Right at the intersection of art and science resides the roller coaster…
And though we’ve devoted in-depth features to many – from Son of Beast to the Big Bad Wolf; Expedition Everest to Top Thrill Dragster; Space Mountain: De la Terre à la Lune to Volcano: The Blast Coaster – in the opinion of many of the industry’s most devoted fans, the ride that most magnificently combines art and science in one is MILLENNIUM FORCE, the landmark gigacoaster at Cedar Point.
Rising 300 feet over Ohio’s Lake Erie, Millennium Force is the crown jewel of the “Roller Coaster Capital of the World”; the end-all-be-all of the ’90s “Coaster Wars”; the “Best Steel Coaster in the World” year after year; and true to its name, an industry pivot point perfectly bridging the gap between past, present, and future. Even having been surpassed in height, drop, speed, and length, this landmark ride is a bucket list topper for coaster enthusiasts from around the globe.
Though Cedar Point promised in 2000 that “The Future Is Riding On It,” the story of Millennium Force really is the story of the steel roller coaster and its half-century evolution… And that’s where our ride starts…
The Steel Age
You have to remember that in the grand scale of humanity’s search for amusement, the steel roller coaster is a relatively new invention. By any count, the first modern, tubular steel-tracked coaster was Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds – a 1959 addition to the then-four-year-old park. Even still, it wasn’t until the mid-’60s that “mine train” coasters began to proliferate across amusement parks; not until 1975 that Knott’s Berry Farm’s Corkscrew (left) turned upside down; not until 1978 that Cedar Point’s Gemini finally offered a drop of over 100 feet, proving that this still-new “steel coaster” medium could build taller, faster, and steeper than anyone had imagined before.
For that reason, we can’t lay the foundation for Millennium Force without acknowledging that the rise of the steel coaster began with Arrow Dynamics – a Utah-based ride manufacturer who practically dominated the industry for decades, including each of the installations mentioned above from Matterhorn to Gemini.
In fact, the story of the first three decades of the steel coaster is basically the story of Arrow: of the “mine trains” that proliferated through a generation of parks in the ’60s; of the Double Loops and Corkscrews that became standard in the ’70s; then, of the swinging suspended coasters and daunting “multi-loopers” that became mainstays of midways in the ’80s. Arrow laid the groundwork for countless innovations – and their coasters today remain the foundation of countless amusement parks across the country.
But at the intersection of the steel coaster’s rise and Arrow’s story stands one park, one ride, and one man who set the stage for Millennium Force. Cue the ’80s synths.
Magnum XL-200
Cedar Point, like many classic amusement parks, is old. Like, seriously old. Tracing its opening to the Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant just five years after the end of the Civil War, the 1870 park on Ohio’s Lake Erie began like many amusement parks did: as a lakeside bathing beach that gradually added a bathhouses, a dancehall, a bandstand, and – by 1892 – a roller coaster. (The pre-electric, gravity-powered Scenic Railway reached sensational top speeds of 10 miles per hour.) It wasn’t even until 1911 that a causeway was constructed to the island, turning the Victorian picnic park from an island to the peninsula we know today.
Speaking of which, to visit Cedar Point a hundred years later (left) would be to see a modern park filled with rides of its time – midways littered with log flumes, classic wooden coasters, historic hotels, and more. More to the point, though, Cedar Point was perhaps a poster child for the story of the roller coaster as told through Arrow’s innovation. The park had its dutiful ’60s mine train (1969’s Cedar Creek Mine Ride), its ’70s looper (1976’s Corkscrew), and an Arrow suspended coaster (1987’s Iron Dragon) all still reigned over by 1978’s Gemini.
But Cedar Point of the ’80s also had a secret ingredient: Dick Kinzel.
