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Rides That Were Ahead of Their Time

Benenen

Benenen

Hyper Poster
I was recently daydreaming about my time in the UAE and, more specifically, the quality of the motion based 3D dark rides there. Speed of Magic is very average, it's a fun ride but the story is dull, the sets feel empty and there's some jarring transitions. Avengers: Battle of Ultron is much better, the dark ride sections look amazing but there's not many of them. It suffers from the same issue as Transformers where if it was purely a traditional simulator then not too much would be lost. Justice League at Warner Bros is by far the best of the bunch and one of my favourite rides of all time. The screens actually interact with the physical sets and it doesn't feel like two separate rides stitched together.

Bit of a tangent but this leads into my point about how Spiderman at IoA was truly ahead of its time and still 20 years on has not been close to being bettered. It even feels more modern than Forbidden Journey which let's itself down by the jarring screen transitions and the dementor section which has a seaside ghost train vibe to it. Spiderman came at a time when both 3D cinemas and standard simulators were still a cutting edge novelty yet it combined the two to create something truly advanced.

In terms of coasters it was harder to think of something that was ahead of its time. Storm Runner was one of the first coasters to mix different styles up. Before 2004 most coasters were either multiloopers, one trick pony launchers or traditional hypers but Storm Runner manages to combine a launch, inversions and airtime to a standard that hadn't been achieved before. It's this style of coaster that paved the way for the modern Intamins, Vekomas, RMCs and Mack Megacoasters that we see today that do a bit of everything. I imagine I've missed some and there were coaters that did this earlier than Storm Runner so I'd be interested to hear what they are.

Anyway, enough rambling, over to you guys. What rides do you reckon were before their time?
 
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Maverick having been built in 2007 was way ahead of its time, considering how it still is a world-class coaster to this day and it took designers a couple more years to understand the true potential of launch coasters and how to utilize launches within layouts.

Nemesis might not have been much ahead of it's time, but it was spectacularly on top of it's time and introduced the era of world-class unique inverted coasters.

Colossos at Heide Park opened during a time when CCI still made coasters, which is kind of mind-blowing in itself. The Intamin Woodies are more technological showpieces rather than a sustainable design-advancement (that one I would give GCI with Thunderhead) but they do what they do insanely well.

Oblivion was not ahead of it's time, but ahead of it's model if anything. The design-requirements for a good dive coaster drop (aka insanely deep tunnel) were such an initial hurdle that it took 7 years of nobody taking a shot at it until it was scrapped entirely, justified by more elaborate layouts.
 
Winjas.

Insane trick tracks that were and still are genuinely impressive, I for one believe that these spinners trump every other Maurer spinner, and from my own personal experience remain the best spinners about. And to think they're 17 years old, work amazingly, DUEL and are just all round fun experiences. Insane. That's a ride truly before it's time because still, to this day, there is not another coaster of its type quite like it.
 
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Pirates of the Caribbean was surely ahead of its time, made in 1967. It was only four years after the first audio animatronic was introduced, yet, to this day, it's considered one of the greatest rides ever. Another ride ahead of its time was Pooh's Hunny Hunt. While Aquatopia would be another trackless ride to open about a year later, it's more of a complicated flat ride. Pooh would be the only trackless dark ride until 2013 when Mystic Manor opened.

As for coasters, I'd say that Kumba was ahead of its time at opening, though B&M and that style quickly took over the market. Intimidator 305 had a layout focusing on speed, intensity, and transitions back in 2010 when the B&M Hyper ruled supreme. It set the stage for other intense rides like Skyrush to open later. Lastly, Magnum XL-200 broke the 200 foot barrier while also delivering a great ride in an era when coasters were, let's say, unrefined. It's really amazing that it still rides so well today and stands favorably next to hypers made 20 years later.
 
Echoing Maverick here. One of the first rides that mixed a lot of elements that other coasters would have as their sole focal point: A launch, a beyond-vertical drop, inversions, ground-hugging and airtime. Even more than a decade later, its ideas still haven't been followed up to the same degree.

Drachen Fire is another contender. A really innovative layout, but a flawed execution: The tools required to design a smooth ride, and to manufacture it with the right degree of precision, had not yet been invented. Something similar could be said about Son of Beast. Its general idea was solid, but the construction was not.
 
