Frontier Developments has been hard at work on space sim Elite: Dangeous for some time now, but before that one of the company’s biggest hits was Rollercoaster Tycoon 3.
Planet Coaster, announced by studio CEO David Braben at E3 via a light-hearted trailer, is clearly an attempt to create a spiritual successor to RT3. Braben described the game as “the revival of a genre”.
Concrete details are rather thin on the ground aside from that, but the trailer shows a beardy hipster type piecing together a theme park, before getting a hug from a dinosaur mascot. Frontier’s history with the genre and talk of reviving a genre suggests that they see this as a real rival to Atari’s upcoming Rollercoaster Tycoon World, which is being handled by Area 52 Games. Considering the lukewarm reception that project’s initial gameplay footage received, they might be right.
Planet Coaster is expected to debut on the PC in 2016. Expect more information on the game to emerge in the next few months.
