There are thousands of roller coasters on Earth… but there are very few that we can all agree deserve the title “legend.” From Millennium Force to VelociCoaster; Top Thrill Dragster to Lightning Rod; The Voyage to El Toro. Each of these rides is renowned for its speed or height; its launches or drops. But one of the world’s greatest roller coasters isn’t a record-breaker at all. Instead, it’s a one-of-a-kind ride born of a park’s need to keep its coasters quiet and hidden.
Spiraling out from underground caverns; looping through narrow, jagged canyons; plunging over rivers of blood… Is it a coaster, or a creature? That’s the question of NEMESIS – the game-changing roller coaster at Alton Towers in the U.K. This landmark ride invites you to climb aboard the exoskeleton and tentacles of a hideous creature – part deep-earth crustacean, but interdimensional nightmare – and brave one of the most intense, unusual layouts on Earth. Ready to ride?
In the beginning…
As you’d expect, the story of how an extraterrestrial, crustacean-like alien creature crash-landed at an amusement park in the British countryside is a story right out of the X-Files. Suffice it to say that even though the namesake Gothic estate its built around is an really-for-real, authentic, two-century-old manor house of the Earls of Shrewsbury, the story of the theme park that shares its name begins much more recently.
Even though the gardens and grounds of Alton Towers have been open to the public for recreation for the better part of the 20th century, it wasn’t really until the arrival of the legendary Corkscrew – an inverting Vekoma classic – in 1980 that Alton Towers began its evolution toward a true, modern amusement park.
In quick succession, the park added a host of staples: the Log Flume water ride, an Around the World in 80 Days dark ride, an enclosed Schwarzkopf coaster called The Black Hole, the Grand Canyon Rapids… Indeed, like many parks built “A.D.” (that is, After Disney World), Alton Towers was shaping us to be a quality family amusement park.
That was interrupted by a figure who saw more potential in the park than your run-of-the-mill amusement. Employed by the Tussauds Group (known for Madame Tussauds wax museums), attraction designer John Wardley had just successfully overseen the 1987 rebirth of the declining, London-area Chessington Zoo into Chessington World of Adventures – a more refined theme park that had seen visitation triple.
When word came down that Alton Towers was to be sold by the developer who’d owned it for decades, Wardley made it his personal mission to convince Tussauds to purchase the park. In 1990, for £60 million, Alton Towers became Tussauds’ newest property… and Wardley’s pet project. Wardley set out to supercharge Alton Towers as a true theme park, yielding the new Katanga Canyon area with the Runaway Mine Train roller coaster; the misty land of Gloomy Wood with its iconic Haunted House; and the beloved classic dark ride Toyland Tours. But that’s just the start…
Secret Weapons
Wardley may have had big plans for Alton Towers… but he quickly ran up against one of the park’s more unique limitations.
Theme parks come in many different forms. Some develop over a century or more. Some pop up, master-planned and perfectly formed, practically overnight. But they all have one thing in common: neighbors. By nature of reading this, you might daydream about living close enough to your favorite theme park to walk by after work. But you can no doubt imagine that not everyone appreciates their local theme park… or more to the point, the sights, smells, sounds, and traffic it brings. Such is the case with Alton Towers – a park otherwise tucked into a rural hamlet and historic estate, and whose neighbors would probably prefer that you not scream into their backyards, thank you very much.
It’s from the mindset that Alton Towers deals with one of the more unique restrictions in the industry: limitations on sound, of course, but also the requirement that no ride breaks through the park’s “treeline.” In other words, Alton Towers is a park without a skyline of steel rides and coaster track. Instead, all of its rides exist out of sight, tucked away among the trees.
For some, that might’ve been an excuse to stick to meager mine trains and fanciful family coasters. For Wardley, it was a personal challenge. And if you can’t build up, then the next best thing is to build down.
As the story goes, Wardley’s first proposal was to create a new area of the park themed as an off-limits military base, all built around a new model of roller coaster by Arrow – a heartline-oriented, Pipeline roller coaster – he planned to call “Secret Weapon.” Space limitations apparently yielded a draft layout that would’ve been pitifully short. As a result, Alton Towers began rock blasting to create man-made canyons in the park’s southwest corner, determined to work backwards from whatever canyons they could create to add more length to the concept – a revised “Secret Weapon 2.”
