LONG LIVE THE KING...
So, here we are, after 9 glorious years, Six Flags has announced the closure and decomissioning of the worlds tallest rollercoaster, Kingda Ka. The news was sudden, and came as a controversial tradgedy to themepark fans all over the world as the closure was announced after the final rides took place (gee, thanks Six Flags) but this hydraulic launch giant was held close to many of our hearts.
Kingda actually was the first coaster that I had a bit of a love for, but to understand all this, first we need to take a quick dive back into the 90's and look at the coaster wars (bit of a daunting name to be honest)... Ok I lied a little bit, its '89, but its close enough right? Magnum XL-200. This beast towered up into the skyline at 62m tall with a top speed of 72 mph. Dubbed the worlds first hypercoaster, Magnum sqiftly rocketed its way to sucess, and sparked off a two decade long scramble as to who could build the next tallest, fastest and most impressive coaster, which of course, is known as the coaster wars.
The tallest coaster record soon made its way here to the UK, when the 1994 season brought us Blackpool's Pepsi Max Big One, raising the bar to 65m as the tallest coaster. It is worth noting however that despite its monsterous height, the big one was not the fastest in the world at the time - that title belonged to Kennywood's Steel Phanton (which has more recently been renamed to Phantom's Revenge) which hit a top speed of 85 mph. At this point, multiple parks across the world had comissioned new rides in an attempt to be crowned the next record holder.
Over the next few years, several rides opened and took the title of the tallest coaster within quick sucession of eachother, Fujiyama (Japan, 1996), Tower of Terror (Australia, 1997) Superman the escape (U.S.A 1997) and Millenium Force (2000) - Millenium Force pushed past a whole new limit, and cedar point now had the worlds very first giga coaster. Cedar Point had now held the records for tallest AND fastest coaster, with 94m and 93mph respectively. Even today this coaster is still considered by many one of the greats, however its record holding reign only lasted a mere three months.
August 1st, 200 brought Steel Dragon 2000 onto the rankings as the new #1, standing at a new record height of 97m and a top speed of 95mph.
In 20003, Cedar Point took the title once again, opening the worlds first stratacoaster, standing at 130m and hitting a terrifying 120mph with it's launch. This would be the same style coaster that six flags great adventure would opt for in 2005, with the opening of Kingda Ka. Beating top thrill by a mere 9m, Kingda Ka reigned as the tallest coaster up until its closure on November 11th this year, handing on its long standing record back to Top Thrill Dragster, now called Top Thrill 2.
After Kingda Ka, the battle for tallest rides subsided, with parks focusing on other records such as speed, or inversions, and deciding on favoring a unique ride experience over beating records.
As of writing this, the UK holds one record holder - The Smiler which holds the record for most inversions on a rollercoaster. Brittish parks however no longer even make the top 10 for tallest or fastest coasters in the world, with the tallest and fastest UK coaster being Hyperia at 71.9m and a speed of 80mph.
And so we bid farewell to the long reign of Kingda Ka, we can only wonder if anyone will swoop in now to try and reclaim the title for themselves...
oh, and speaking of coaster design - Kaiju, the coaster designing competition project I am running finally has a public google drive with assets!! Find them here- https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mlDypKznTo2TgaEUFo2KhZH859v30Fhd?usp=drive_link
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