For decades, few rivalries could top that of the battle for the “Coaster Capital of the World” crown. Seriously, in the ’90s and 2000s – with the Coaster Wars raging and park operators at their hungriest for new thrills – it was anyone’s guess which park would tout having the most roller coasters on Earth any given season. That record was batted back and forth between Cedar Fair and Six Flags parks, each racing to build taller, faster, steeper, and – most importantly today – more roller coasters.
Now that the chaos of the Coaster Wars have largely subsided, it’s probably a good time to pause and look at the industry today. Which parks actually ended up with the biggest coaster counts? You may be surprised…
Honorary Mention: The 14 Coaster Club
Though our Coaster Count Countdown includes just five slots (with the fifth-ranked park containing a substantial 15 coasters), we have to at least give an honorary mention shoutout to the gaggle of parks that house the similarly-impressive count of 14 roller coasters. Look, you don’t get 14 roller coasters overnight. And almost by definition, having more than a dozen roller coasters means you’ve got many different types of roller coasters – another feat.
So before we begin with our formal top 5 countdown, we’ve got to applaud Kings Island (Ohio), Carowinds (Charlotte, North Carolina), Six Flags Over Texas (Arlington, Texas), Six Flags Great Adventure (Jackson, New Jersey), and Europa Park (Rust, Germany) that all manage to squeeze 14 coasters into their layouts. Not bad – and it means that any one of those parks could easily tip into the top 5, joining our current fifth place in the Coaster Count Countdown…
5. Six Flags Great America (15)
Six Flags currently operates 15 amusement parks across North America (though parks seem to come and go from the company’s direct ownership, operation, and / or branding every few years). Despite being the amusement park of many regional centers, most Six Flags parks actually tend to have rather modest ride lineups. Some still count Vekoma SLCs and Boomerangs as headliners. But a few have certainly been elevated into flagships with robust lineups and unique rides.
Six Flags Great America outside of Chicago, Illinois is certainly one of them, currently housing 15 coasters. (Two decades ago, that would’ve made it the unchallenged “Roller Coaster Capital,” snatching first place for its own.)
Great America doesn’t necessarily hold any record-breaking coasters, but it does house a lot of firsts. B&M’s first coaster ever, Iron Wolf, could’ve been found there (but has now been relocated to Six Flags America as Firebird). The first B&M inverted coaster, Batman: The Ride (above), is still a landmark and a bucket list attraction for many coaster fans. Same with Raging Bull, co-debuting with Apollo’s Chariot in 1999 as the first of B&M’s airtime-filled hypercoasters. In terms of more modern anchors, there’s the RMC Topper Track’ed Goliath and the S&S launched coaster Maxx Force, the B&M wing coaster X-Flight, and the S&S 4th Dimension Joker. It’s a very diverse and surprisingly quality ride lineup… but not nearly as well-known as the next park…
4. Cedar Point (15 + 1 in 2023)
If you were expecting Cedar Point to rank higher on this list… surprise! Yes, after being the big name in the “Coaster Wars” of the ’90s and 2000s and a longtime contender for the “Coaster Capital” crown, Cedar Point seems to have pretty much surrendered in its long-time pursuit to house more roller coasters than any other park on Earth. Of course, many coaster enthusiasts still cite the Ohio park as the “Coaster Capital” given that its lineup is downright legendary and packed with bucket list thrills.
Though its lineup is significant, there’s no need to beat around the bush… Without a doubt, Cedar Point is best known for being the first park to break through 100-, 200-, 300- and 400-foot height records with 1978’s Gemini, 1989’s Magnum XL-200, 2000’s Millennium Force, and 2003’s Top Thrill Dragster – each a renowned landmark ride in its own right. Add to that all-star lineup hits like the wild, experimental, bucking Intamin installation Maverick and the best-in-class RMC Steel Vengeance and it’s easy to see why Cedar Point is worth visiting for any coaster fan.
To round out the lineup, you’ve got legendary B&M invert Raptor, the graceful and iconic B&M wing coaster Gatekeeper, the oversized B&M dive coaster Valravn, and more. Of course, like many of the biggest players in the Coaster Wars, Cedar Point arguably overinvested in coasters in the ’90s and 2000s. It has zero dark rides, few flat rides, and a severe shortage of “medium-sized,” family-focused thrills. Which helps explain the need for the new Boardwalk area in 2023, bringing with it a fan-frustrating Wild Mouse.
It’s difficult to classify Cedar Point’s position in the lineup given that technically, Top Thrill Dragster was standing but not operating throughout 2022, and given the park’s announcement that the experience “as we know it” is being retired, it looks likely to stay that way in 2023. But the added note that “our team is hard at work, creating a new and reimagined ride experience” means that Dragster will probably return in an edited form, meaning we’re comfortable continuing to count it as SBNO in the park’s lineup for now…
Meanwhile, would you believe that one of Cedar Point’s own sister parks has actually grown to outrank the one-time “Coaster Capital of the World”?! Read on…
3. Canada’s Wonderland (17 + 1 in 2023)
Where once the idea of Cedar Fair allowing another of its parks to overshadow Cedar Point would’ve been unthinkable, Canada’s Wonderland has become an unexpected flagship for the company. Located in Vaughan, Ontario, the park is a unique mix of experiences and environments. That’s because – like its sister parks Kings Island, Kings Dominion, and Carowinds – it was a park built by Hanna Barbera’s Taft Broadcasting in the ’70s & ’80s, purchased by Paramount in the ’90s, then sold to Cedar Fair in the 2000s.