Luckily, Wardley managed to score a test ride on a prototype version of Arrow’s Pipeline model and returned with unfortunate news: after all the work they’d done to prepare the site, he found the pipeline coaster was “very slow,” “rather boring,” “looked cumbersome, and was very energy inefficient.” (Arrow never ended up selling a Pipeline coaster.)
But across the globe, something new was in the works. Through some industry connections, Tussauds apparently became aware that upstart coaster manufacturer Bollinger & Mabillard (B&M) of Switzerland was secretly working on a brand new kind of roller coaster for Six Flags Great America in Chicago – one where riders would hang beneath the tracks with their legs freely swinging like a ski-lift.
And unlike Arrow’s placid, swinging, family-friendly Suspended Coasters, the B&M Inverted Coaster was shaping up to be an intense, inverting thrill ride that just might change the game… (Indeed, the Inverted Coaster is inarguably one of the major revelations that lead to the Coaster Wars of the ’90s and 2000s.)
Six Flags Great America’s manager, Jim Wintrode, agreed to disclose information about the inverted coaster to Tussauds’ management and even invited them to the May 1992 opening of the coaster – Batman: The Ride. Instantly convinced of the model’s merits, Wardley returned to the U.K. and took another look at the blasted-out site once planned for “Secret Weapon 2.”
Though an off-the-shelf clone of Batman: The Ride would never work, it stood to reason that if Tussauds was willing to invest the cost of an incredibly custom ride, the world’s second B&M Inverted Coaster could be a landmark, and could catapult Alton Towers into the nascent Coaster Wars… Read on…
Through the latter half of 1992, “Secret Weapon 3” was officially in production. Working off of the existing canyons bored and blasted into the site, Wardley drew up an initial sketch of a possible layout – one that would see the coaster’s height contained to the tree level, instead diving and twisting through the park’s artificial fractures in the bedrock. From there, the concept was handed to iconic coaster designer Werner Stengel, who crafted it into a refined, realistic project.
With manufacturing underway, Wardley turned to the park’s then-marketing director Nick Varney to develop a personality and campaign around the ride. Together, they “realized that it would be fun to conceive the site as an excavated area where this hideous monster had been lurking for millennia.” Wardley told The Guardian. By the way – as he tells it, he and Varney then came up with the ride’s final name – Nemesis – while sharing a bottle of Southern Comfort whiskey.
Working backwards from the idea of a subterranean alien creature having been inadvertently unearthed, the duo conceived of the area within the park that the new ride would inhabit: a dystopian, post-apocolyptic space sealed away by the mysterious, militaristic Phalanx Operation, apparently at war with the alien creature’s poisonous spread.
Littered with the rusting remnants of a long-lost war, the Forbidden Valley would turn Alton Towers’ forested southeast corner into a land filled with the brain-like, fungal tentacles of the Nemesis creature, slowly decomposing the metallic remnants of humanity’s outposts. And all of the decay would be entered on the roller coaster itself – or, as it would appear to be, the calcified tentacles and talons of the massive, carnivorous creature.
Holland added, “We turned the central loading and unloading station into the creature’s body, with structures coming out of it like legs that disappear into the rock. This gives the sense that there’s more creature down there somewhere, hidden.”
As the (very, very ’90s) promotional video above explores, Nemesis wasn’t just a roller coaster; it was an experience. An elaborate backstory introduced the lore behind the creature – an insectoid, crustacean alien with a calcified exoskeleton, spider-like legs, and subterranean tentacles that have taken root throughout the park, strangling nearby fixtures with its pulsating, dripping, brain-like fungal touch. The result is that it’s difficult to classify Nemesis as “just” a “bare, steel roller coaster.” Maybe it was something new entirely.