Born in nearby Toledo, Kinzel had practically been raised at Cedar Point. According to Tim O’Brien’s biography, Dick Kinzel: Roller Coaster King of Cedar Point, Kinzel began his employment with the park as a seasonal worker, then as a food service supervisor before – in 1975 – “begging” for the job of Director of Operations for the park. Kinzel was there for the groundswell of revenue surrounding the record-breaking opening of Gemini in 1978, so when he returned to Sandusky after a stint leading Valleyfair as the newly-elevated CEO of Cedar Fair in 1986, Kinzel set out to recreate that magic.
Whereas Gemini had cost a staggering $3.7 million, Kinzel now turned to the board with an almost-unthinkable request: a $7 million allowance to win back the coaster height record (which would be stolen by Six Flags Great America with 1988’s 170-foot-tall Shockwave).
“I just wanted the highest coaster in the world,” Kinzel remembered in a 2017 retrospective with the Sandusky Register, with his sights set on reaching 185 feet. But allegedly, a board member asked, “How much more would it take to get to 200?”
Magnum XL-200 opened May 6, 1989 – the world’s tallest, fastest, and steepest roller coaster… But more importantly, to Kinzel’s thinking, the first ever to top that once-thinkable 200-foot height barrier; the world’s first “hypercoaster.”
Kinzel called those “last 15 feet” the best investment in Cedar Fair’s history. “People would actually say it was worth the price of admission alone,” Kinzel said. “I honestly think it was the best decision the park ever made.” It makes sense. No coaster remains the “tallest” or “fastest” or “steepest” for long, but the first? That’s one for the record books.
Even if Magnum is, today, half the height of Cedar Point’s tallest coaster, it’s still a landmark. Its red-orange track blazes alongside the northern edge of Cedar Point’s beach, racing perpendicular to the surf in continuous, arcing airtime hills and metallic tunnels. Though today, its age betrays it (Arrow’s ramp-like hills and trim-braked turnarounds feel significantly different than the precision-calibrated, flowing airtime hills of a B&M hypercoaster, for example), there’s no question that it remains a bucket list ride for coaster enthusiasts.
Magnum is an icon not only in the park’s history, but Arrow’s. After all, in retrospect, Magnum sort of topped out Arrow’s capabilities. Though the manufacturer had literally created the modern standards of a thrill ride, the industry was standing on the precipice of a massive shift that would leave Arrow behind and introduce the designers of the 21st century…
The Coaster Wars
No one could’ve predicted in the late ’80s that everything was about to change. But right about then – just as the concrete footers of Magnum were taking shape along Cedar Point’s beach – the first domino en route to the Coaster Wars had been tapped.
It started when – in 1988 – two prominent engineers from Giovanola (a Swiss parts supplier who worked with coaster manufacturer Intamin) decided to go it alone, opening their very own engineering firm with just four employees on the payroll. Suffice it to say, Walter Bolliger and Claude Mabillard weren’t looking for work for long. Right away, they were approached by the engineering team at the recently-rebranded Six Flags Great America near Chicago with a proposal to create a next-generation version of the stand-up coaster that the duo had developed for Giovanola.
The result was 1990’s Iron Wolf – like so many B&M coasters, not the first of its kind, but the most definitive form. After all, Iron Wolf (above) debuted what would become B&M signatures, like four-abreast trains, thick-spined track, cylindrical columns, that iconic “pre-drop” dip, and precisely-engineered layouts packed with complex inversions… a substantial divergence from Arrow’s equivalent mega-loopers of the age, and certainly from TOGO stand-up coasters.
Of course, what really put B&M on the map was their return to Great America two years later with a whole new concept coaster: the inverted Batman: The Ride (above). Again, though Arrow’s suspended coasters had dangled swinging “buckets” beneath the track, B&M’s innovation had allowed for ski-lift style trains where riders – legs dangling! – were rocketed through fluid aerial manuevers and inversions.
Obviously if we jump ahead, it’s easy to see B&M’s two debut rides were the start of something substantial. The inverted coaster, in particular, became the headliner du jour of the ’90s; the must-have thrill ride that would proliferate across coaster parks, yielding wave after wave of B&M coaster designs. But especially there, at the dawn of the ’90s, the first wave of B&Ms standing alongside Arrows must’ve been like color TV supplanting black-and-white; a mind-blowing, unimaginable redefinition of what roller coasters could look like, feel like, and do.