One of the first things Cedar Fair did was to supercharge each of the former Paramount Parks with a B&M hypercoaster, which was 2008’s Behemoth at Wonderland. The company then returned to each of those parks, bestowing them with a 300-foot gigacoaster, with Wonderland’s being 2012’s Leviathan. 2019’s B&M dive coaster Yukon Striker completes the trifecta of crowd-pleasing, marketing-friendly B&Ms that the park needed.
And from a purely coaster-centric point-of-view, they were needed. Wonderland’s coaster count may be bigger than Cedar Point’s, but it’s not nearly as iconic. Arguably, Wonderland has a “quantity over quality” issue, with a Vekoma SLC, Zamperla Volaire, Arrow multi-looper, and Vekoma Boomerang making up the rest of the park’s “big” coasters… In that way, Canada’s Wonderland is perhaps our next prescient reminder that bigger doesn’t always equal better, and that some parks with a half dozen coasters actually have a more quality coaster collection than some of the parks on this list…
2. Energylandia (17 + 3 in 2023)
If you’ve only just been hearing about Poland’s Energylandia here and there, it makes sense. The park is a relative newcomer, having only opened in 2014 with three coasters (the biggest of which was a Wild Mouse). Energylandia is owned by Polish businessman Marek Goczał, who also owns the Energy 2000 energy drink and the Club Energy 2000 nightclub. Apparently, amusement parks, energy drinks, and nightclubs are good industries to be in, because in its second season, the park added three more coasters (two family installations and a Vekoma SLC); one in 2016; three in 2017; two in 2018; three in 2019, and on and on, with 3 more planned for 2023.
So by the numbers, Energylandia has exploded onto our Coaster Count. That being said, rcdb.com ranks half of its (soon to be) 20 coasters has “family” or milder, meaning half of its coasters are relatively inexpensive, off-the-shelf, traveling-style Whacky Worms, Wild Mice, and Junior Coasters. But its headliners really are significant.
Abyssus and Formula are two of Vekoma’s next generation multi-launch coasters; Hyperion is a 269-foot tall Intamin coaster, rivaling Millennium Force in stats; and Zadra (above) was the first from-scratch RMC I-Box installation (versus a rebuild of an existing wooden coaster) and – at 206 feet – stands one foot taller than its sister ride, Steel Vengeance. The park’s 2023 lineup promises a Vekoma mine train, a kiddie coasters, and – most interestingly – a yet unnamed Vekoma tilt coaster.
In any case, it’s odd to consider that after duking it out for decades, Cedar Fair and Six Flags’ flagships were bypassed seemingly overnight by an 8-year old Polish park. Energylandia will tie for first place in 2023, and given that it tends to add somewhere between 1 and 3 roller coasters every single year without fail, it’ll almost certainly blaze past the current first place champion the very next year. Weird… Until then, though, the crown belongs to…
1. Six Flags Magic Mountain (20)
In the heat of the Coaster Wars, the only park to ever be a real contender to Cedar Point’s Coaster Crown was Six Flags Magic Mountain, near Los Angeles. Year after year, discussion boards of the ’90s and 2000s were alight with each park’s respective fans trading blows back and forth, debating how their respective companies would retaliate and ultimately “win.” Well, by the metric of quantity, we can now see that Magic Mountain went home with the gold, clearly out-building any other U.S. park and leading Cedar Point by no less than four coasters.
What’s especially interesting, though, is how little overlap there is between Magic Mountain and Cedar Point. Six Flags’ Valencia park houses an equally-diverse ride lineup made of some very interesting, one-of-a-kind rides. 1997’s Superman: Escape from Krypton was one of Intamin’s first major rides, and an experimental entry in the launched coaster story; X2 is an equally-ambitious 4th dimension landmark coaster and the final installation from classic coaster manufacturer Arrow. The park includes several B&M hits: a clone of the inverted Batman: The Ride, the stand-up Riddler’s Revenge, the floorless Scream!, the flying Tatsu…
But the park’s more recent, modern installations are equally as ambitious (and just as importantly, more custom and less off-the-shelf), like the terrain-following Premier launched coaster Full Throttle, the RMC single-railed Wonder Woman: Flight of Courage, and two mobius-tracked racing coasters – Premier’s launched West Coast Racers and the RMC’ed remains of an old racing woodie, now Twisted Colossus (above). It’s kind of cool that there’s practically zero overlap in coaster models between Cedar Point and Magic Mountain!
Quality or quantity?
In the ’90s and 2000s, the battle for the “Coaster Crown” was the A-Plot of many amusement park discussion boards. Year after year, operators battled it out to add more, more, more roller coasters, with accusations of cheating and lineup-loading and miscalculating running rampant on fan forums.
Now that the dust has cleared, maybe the takeaway from our Coaster Crown Countdown is that the number of roller coasters in a park… doesn’t really matter? Is a day at Magic Mountain better than a day at Cedar Point because it has 25% more coasters? Not necessarily. And in fact, a blind allegiance to roller coasters can end up with a park forgetting what else it needs – like shows, entertainment, dark rides, flat rides, landscaping, dining, and more.
You might prefer to ride any one of Busch Gardens Williamsburg’s nine coasters (each truly among the best of their type, and lovingly integrated into themed environments) than all twenty of Energylandia’s, right? So as the years pass, our coaster counting will continue… but as to whether it’s a primary indicator of a park’s success? Well… We’ll leave that to you to decide.