“What we’re doing in twisted steel is what a scriptwriter does with words,” Wardley told the Guardian. “We’re entertainers – in the business of creating thrills and mystery. Like a good writer, a good designer won’t let people know what’s coming: it should be a succession of steadily building surprises.” Speaking of which… Ready to go for a ride? Let’s tackle Nemesis…
NEMESIS
The experience begins as we first reach the boundaries of the Forbidden Valley. We’ve clearly entered a place hostile to our presence. There’s something ominous about the way nature has flourished here – great, billowing trees; jagged, pointed stones that have burst through pathways; and a layer of rust that’s grown over the decaying remnants of what appears to be a war zone where we – humanity – lost.
At the area’s entrance, a great cannon points deeper into the valley, clearly having failed to neutralize whatever target it was aimed at. Instead, the rusted weapon is overtaken not just with age and rust, but with something supernatural… an almost-pulsating, brain-like fungus that’s burst forth from the ground like root-like appendages, swallowing the cannon with webs of tentacles.
The path continues on past corrugated steel sheds and into the woods, where we gain our first sight of Nemesis itself – serpentine steel tracks weaving in and out of the ground, rising and falling into great canyons whose once-rocky walls are covered in creeping vines and ivy. All’s quiet… until, with a muffled, gravely roar, it tears past – a roller coaster vehicle like none you’re likely to have seen before… Like a pulse of blood through the tangled tracks of its form, the train careens down into a cavern and disappears.
If you think you’ve got what it takes, the path to the left leads to the aged research and containment outposts of the Phalanx. There, catwalks will lead you over and under the rusted white tentacles of Nemesis. Descending into the pits of the creature’s winding path, you’ll cross a flimsy metal bridge suspended beneath the ride’s towering vertical loop, tucked into a narrow canyon. It’s a thing of beauty.
And yet, it’s grotesque. The queue ends at the creature’s core… the calcified, boney, fleshy body that’s supported by pincers and claws dug deep into the caverns surrounding. It looks as if Nemesis stood up, shook off centuries of rock, and then anchored itself above ground.
The creature looks partly of the earth and partly of space; like something pressurized in the deep ocean, or from another dimension entirely. It’s part biological and part mechanical. It can’t be determined in the track itself is part of its body, or some sort of structure meant to staple it down. Still, the rusted white steel weaves around it and – somehow like the fungus we know spreads underground – seems to strangle the surrounding hillsides.
Anyway, the only way to experience Nemesis is to step aboard… To hop up into that second-in-the-world inverted coaster train, dangling from the track with nothing below… to leave the station and align with the lift hill. The climb on Nemesis leaves riders just 42.7 feet over the English countryside (below the imposed “treeline” limitation) – just 18 inches higher than Magic Kingdom’s Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. Yet what follows is regarded not just as one of the most intense, but one of the best roller coasters on Earth, period.
A play-by-play of the ride could never beat the element-by-element description offered by one of the best coaster reviewers in the business, Jeremy Thompson of Roller Coaster Philosophy.
Suffice it to say, Nemesis is doubtlessly one of the world’s most clever, unique, and captivating rides. Its first drop is… well… it doesn’t really have one.
Instead, the ride dips off of the hillside its lift is built into – riders’ feet dangling inches over a gushing red river – and immediately twists into a wingover (B&M invert speak for a corkscrew). It levels out only long enough to bank into an intense helix, curling down into the ride’s iconic blasted quarries – toes at the rocky edge – before rising up and twisting overtop of the creature’s hulking body.
Then it’s gone again, disappearing into the pit, rising up for a hammerhead turn before descending. Nearly every other B&M inverted coaster places its inevitable vertical loop as the first element at the bottom of the first drop. Not Nemesis. Instead, it happens here, halfway through the layout. It bottoms out deep in a pit, loops skyward, then plummets back into the caverns.
Where most rides would meander through their last turns and twists, burning what’s left in their engines, Nemesis isn’t over yet. It rises up into the air, then droops back into the tunnels. It pops out again, only long enough for an in-line twist, with the coaster’s spine practically resting on the ground. “I put the end station not at the bottom, but halfway up,” Wardley told the Guardian. “This means that you swing way below the station in a big finishing dip, then come back up to the end.”