In retrospect, it’s almost hard to imagine just how radically the amusement park industry changed between 1989 and 1999, and how quickly B&M overcome Arrow’s multi-decade reign.
Sure, Arrow would return to the “hypercoaster,” stealing the “world’s tallest” record from its own Magnum XL-200 with 1994’s Desperado, which was itself dethroned by another Arrow hypercoaster – Blackpool Pleasure Beach’s Pepsi Max Big One – just a month after. And for a while, it might’ve seemed that – just as Arrow mine trains and double loopers had become park standards in the ’60s and ’70s – Arrow hypercoasters would gradually make their way to parks across the world.
But this time was different. The rules had been rewritten, as evidenced by B&M’s own take on the 200-foot genre – 1999’s Apollo’s Chariot at Busch Gardens Williamsburg. As they’d done with the stand-up, inverted, and sitting coaster, B&M’s hypercoaster was distinctly of the next century – its precisely-designed, effortlessly weightless, high-capacity, high-reliability, and buttery-smooth out-and-back airtime hills with raised, open trains and efficient loading… such a vast divergence from Arrow’s pre-computer, herky-jerky, soldered-on-site installations.
So is it any surprise that for serious thrill parks, the ’90s was an era of unthinkable expansion. Corporate owners like Cedar Fair, Six Flags, and Paramount Parks swept across the nation, gobbling up independent parks or small-scale operators like Pac-Man. Frankly, their big-budget financial backing and corporate connections were needed to supercharge parks with a tidal wave of thrills, powered by headlining record-breakers by B&M.
The Coaster Wars had arrived. Across the industry, coaster counts exploded. The arms race accelerated through the decade, for better… and for worse.
“For worse,” for example, the reverberations of this era can still be felt in every copied-and-pasted Vekoma SLC; in every over-expanded Six Flags that can’t seem to get past decades of reliance on low-cost season passes and marketing focused exclusively on thrill-seeking teenagers; in each Cedar Fair park that boasts a dozen coasters, but zero dark rides; in the decade of recuperation each park has needed to make up for ten years without any flat rides, family attractions, or theming; in the parks that didn’t survive the era because they couldn’t muster the finances to compete with corporate-backed chains whose headline-grabbing coasters drew visitors like a fly zapper…
We say all of that to convey to you just how accelerated this era was, and how ravenously hungry operators were to turn family parks into flagships; to build taller, faster, and bigger than the competition by any means necessary, with saturated steel columns rising like redwoods among expontentially-expanding park skylines.
And “for the better,” this era of breathless expansion, intense competition, and rising new players in the industry served as a stellar alignment between Cedar Point, Dick Kinzel, and a rising ride manufacturer willing to do the unthinkable: shatter the 300-foot height record. Read on…
The Trouble With 300
In his memoir Always Cedar Point, the park’s long-time Vice President and General Manager John Hildebrandt recalled, “What Dick wanted was a ride that would surpass Magnum but would carry the same genetic code: steel structure, tubular steel track, no inversions, high capacity, world class stats: highest, steepest, fastest.”
B&M, he said, was never considered, as at that time, as their three models (standing, inverted, and sit-down) all focused on compact layouts packed with inversions. (Kinzel couldn’t have known that B&M was actually in development of its first airtime-filled, inversion-free hypercoasters – Apollo’s Chariot at Busch Gardens Williamsburg and Raging Bull at Six Flags Great America – that would both debut in 1999. Of course, even if B&M had been contacted, their calendar was already full with six coasters debuting in 2000. Welcome to the Coaster Wars!)
As Coaster101’s fantastic history of the ride that became Millennium Force tells it, the first response to Cedar Fair’s request for proposals was from D. H. Morgan Manufacturing – a California-based firm started in 1983 by the son of Arrow’s founder.
