Ep.302 – What A Ride: Building Theme Park and the Mind Behind It

About this episode

David and Rob explore the development of the game Theme Park and its impact on the gaming industry.

In 1994, Bullfrog Productions released Theme Park , a construction and management simulation that would go on to sell fifteen million copies and define a genre. In this episode, David and Rob trace the game's development from Peter Molyneux's initial concept through the year and a half of work that brought it to life, led by a seventeen-year-old programmer named Demis Hassabis working a gap year before Cambridge. They explore how Hassabis built the game's visitor simulation from scratch, why multiplayer was cut two weeks before release, and what it meant that Molyneux's bet on bright colors for Japan paid off exactly as predicted. They also follow the thread forward from Theme Park's role in establishing a genre to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry that Hassabis won in 2024 for work that began with the same questions he was asking in Guildford in 1993. Join David and Rob as they look back at the little people, the late-night spreadsheets, and the teenager who built them on today's trip down Memory Card Lane. Read transcript

People in this episode

Hosts: David Kassin, Robert Kassin

Topics covered

• game development
• simulation games
• Theme Park
• video game history
• programming
• Peter Molyneux
• Demis Hassabis

Keywords

• Theme Park
• Bullfrog Productions
• Peter Molyneux
• Demis Hassabis
• game development
• simulation
• video games
• Nobel Prize

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Bullfrog Productions

Books & works: Theme Park

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