When it’s all said and done, Nemesis is only 2,349 feet long… but it’s one of the most relentless, action-packed, astounding thrill rides on Earth. Totally custom. Packed with personality. Jaw-droppingly unique. Absolutely effortless. It never slows – even for a second…
… That is, until the entire ride was demolished in 2023. On the last page, we’ll explore two high-profile “sequels” to the story of Nemesis, as well as the Phalanx’s mysterious closure of the Nemesis site and the surprise re-emergence of this alien thrill ride. Read on…
Spin-Offs & Sequels
Like any grotesque B-movie monster, Nemesis has inspired two “straight-to-video” sequels.
Located just outside of London resides another park owned by Alton Towers’ modern parent company, Merlin Entertainments. Thorpe Park is a little less storied than Alton Towers; agreeably, more “amusement” than “theme park,” and featuring many of the U.K.’s more explicit thrill rides. (That includes the new Hyperia, set to be the U.K.’s tallest and fastest roller coaster at 236 feet and 80mph.) There resides 2002’s pseudo-sequel and spin-off Nemesis Inferno.
Opened 8 years after Alton Towers’ Nemesis, Inferno might share a name and a ride system (a B&M invert) with the original, but beyond that, the two don’t have much in common. Inferno is a much more standard, by-the-books inverted coaster with a standard 95 foot lift over the park’s midway, a first drop leading into a vertical loop, and then a layout that includes a zero-G roll and a pair of interlocking corkscrews.
The only things that make Nemesis Inferno notably different from any other B&M inverted coaster around the globe are that it departs the station and swings through a short enclosed tunnel designed to resemble a volcano en route to the lift hill, and that it’s set in a rather lush, tropical, jungle-like setting. Fans have tried to invent mythologies as to what this volcano and the maroon-tracked ride has to do with Nemesis, but the hard likelihood is that that name was simply chosen to drum up interest and connect to a sister park’s ride of the same type, with or without the detailed backstory enthusiasts crave.
The second pseudo-sequel to Nemesis is in a much more fitting place: the Forbidden Valley right back at Alton Towers. Since Nemesis’ appearance in 1994, the Forbidden Valley area had changed quite a bit. In 1997, it gained The Blade – a swinging ship ride redecorated to match the area’s industrial fallout warzone vibe, appearing as a sort of rusted pendulum.
Along with it came Ripsaw – a HUSS Top Spin of twisted metal drills and militaristic warning stripes, all flipping over a pool of fountains, creating a sort of mini land of dark, industrial thrills built around the Nemesis creatures. (In 2002, Forbidden Valley gained a “sub-section” with the opening of a green oasis within the Valley, untouched by Nemesis’ reach, anchored by the prototype B&M flying coaster, Air).
But in 2012, Alton Towers returned to the Nemesis mythology with one of Merlin’s signature, mysterious marketing campaigns asking of Nemesis, “What lies beneath?”
Insiders quickly figured it out. Basically, Merlin had purchased a number of drop towers from the small Swiss attraction manufacturer ABC Rides to serve as the thrilling finales of the walkthrough family comedy / haunted house / living history “Dungeon” attractions they operate across the U.K. Rumors quickly asserted that Alton Towers’ new spin-off of Nemesis would be the same: an enclosed, relatively minor (about 20 foot) drop tower with riders boarding at the top, plummeting, then rising back up to exit.
The ride – dubbed Nemesis: Sub-Terra – may not have been a major E-Ticket, but it did expand the mythology of Nemesis and the mysterious, quasi-governmental agency – The Phalanx – dedicated to the creature’s containment. Entering their corrugated steel base, guests were ushered through chambers where operatives of the Phalanx set up the story: that we have been invited for a rare opportunity to view an egg apparently found deep underground that may have originated from the Nemesis creature, suggesting that it’s not alone.