Morgan’s Arrow-like coasters had come through for Cedar Fair before, including three hypercoasters (Valleyfair’s Wild Thing, Dorney Park’s Steel Force [above], and Worlds of Fun’s Mamba, built between 1996 and 1998, respectively). So it made sense that Morgan was a shoe-in for breaking through the 300-foot ceiling at Cedar Point…
Of course, it wouldn’t be easy. A 300-foot Morgan would test a park’s space and riders’ time. Think about it: Magnum’s 30°-ascent lift hill covers a horizontal distance of just over 400 feet to reach its 205 foot height, and takes 90 seconds to reach the summit. The prospect of a coaster adding an additional 100+ feet of vertical lift would mean a lift hill that takes up tremendous real estate, uses a whole lot more steel, multiplies the stress on a chain, and drastically lowers the ride’s capacity.
It was possible, but it wouldn’t necessarily be pretty. As Hildebrandt tells it, Morgan’s as-good-as-it-gets offer was “basically a done deal” until a black horse entered the race.
Intamin
In the churning cauldron of stew that many amusement parks became in the Coaster Wars, there’s no doubt that B&M coasters were the potatoes – hearty, trusty, reliable, and even comforting. Whether stand-up, inverted, sitting, or hyper (or, into the 2000s, dive or flying or wing or…), these coasters rolled out across the industry as attention-grabbing headliners that were big, flashy, thrilling, marketable, and – most importantly – sure bets. (Today, B&M is sometimes criticized by coaster aficianados for gradually skewing toward general appeal over innovation; for being too agreeable, with less intensity in each subsequent installation as its rides become giant, floaty, and unaggressive.)
That’s significantly different from the firm that’s often cited as their counterpart: INTAMIN Rides. It makes sense. Though Intamin’s first installation dates back to 1979 (ironically, Cedar Point’s Junior Gemini – a 19-foot tall kiddie coaster next to the previous year’s record-breaking 100-footer), bolstered by the Coaster Wars, the manufacturer found its niche in the mid-90s.
Intamin’s first real headliner of the era, for example, was Six Flags Magic Mountain’s Superman: The Escape (left). Playing with prototype launch technologies and extreme statistics that saw the ride’s opening delayed by a whole year (also an Intamin signature), the ride used cutting edge linear synchronous motor (LSM) electromagnetic technologies to send riders screaming down a launch track at 100 miles per hour, pulling up into a vertical climb, and suspending weightless before falling backwards in a high-speed return to the station.
Over the late ’90s, Intamin gradually phased out the nondescript family coaster models it had supplied for decades and began to become a serious player in the arms supplying of the Coaster Wars… the manufacturer most willing to push the boundaries in pursuit of unique, record-breaking experiences that could plus parks with brochure-ready rides.
From their own sleek hypercoasters (1999 & 2000’s two Superman: Ride of Steel installations at Six Flags Darien Lake and Six Flags America) to 1998’s much-duplicated launching Impulse coaster with twisted vertical spires, Intamin attractions had all the modern smoothness of B&M, but with a fiery, feisty twist; the spiced meat of the stew, if you will, introducing launch technologies, shuttle coasters, and extreme statistics that reliable B&M wouldn’t touch.
Perhaps the best example of all things ’90s Intamin would be the Lost Legend: VOLCANO – The Blast Coaster at then-Paramount’s Kings Dominion – the world’s first launched, inverted coaster, exploding riders vertically out of a fire-belching mountain… and of course, a ride plagued by downtime, with a season-delayed opening itself, years of half-loaded trains, decades of tumultuous operations, and finally, a 2018 removal after just two decades of life.
Long story short, Intamin came out the gate as just the kind of bold, experimental manufacturer whose dabbling in prototype technologies could both combat B&M’s widely-appealing new thrill concepts and be a complement to them in the most ambitious of parks. (That kind of remains Intamin’s niche: technology-fueled, cutting-edge, and often-temperamental rides up to and including the headlining additions of Hagrid’s seven-launch, switch-track, freefall-drop Motorbike Adventure and the ultra-compact, multi-inversion, multi-launch Jurassic World VelociCoaster.)