+1 for Winjas. It's crazy to think it was built SEVENTEEN YEARS ago.

I'll be a little controversial and say Derren Brown's Ghost Train. The idea behind it, and the original concept, was a fantastic one, but the execution has been all wrong, and nowhere near enough time and money went into it beforehand. Genuinely believe that the original plan (different scenarios, etc) is a future for theme parks, but not for a while yet.
 
Winjas is a great shout. The theming and ambience of the ride feels very late 90s but the ride system and the way it flows is so advanced for 2002. On the Intamin and Zierer drop coasters there's large pauses between the train entering the drop track and leaving it. It feels so clunky compared to the Winjas trick tracks which are almost instant.
 
Yeah Maverick was one that springed to mind. Multi-launch coasters (for the most part) all the rage nowadays, and it's crazy to think that Maverick opened 12 years ago. Intamin, Mack, and Premier have expanded on Maverick and are incorporating a variety of elements that all act as an ensemble to make quality rides.

I also thought of Nemesis but now that I think about it didn't exactly do anything new that previous installments didn't. It just stands out as an impressive ride that still manages to be incredible after 20+ years. But before Nemesis we already have a few Batmans, Flight Deck, and Raptor and they were all doing similar things. Actually I'd argue that Raptor was ahead of its time as it was one of the first large B&Ms (I guess Kumba could qualify here as well), which is what they began to focus later on as opposed to smaller stuff.
 
I'm going to say Magnum on this one. Yeah, there were things like Moonsault Scramble that already went over 200 feet, but this ride was the first to actually use that height to its full potential. Arrow essentially took their mine train, scaled it up a fair bit, and created the basis for the modern hyper coaster.
 
When I think "Ahead of Their Time", I also think of tragic ending, a roller coaster who's concept outflanked it's technology.

This would make the likes of Drachen Fire, where the design vision was there, but antiquated technology proved it's downfall. But I think to put a broad-stroke out there, I'd propose Dinn Corp as a whole to be ahead of their time.

Charlie Dinn took his can-do attitude from the Beast construction, and set a course to build a series of large, aggressive wooden coasters. The only problem with much of this construction was design still relied on pen-and-paper for approach, as lumber was also cut on site, and pieced together as it always had been from the days of John Miller (not to mention using PTCs as well). Just as it was with Arrow Multi-Loopers, using old hardware originally designed for ~100 ft. drops and 50 mph top speeds proved difficult; PTCs have large clearance, which means rough rides at high speed. And to help account for this, Dinn Corp. used certain pacing techniques that caused pacing issues (aka slow, sluggish speeds) at the top of drops, making many of their layouts feel meandering and lackluster.

If Dinn Corp. were to have another go in this day and age, with improve articulated train design, better computer modeling, and aggressive layout design, I'd venture that Mean Streak, Texas Giant, Psyclone, and other now defunct rides would have been more well received over time. I'd even apply this to CCI coaster designs, such as Boss and OG Ghostrider - great rides in concept, that were held back by dated train design and track layout. Now that Ghostrider has received a GCI reprofile and Millennium Flyer trains from the 21st century, the ride is far more palatable.
 
I think X (now X2) was way ahead of its time. I feel like Arrow had been crawling when they decided it was time to fly. It's mind-boggling to think that their latest designs were a bunch of loopers when they took a leap of faith in the 4D concept. Alan Schilke was a visionary, and even with CAD tools, I guess the industry just wasn't ready for that prototype and neither were SF/Arrow when they thought that a 200 feet, 20 feet-wide rotating trains contraptions would work.
 
I would personally nominate Son of Beast as being ahead of its time. It was 218ft tall, reached 78mph, yet was made of the same components that wooden coasters half the size were made from. I'm unsure as to whether the structure and trains they used could deal with Son of Beast's layout and forces, as Son of Beast was said to be extremely rough and was known to have problems with its structural integrity.

I don't know whether you guys agree with me, but I personally reckon that if Kings Island had waited a few years and let a company like RMC or even Intamin with their prefab wooden coaster tech attempt Son of Beast, it would have been a far more successful ride.

