively played and modded by players in 2023. But there are also purists who don’t play the game using fancy mods or open-source ports. And Marcel Vos, a popular RCT2 YouTuber, is one of these players who enjoys experimenting with the original 20-year-old version of the game. A few years back he made a coaster that takes 12 years to complete. But now his newest creation—impressively created without mods—is a working roller coaster that will take over 3 quinvigintillion years in real life to complete. Bring some snacks.
To pull off this amazing and hard-to-comprehend task, Marcel Vos first built a really, really, really long roller coaster that had almost no hills or dips. This means the coaster’s train moves very slowly around the entire thing. Then, when it reaches the end, it reverses due to specific ride options. That return trip takes even longer. And it has to take this very long journey seven times before the ride is considered finished. All in all, that ride takes over two years. That’s long, but not the universe-spanning ride the headline of this article promised.
That is achieved via 253 smaller roller coasters that are synced—using in-game options in RCT2—with the larger, very slow coaster. So once that big roller coaster finishes one ride—which remember takes two years—one of the smaller coasters will start its ride and that coaster is synced to a coaster that will then complete a ride, and so on and so on. What this all means is that by the time you reach the final roller coaster in this nightmare chain, it will take much longer than just two years to complete. In fact, the actual number is so large I can’t even write it all out.
Here’s a picture of it:
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Marcel Vos does a good job in the video demonstrating just how impossibly large this number is, pointing out that if you were to count a single atom every year of everything that exists in the known universe, you’d be done right around the time Vos’ “Universe Coaster’’ would finally be ending its hard-to-comprehend journey. Yeah, you definitely want to pack a lot of snacks before hopping on this ride.
If you want to see this bonkers Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 ride yourself, Marcel Vos has graciously released a file you can download and play on your own PC. Just be warned: You won’t be around to actually see the final ride finish its eternal journey through theme park hell.