So even as the public roiled with rumors of a 10-inversion B&M coaster coming to Cedar Point as their next big thing, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see that – at this pivotal moment at the height of the Coaster Wars – there could be no other way to go than up, no where but Cedar Point to make it happen, and no one but Intamin to make it real.
Preparation Y2K
Allegedly, Intamin was the only other ride manufacturer besides Morgan to respond to Cedar Fair’s 300-foot coaster request… And in addition to undercutting Morgan’s quoted price by “several million dollars,” Intamin was willing to pack the coaster of the new millennium with fittingly 21st century technology.
According to Tim O’Brien’s aforementioned biography of him, Kinzel recalled that Intamin’s proposal checked two boxes that Morgan’s couldn’t: “how to get the cars to the top of the 300 foot summit quickly and how to come up with a more durable material for the wheels.”
For the former, Intamin’s giga would solve the problem with what you might call the firm’s signature “innovative risk.” In this case – increasing the ride’s lift hill from a 30° to 45°. It may not seem like much, but the steeper ascent would allow Intamin’s ride to reach the 300-foot peak in a smaller footprint than Magnum’s 200-foot summit. Though such a proposal might suggest adding even further stress to the ride’s chain lift, that was the other secret ingredient in Intamin’s plan: its giga coaster wouldn’t use a chain lift at all. Instead, Intamin’s ride would use an equally-tested technology – albeit, one that hadn’t been used in this way before: an elevator lift cable.
On a standard roller coaster’s lift hill, a continuous chain is pulled through a metal trough in the track’s center, driven by a motor. When a train engages with the lift hill, a fixture attached to the bottom of each train called a chain dog folds down until it ker-klunks into a slot on the chain, drawing the train up the hill. The click click click click riders hear are one-way-folding, anti-rollback latches that – if the chain were to disengage – would keep the train from plummeting backwards. At the hill’s peak, the chain rolls over a gear and returns back to the base of the lift. There, the lift dog is disengaged, allowing gravity to take over as the train rolls down the drop.
But on Intamin’s giga, a multi-wheeled catch car attached to an elevator cable would physically lock onto the train’s underbelly while riders are loading. Then, with the same flywheel technologies that power any office building’s elevator, that cable would swiftly, smoothly draw the train directly out of the station, briskly pull it up the lift, guide the train right over the top, then be lowered back into the station to grab the next train. Voila!
Whereas a standard lift hill can generally travel 7 feet per second, Intamin’s cable lift could move trains at 22 feet per second, essentially whisking guests to the 310 foot height of the ride in under 25 seconds.
Intamin’s proposed layout would be a modified out-and-back, creating a T shaped ride with the coaster’s station and lift hill neatly fit between Lake Erie and the park’s existing Frontier Trail midway, with a bulk of the ride taking place on a small island encircled by the park’s Paddlewheel Excursions boat ride. Only the park’s Ferris Wheel would need relocated to make way for the coaster’s final turn and brakes.
According to Coaster101, Morgan reviewed Intamin’s design, and countered that their proposed ride layout would have “way too much energy coming into the station” and that their designers would need to “just put a bunch of brakes to scrub it off.” Regardless, Cedar Fair selected Intamin’s design, committing $25 million to the construction of the first ever 300-foot tall full-circuit coaster.
With rumors running rampant and discussion boards alight with possibilities, on July 2, 1999, Cedar Fair officially filed a trademark for the name… MILLENNIUM FORCE. A week later, blazing blue Intamin track began to arrive at the park… but no one was quite sure what, exactly, Cedar Point’s 21st century coaster would be…
Then, on July 22, 1999, it became official: Millennium Force would debut in 2000 as the world’s tallest full-circuit coaster. At 6,565 feet, it would also rank among the longest roller coasters on Earth, with record-breaking gravity-driven speeds of 93 miles per hour. – just one of the ten world records it touted being a part of.