Great topic idea, by the way!
 
oriolat2 said:
I think X (now X2) was way ahead of its time. I feel like Arrow had been crawling when they decided it was time to fly. It's mind-boggling to think that their latest designs were a bunch of loopers when they took a leap of faith in the 4D concept. Alan Schilke was a visionary, and even with CAD tools, I guess the industry just wasn't ready for that prototype and neither were SF/Arrow when they thought that a 200 feet, 20 feet-wide rotating trains contraptions would work.
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Heck, I think the world still isn't ready for the full-size 4D coasters. They may very well stand for decades as the high water mark of crazy coaster design. Hyper-Wing coasters with vertical drops, inversions, trains as big as buses with thousands of moving parts, two sets of rails, underground tunnels, and for good measure the trains hung below the track for portions of the layout. When they added flamethrowers to X2 it didn't really increase the insanity of the concept by that much. With the recent trends of building smaller-scale coasters that don't stick out as much on the skyline and don't cost a fortune to maintain, I wonder if we'll ever see more of those monstrous coasters. Perhaps S&S (and their clients) decided that the Free Spin concept dazzles guests sufficiently at a fraction of the cost, eliminating the need to go all-out insane like X2, Dinoconda and Eejanaika.

Another contender here, and an unexpected one at that: The Intamin Inverted Impulse coasters. They popped up like toadstools in 2000 and 2001, then one model was built in each of the two following years, and we haven't seen any new ones built since (one is stated by RCDB to pop up at Wanda Chongqing this year, but I haven't seen any news of it even in Roomraider's threads). Evidently, those coasters must have had a flaw that made it hard to find customers after the initial production batch was put into operation. But what the Impulse coasters had was a swing launch, a concept that hasn't really taken off until the past few years. The Impulse coasters did the swing launch and nothing more, but there wasn't really anything that could hinder the designers from building a full circuit like the Sky Rocket II. That model only came into existence a decade after the last Impulse coasters, and by now more of them have already been built than the Impulse coasters. I guess the change from LIM to LSM really made those swing launches more affordable, and putting the trains on top of the track probably made matters a little less complicated. SRII's have really taken off in recent years, and probably made Premier a decent amount of money, but they owe a lot to their inverted spiritual predecessors from Intamin.
 
Pokemaniac said:
Heck, I think the world still isn't ready for the full-size 4D coasters. They may very well stand for decades as the high water mark of crazy coaster design. Hyper-Wing coasters with vertical drops, inversions, trains as big as buses with thousands of moving parts, two sets of rails, underground tunnels, and for good measure the trains hung below the track for portions of the layout. When they added flamethrowers to X2 it didn't really increase the insanity of the concept by that much. With the recent trends of building smaller-scale coasters that don't stick out as much on the skyline and don't cost a fortune to maintain, I wonder if we'll ever see more of those monstrous coasters. Perhaps S&S (and their clients) decided that the Free Spin concept dazzles guests sufficiently at a fraction of the cost, eliminating the need to go all-out insane like X2, Dinoconda and Eejanaika.

Another contender here, and an unexpected one at that: The Intamin Inverted Impulse coasters. They popped up like toadstools in 2000 and 2001, then one model was built in each of the two following years, and we haven't seen any new ones built since (one is stated by RCDB to pop up at Wanda Chongqing this year, but I haven't seen any news of it even in Roomraider's threads). Evidently, those coasters must have had a flaw that made it hard to find customers after the initial production batch was put into operation. But what the Impulse coasters had was a swing launch, a concept that hasn't really taken off until the past few years. The Impulse coasters did the swing launch and nothing more, but there wasn't really anything that could hinder the designers from building a full circuit like the Sky Rocket II. That model only came into existence a decade after the last Impulse coasters, and by now more of them have already been built than the Impulse coasters. I guess the change from LIM to LSM really made those swing launches more affordable, and putting the trains on top of the track probably made matters a little less complicated. SRII's have really taken off in recent years, and probably made Premier a decent amount of money, but they owe a lot to their inverted spiritual predecessors from Intamin.
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You make a great point. I remember a prefab impulse invert in RCT2 that was a full loop - definitely ahead of its time!
 
