2024 Theme Parks Recap

And with that, the theme park season is officially over! With some of our favorite parks shutting their gates for the winter, let's take a look back into what happened this year and a look into our community’s favorite memories!

However we start with the park we lost this year…

Flambards in Cornwall has announced they will be closing their doors after nearly 50 years, this sad news came around as they retired several of their older rides and then announced their closure.

Moving onto more exciting news, we have had many different new rides open across the world!

The major one being Hyperia at Thorpe park, England. After holding the record for 30 years, Pleasure Beach Resort has lost the UK’s tallest coaster record to Hyperia. This new coaster sits at 236ft and boasts speeds of 81 mph, and a never before seen element called an outer bank airtime hill! Statistics show that Hyperia holds 14.8 seconds of airtime, floating you out of your seat for the majority of the ride! This coaster didn't come without its issues, rolling back twice in its opening year and multiple breakdowns and a lot of down time overall. We still love this new coaster regardless.

Other news in the UK, we’ve had other rides open, Vertigo over at Adventure Island, what makes this ride interesting is that the park allowed the public to choose between four names of the new drop tower.

Over at Drayton Manor, Gold Rush opened, the first Intamin Lift and Launch coaster in the UK, this ride features two different experiences and layouts mixing forwards and backwards launches, this coaster is part of the new ‘Frontier Falls’ area, which has replaced the parks former drop tower called ‘Apocalypse’. Drayton Manor is showing the UK that not all rides need to be extremely thrilling, and can be catered towards the family audience.

Keeping with the family orientation, down in Windsor, Legoland opened a dueling coaster called ‘ Minifigure Speedway’; this coaster has two parallel tracks, ‘Team Legends' and 'Team Allstars’. This coaster is unique as part of the theme, the resort has built the largest Lego Minifigure in the world, called Roxie.

Staying with Merlin attractions, Alton Towers took 2023 to completely overhaul a fan favorite, ‘Nemesis’ into ‘Nemesis Reborn’. This has been long awaited by people who visited in 2023 as they had an observation platform overlooking the site. Early 2024, we saw it open to the public, and it was met with positive waves of emotions and happiness to see the ride still operating and continuing to operate for the future. The new paint scheme makes the ride feel more sinister and monster-like. The station itself was overhauled to have a fully LED monster eye that fans can go right up to and have photos taken in front of. Not just the ride has been overhauled though! The entire Forbidden Valley area has been transformed to feel like a special facility to keep Nemesis captured in. Also announced in 2024, another new ride has been announced widely predicted to be known as ‘Intoxicator’, also predicted to be a top spin model flat ride. We saw work begin in mid 2024 and work continues now.

Again, more Merlin attractions, after an entire year of work, in Scarefest, Alton Towers have finally reopened Hex! It has been suffering with issues and was scheduled to open earlier, but sadly never happened, they continued to find more issues and eventually it reopened on the 5th of October! The opening was not very smooth though, having more issues again, and now has surpassed the issues and remained open

Continuing on with refurbs, across the pond, Cedar Point have been hard at work with Zamperla to revamp Top Thrill Dragster, into Top Thrill 2, sadly, it only remained open for 8 days, until they discovered the coaster trains has issues, sadly, the park announced it won't be reopening until 2025.

Staying over in the USA, at Disney World Florida, the long awaited Splash Mountain refurb has been completed, transforming into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, people have been missing the original Splash Mountain, many people have been welcoming to the new theming.

Overall, we may have not mentioned everything that happened but, 2024 was a very good year overall for the theme park industry. We are very optimistic for the future and look forward to what 2025 holds in store!!