But in keeping with Kinzel’s experience with Magnum, more importantly, the park that had introduced the world’s first 100- and 200-foot tall coasters would now, unthinkably, just a decade later, shatter the 300-foot height barrier. Millennium Force would be the world’s first and only gigacoaster, forever cementing Cedar Point as the gravitational center of the Coaster Wars and “The Roller Coaster Capital of the World.”
Ready to go for a ride?
Millennium Force
It’s one thing to hear a radio ad or see a television commercial hyping up Millennium Force; to see its concept art in the newspaper; to hear people talk about the world’s tallest roller coaster and the inevitable “would you or wouldn’t you?” that its staggering statistics ellicit.
But it’s something else entirely to arrive on the Cedar Point causeway and see Millennium Force looming over the park’s skyline. Even today – surpassed by its own younger cousin – Millennium Force is an icon. Its sleek first hill rising against the morning sky is a beacon for arriving coaster enthusiasts; the culmination of pilgrimages from around the world. This is one of those rides; a living legend, identifiable by its silhouette alone.
Still, nothing quite registers the scale and importance of Millennium Force like standing at its entrance. Thousands of guests occupy the sea of concrete and steel corrals that reside here, beneath the occasional tented shade structure. There’s even a DJ booth – much-needed on the hottest summer days when multi-hour waits for the world’s first gigacoaster build through the day.
Can a ride on Millennium Force be worth it? There’s only one way to find out…
The queue rises from the concrete plaza of switchbacks, climbing to a second story. On the left, a black steel fence places waiting riders within feet of the fluid blue track and a compressed airtime hill precipitously squeezed between banked turns. When the train finally arrives, it’s almost silent – sleek and aerodynamic as it races by – pht-pht-pht-pht-pht-pht like shuffling playing cards as the rows pass.
It isn’t for three or four Mississippi seconds after the train’s gone that the wind follows, bursting from around the phantom train as if it just barely tapped the sound barrier.
All eyes follow the train, of course, as it zags out of the airtime hill, slithering up an overbanked turn that crowd surfs across the queue, then aligns with the final brakes, entering them at what must be damn near the ride’s top speed. (Okay, so Morgan was right about the ride’s massive kinetic energy…) Nervous first timers make a note to themselves: when we reach that turn, it’s over. Little do they know, when the time comes, they’ll wish it wasn’t.
In what reads like a sinisterly clever bit of planning, the train that raced by us on the right seconds ago now returns to the unload station on the left, its riders breathlessly cheering, chattering, and applauding. “How was your ride?” No need to ask. Millennium Force speaks for itself…
For all the pomp and circumstance you might expect for challenging the world’s first gigacoaster, Millennium Force’s station is simple – an elevated steel shed. Correctly anticipating the sleek, metallic, Helvetica aesthetic of the 21st century, it’s bare but for metallic accents, geometric auxillary fans, blue and green corrugated steel garage doors, and – over the train – red flourescent lightbulbs. Yet it’s a frenetic place. A place buzzing with nerves and chatter. How couldn’t it be? Whether its your first or thousandth time, Millennium Force is special.
The iconic, electronic loop of Millennium Force’s station music – a continuous rising and falling arpeggio of muffled doo-doo-doo-doos with a hi-hat rat-a-tat – builds anticipation. It seems to sync to the coaster itself as the flourescent red lights all extinguish, then re-light from the train’s back to front, ushering it out of the station.
There’s no pre-drop; no drive tires to propel the train. In fact, observant riders can actually see the elevator catch car lower down the hill that begins right at the station’s end, swiftly and silently gliding under the train and settling into place as riders board.
The Future is Riding On It
Another relative innovation for the era – the ride’s trains. Nine cars – each arranged with 2-by-2 seating that elevates the second row slightly over the first, yeilding an impressive 36 riders per train. But more to the point, Intamin’s hydraulically-secured lap bars omit the click-click-click racheting of other restraints. Like the ride itself, they’re silent. Precise. And in the open air sleds and extreme statistics of the train, surprising. Feeling so open and exposed is one of Millennium’s most fundamental features, though, and knowing that you’ll be hoisted 300 feet over Lake Erie in no time flat with nothing but this yellow lap restraint over your hips is a formative experience for any coaster enthusiast.