A simulated elevator descent into the vast sub-levels of the Phalanx base then brought riders to the “deep-earth cavern” where four 10-person ride towers all faced inward toward the giant egg. But of course, as the spotlights on it flicker, the egg “cracks,” the “viewing chambers” plummet 20 feet, and riders find themselves in a subterranean cave where countless eggs are piled up, suggesting that we are truly in the early moments of an unstoppable takeover of Nemesis creatures. In a clear match of Disney’s Lost Legend: Alien Encounter, “back-pokers” and “leg ticklers” were accompanied by sprays of water, suggesting the hatched creature is already on riders’ tails. Then, the vehicles ascend once more as Phalanx operatives rush riders out the doors.
Given that it cashed in on the Nemesis name, fans were particularly perturbed by the entire experience ending in a just a two-story drop. Sub-Terra underwent waves of significant reinvestment over 2012 meant to add intensity to the experiences surrounding the ride itself. By the summer, the ride culminated in an entire “scare maze” style experience of live actors playing Phalanx military operatives seemingly zombified by the hatched Nemesis creature’s sting.
Even so, a high profile accident on the park’s Smiler roller coaster saw a major drop-off in attendance in 2015, and the still-relatively-new-Sub-Terra was an easy attraction for the park to mothball. It didn’t re-open in 2016, and by 2019, was off the website altogether, suggesting that a drop tower ride was just sitting in the dark in the closed off facility.
Sub-Terra made a surprise re-opening in 2023. (The elaborate pre-show has been significantly shortened to get to the point faster, and the scare maze on the back end has allegedly been walked back, creating a less intense and less-team-intensive “decontamination zone.”) Whether Sub-Terra will stick around or not, we don’t know. After all, it may have just been re-opened to add capacity during “The Year Without Nemesis”… Speaking of which…
Reemergence
The Phalanx doesn’t usually go on the record. But in fall 2022, announcements from the shadowy organization unveiled that Nemesis was closing. It might’ve made sense. We are, after all, approaching the 30 year anniversary of many B&M’s, and even the most trusty, reliable steel coasters can develop wear and tear after three decades. But any fears about the permanent closure of the legendary ride were short-lived.
On the ride’s closure date, we received another download of information from the Phalanx:
Long story short? The Phalanx’s investigation into Nemesis had found the need to safeguard the “complex beast” and “her well-being.” Yes, following in the rare footsteps of another ’90s B&M legend (Universal’s Incredible Hulk), Alton Towers had filed permits to conduct a major rebuild of Nemesis, including full replacements of nearly every section of track, and 89 of the 117 support columns bored into the hillsides and canyons blasted into the park three decades earlier.
Nemesis would rise again, and in as exact a duplicate of the original as one could imagine. Well, except for one significant and divisive change…
The new Nemesis would abandon the iconic white track with rust-colored detailing in favor of something slightly more evocative: stark black track with a painted, pulsing “vein” of blood stretching across the ride’s length. A new take on the mix of biological and mechanical that’s always defined Nemesis, the look is a major change, with major fans and major haters.
The black track will certainly be a very drastic difference for this ride and the environment is occupies. In some ways, it’s an embrace of the B-movie monster element inherent in the ride. But it’s also a significant edit to an iconic, recognizable ride, and an unusual mismatch to the still-boney-white crustacean creature that serves as the ride’s anchor and station. (Though it, too, may become black by time Nemesis makes its official reappearance in 2024.)
In any case, Nemesis wasn’t defeated. It’s merely in the midst of a metamorphosis. This iconic coaster won’t just live to see another day; it’ll come back better than ever, and ready for at least another 30 years of life. And by the way, pay careful attention to the process of Nemesis’ reemergence and re-marketing as a brand new, refreshed thrill. After all, we’re about to see a lot of rides born of the ’90s Coaster Wars reach their 30-year marks, when parks will need to get serious about upkeep or decide to cut their losses…
In the case of Nemesis, we’re lucky to know that this alien phenomenon will ride again, and that a landmark, flagship ride has been given an extension on life. An absolute icon of what we call the New Coaster Wars, this personality-packed, totally custom coaster infused with home-grown mythology and a completely-original IP is clearly a classic. And in Nemesis, we all have a ride that should either top our coaster counts, or our bucket lists.
