Just thought id check in here as i do every few years. A select few may remember my username from back at the old atari forums from many a moon ago when i was but a teenager. And when forums were still a major part of the internet! And a few might have used a couple of my contributions to the community and might know my username from there. Hello!
RCT 1 Was the first game i really played on PC back in about 1999. I remember buying RCT3 when it came out only to realise the PC i had at the time was nowhere near good enough to run it. So after a few years i had a laptop that could finally run it and basically whiled away much of my early teens hanging out on the atari forums and playing rct3.
Well RCT3 got me onto 3d modelling in sketchup so i could create my own CS which on reflection was terribly modelled but then again i was a teenager using sketchup on a crappy laptop and using cracked photoshop CS1 to make textures. Ive been a professional 3D Artist for the last 8 years until i quit my job to go freelance in April of this year.
The last 6 months of my life has been an absolute dream come true for 14 year old me and ive thought about the old RCT days alot because ive been working with an amazing art department and designing a particularly magical portion of Universals upcoming Epic Universe theme park and my inner child has been losing his shit every day at how insane it is that i get to actually do this as a job after about 20 years.
Ive been designing and building a real life theme park in 3D, thinking about the theming and the story and the weathering and the logic of the world. Playing with fully rigged 3d simulations of dark rides. Honestly every day has been an absolute dream come true and its all thanks to RCT and the community that i basically spent my evenings in for the best part of my early-mid teens.
So from me to anyone that remembers or was around at the time, Thank you! And thanks for keeping this community here. I look back on those times incredibly fondly and its really great to still see a fair few semi-active usernames that i recognise.
SMM