Speaking of which, the start of the ride is likely to catch you by surprise, too. A slight jolt forward signals the start of the catch car’s ascent. Then, in a whisper, the train is gone. Row by row, it bends upward. The 45° ascent is unusual by most coasters’ standards. But the most notable feature here is that it’s fast. Whether you love or loathe the precipitous, slow, clack-clack-clack climb of a coaster, it’s absent here. While the wary can spend just 22 seconds contemplating their fate, the bold are known to lean forward, trying to catch a view of Canada across the lake (possible on a clear day).
But either way, the peak appears. And while a traditional coaster may see a train disengage from the lift – its first few cars dangling as the train’s back half catches up – it’s not so for Millennium. Without so much as a breath, the catch car crests the top of the hill and pulls the train right over the top with it.
Obviously, any 300 foot face-first plummet at a near-vertical 80° will whip a tear from your eye. But Millennium’s opening act is glorious for another reason…
It’s butter smooth. With a sort of stunning, precision engineering the likes of which only the Swiss could muster, the train’s 10 mile per hour cable lift transitions without so much as a tease into a full-on plunge. The train slithers – somehow frictionless – down the plunge, reaching its top speed of 93 miles per hour.
At the bottom of this gargantuan, first-of-its-kind drop, the train pulls out, racing skyward and entering one of the ride’s signature elements. Its second hill is 169 feet tall – taller than any other coaster in the park but Magnum – but winds smoothly skyward in a sprawling turnaround, tilting riders in a 122° overbank. It’s an incredible and unusual way to utilize the ride’s massive kinetic energy (where any Arrow, Morgan, or B&M hypercoaster would simply begin an out-and-back layout of increasingly-shrinking airtime hills with no lateral forces whatsoever).
(It’s here, nearly inverted, that you’ll go rocketing past one of the coaster’s more unusual features – a steel support column with a notch cutaway to account for the extreme overbank’s impact on the rider safety envelope… you can see it just ahead of the train’s zero car above, and look for it in the point-of-view video below!)
The ride dives out of the overbanked turn into a massive, sweeping plunge that levels out for just a moment, then pulls left. It’s a continuous turn that rockets through a metallic tunnel, emerging back into the sunlight (though unrecognized by riders) on the previously-inaccessible island at the park’s center. As it charges forward, the coaster reorients itself and sweeps upward. Millennium Force’s third hill (if you’re counting) is 182 feet tall.
The climb into this hill isn’t abrupt or intense and really, its peak provides one of the ride’s few moments of relative relief from speed, providing just a second to gaze across the park at Gemini, dwarfed below. How far we’ve come…
…. and yet, how far we have to go. Where one day – in the not too distant future – Cedar Point’s own Maverick will be a testing ground for Intamin’s evolution toward instantaneous directional changes, extreme manuevers, and snappy transitions (translating into their second gigacoaster, Intimidator 305), Millennium isn’t about that. It’s a soaring, powerful, graceful creation. Unrelenting in its speed, but slow to transition between sweeping manuevers and oversized elements.
(For that reason, momentarily slowed against that hill, you might understand why some thoughtful and well-traveled coaster enthusiasts – and some outright contrarians – deride the ride as “Millennium Forceless,” “squandering” a moment where an Arrow or Morgan would opt for ejector airtime for such a gradual rise and the almost-calm drop to follow.)
After all, having risen in its third hill higher than most coasters do on their first, Millennium Force doesn’t so much drop as descend, diving through an elongated curve, spilling against the ground, and then pulling up into a massive, oversized, overbanked turn.
In a wide, continuous arc, it returns to ground level, practically skimming substrate. The trains rocket ahead, rising into another overbanked turn to the left, and again defaulting back to ground level at full clip. There’s no mid-course brake; no moment of reprieve; just a fluid layout of soaring track that alternates between sweeping banks, boosted straightaways, and sailing hills.
