Did You Know That RollerCoaster Tycoon Has Formula 1 Easter Eggs?

Today is the day that the 2026 Formula 1 season officially commences.

So let's talk about something that seems entirely unrelated, but instead may be one of the wildest video game crossovers you've ever seen. If you've known me for any length of time, you know that I'm a huge fan of RollerCoaster Tycoon and of racing games.

What if I told you that RollerCoaster Tycoon and Formula 1 have a had a crossover before? That's because the game has certain guest name cheats that occur when you rename a guest to a specific name. Three such guest name cheats happen to be related to Formula 1. Naturally, they involve the Go Karts ride.

Naming a guest either Jacques Villeneuve, Michael Schumacher, or Damon Hill will dramatically increase their top speed on Go Karts. A guest named Jacques Villeneuve will drive at a top speed of 27mph (43km/h), a guest named Michael Schumacher will drive at a top speed of 30mph (48km/h), and a guest named Damon Hill will drive at a top speed of 40mph (64km/h). For comparison sake, a normal guest without a name cheat will drive at a top speed of 20mph (32km/h).

Hill driving faster than Schumacher is somewhat of an oddity as in 1999 when the first game came out, Hill had only won a single championship, whereas Schumacher had won two. Hill retired after this season, and Schumacher went on to win three years in a row, meaning that when the second game came out, Schumacher had won five championships whereas Hill had still only won one.

These are also not the only guest name cheats that affect Go Kart speed.

Chris Sawyer, the creator of the game has his own name cheat. He drives slightly faster than the average guest at a speed of 23mph (37km/h).

Mr Bean (with no period) on the other hand, drives around at a snail's pace with a top speed of only 5mph (8km/h). Just like the Schumacher-Hill scenario, this one is also slightly questionable since Mr. Bean is known for driving his Mini Cooper like a maniac, and Rowan Atkinson has crashed his McLaren F1 multiple times.

Additionally, your Go Karts MUST be in "Race mode" for these cheats to work. If it's in "Continuous circuit mode", all the guests will drive as thought they were normal guests.

To test the effectiveness of these cheats, I built the Mega Track pre-built, set the maximum number of cars to 1 and let all 5 cheated guests and a normal guest take a ride on it, and timed the lap on my phone's stopwatch (and not the in-game timer because that's both inaccurate to real life and doesn't update the stats of the ride unless you change the ride's operating functions).

Here was the results of the following:

Do note that there is a slight amount of randomness to this because guests will intermittently change which lane of the track they are on, resulting in them taking some turns sub-optimally.

Are there any other cheats in this game? Indeed there are. Here is a whole guide of every guest name cheat in the game.

Project Sawyer

Now that I have you here and I have crosslinked to one of my RollerCoaster Tycoon guides, now is the time that I formally announce a huge long-standing project of mine on OutOfGames called Project Sawyer.

Project Sawyer is my goal to write over 250 different guides for RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 and 2.

These are guides that are going to encompass every aspect of the game. Every scenario, every ride, every gameplay mechanic, and explain them in-depth to have the best text guides for the game that exist. To put things less elegantly, I will essentially be on a quest to become the written guide version of Marcel Vos.

If/when I finish all of the RollerCoaster Tycoon guides, I believe that I would branch to also writing guides for OpenTTD and Chris Sawyer's Locomotion.

This will be an extremely long on-and-off process that will take literal years to finish, but I believe that with enough perseverance, I believe I will be able to complete it. You can visit the RollerCoaster Tycoon realm to get news updates for OpenRCT2 and new guides as soon as they are published.