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

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

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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.

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