Matt N said:
I would personally nominate Son of Beast as being ahead of its time. It was 218ft tall, reached 78mph, yet was made of the same components that wooden coasters half the size were made from. I'm unsure as to whether the structure and trains they used could deal with Son of Beast's layout and forces, as Son of Beast was said to be extremely rough and was known to have problems with its structural integrity.

I don't know whether you guys agree with me, but I personally reckon that if Kings Island had waited a few years and let a company like RMC or even Intamin with their prefab wooden coaster tech attempt Son of Beast, it would have been a far more successful ride.

Great topic idea, by the way!
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SOB also suffered from chronic mismanagement from Paramount during construction. They had hired RCCA to do the job, but ended up finishing the build themselves after contract dispute. I riffed on Kings Island's "can-do" attitude for building Beast in-house (which subsequently started the modern wooden coaster era); but SOB was the equivalent of sending a man to the moon by comparison, which showed in the structural failure of SOB through the years.

Great point too @Pokemaniac on Impulses. I think the ultimate downfall, as you said, was using expensive and cumbersome LIM launches, rather than the cheaper, smaller, more modular LSM that we see on virtually all magnetic launches in the last decade. Another pro of LSM is ability to launch on upward/downward curved track (LIM is bulkier and not able to accommodate as much, which is why we typically see it as a straight line launch), which also lets manufacturers build more compacted layouts as you can launch up an element, rather than have a dedicated, straight launch section. Would be great to see an Inverted Sky Rocket layout.
 
Schwarzkopf Shuttle Loops (Weight drop) were definitely ahead of their time! I'm sure that seeing a launched coaster in the 70s was certainly impressive, let alone a launched shuttle coaster that was able to traverse the course forward and backwards! The way it launched was innovative as well, using a giant weight attached to a cable to launch the train!
 
haunted mansion, soarin, spider man, maverick, poohs hunny hunt, pirates of the caribbean, possibly forbidden journey and shanghai’s pirates?
rides like those come to my mind!!

i’ll put more later with more roller coasters and descriptions for sone more
 
Super exciting thread!

My pick would be Harry Traver's Crystal Beach Cyclone:


Crazy tight turns, very forceful layout with agressive banking that wouldn't be attempted again on a wooden coaster until the Intamin Prefabs and Gravity Group's of the mid-00s.
This was from 1926!

Found this pretty decent recreation from Raptor Alex:
 
Coaster Hipster said:
Found this pretty decent recreation from Raptor Alex:
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Not only did it have a Quad-down, but also a quad-trick-track? That really was ahead of it's time!
EDIT: I also want to mention another ride that was FAR ahead of it's time; X/X2! The fact that Arrow was able to create a "wing" coaster with rotating seats is surely impressive, and it is, to an extent, still impressive to this day!
 
Okay, here's another weird one: Diving Machine G5 at Janfunsun Fancyworld in Taiwan, which opened in 2000.
"Wait a second", I hear you say. "Oblivion-in-a-hillside?!? What was so groundbreaking about it? Why not just mention Oblivion, then?"

Because this was the first Dive Machine to take the drop from the skies instead of into the ground. Although it came two years after Oblivion, it predated SheiKra by five years, and Vild-Svinet (the first Eurofighter) by three years, so it was built long before the whole "drop people vertically or more from a great height" gimmick became a thing on rollercoasters. While Oblivion was based on the (genial) concept of dropping people vertically into a deep hole, as a ride type it was kind of locked to that one thing. Train goes into hole, train comes out of hole, brakes, station, exit through the gift shop. G5 was built with a lot less digging in mind; instead, the whole coaster was lifted out of its hole (well, most of it, there's still a tunnel), and the drop became a high plummet from a tall structure and down to the ground. After the tunnel, the train soars up into another high element... and hits the brakes. Hey, I'm not saying this was SheiKra before SheiKra.

But still, it is a remarkable step between Oblivion and the modern Dive Machine. Although the layout is a mirrored clone of Oblivion's, it still was a neat proof of concept of the Dive Machine as a tall coaster and not just a deep one. Had the park had a little more of a budget, and B&M been allowed to do a little more to it, G5 might very well have been the first modern Dive Machine.
 
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