Cross under itself, the ride realigns parallel to the hill that served as its entry to the island, hopping over an elongated hill (above left) and then plunging into another corrugated steel tunnel – this one mirrored from the one that brought us to the island, leading back toward the coaster’s station.
Millennium Force now enters its final elements. Now, you are the riders who bolt past guests in the queue, pulsing by in a flash. The trains arc over a bunny hop, seemingly still traveling in excess of 90 miles per hour.
It’s here that even the coaster layperson would come to realization that Millennium Force is fast and powerful… but it’s not ultra-intense. It’s big, but not wild. Instead, it’s almost… joyful? It makes sense now – as we pass by and are reminded of that unload station – that riders don’t return nauseous or shaking or dead-eyed, but elated. Millennium Force may be 300 feet tall, but it’s not a trial so much as a transformation. Is it too late to put your hands up?
Pulling out of the hop with a final ground-level curve, there’s a wonderful, distinctly-Intamin moment (above) where the train snaps to attention, aligning with an odd straightaway that somehow feels like a speed boost for the already-rocketing train as it enters what we know to be its final move: a last overbanked turn “crowd-surfing” over the queue. The train pulls up one last time, lingering for a moment over the crowd and then resettling, aimed back at the unload station.
What we assumed would be a heartbreaking signal of the ride’s end is. And frankly, just as Morgan anticipated when seeing Intamin’s designs, the train comes in hot, having seemingly shed very little of its top speed over the more-than-a-mile course. Intamin might’ve been able to work another 1,000 feet or so into the layout just using the energy siphoned off in the brakes. But as all 36 riders collectively lean into the deceleration and gather their first full breath since the ride began, it’s over.
Relive the experience of conquering the world’s first gigacoaster with this official point-of-view video, capturing the ride’s gargantuan, oversized elements and its relentless speed from beginning to end.
When it’s all said and done, it’s no surprise that riders return to Millennium Force’s unload station in a state of ecstasy. Clapping, cheering, chattering… Whether you realize the ride’s “importance” in the story of the roller coaster or not, Millennium Force speaks for itself; a goosebumps-inducing, one-of-a-kind, milestone experience. It feels special because it is.
Especially contextualized as a groundbreaking, millennium-shaking highlight of the Coaster Wars and a contemporary to Arrow and Morgan’s hypercoasters, Millennium Force was a reinvention; an early and adept example of how the Coaster Wars would change our collective idea of what coasters looked like, felt like, and could do. Sure, an Intamin giga built for the first time today would look, feel, and do a whole lot differently… but inherent in the ride’s name is its status as a time capsule; a sort of timeless landmark of what awaited in the future of the roller coaster. Dare we say that – true to the ride’s marketing message – the future really was riding on it?
Speaking of which, we can’t finish our look at Millennium Force without addressing how this legendary coaster had influenced rides to follow, and what its position in the story of the Coaster Wars really means…
Giga
Ultimately, Millennium Force didn’t retain the title of the world’s only gigacoaster for long. Less than three months after its debut, Nagashima Spa Land in Kuwana, Japan cut the ribbon on Steel Dragon 2000… a ride six feet taller than Millennium Force, manufactured by Morgan. Yep, the firm who lost the bid to build Cedar Point’s 300-foot behemoth succeeded halfway around the world.
In fact, having been in negotiations with Cedar Point allegedly gave Morgan insider knowledge in exactly how tall the Ohio park planned to build, ensuring they could easily snap up the record in Japan. When Steel Dragon’s statistics were finally revealed, Cedar Point officials were apparently incensed, with Morgan’s team going so far as to suggest that if Cedar Fair hadn’t whet their whistles to the idea of a 300-foot coaster and pulled the rug out, Morgan never would’ve pursued the idea elsewhere…
As to the main question that plagued Morgan’s giga design – how to get riders up the hill – Steel Dragon manages to alleviate the issues inherent in such a massive chain lift hill by using two chains, with the train swapping between them halfway up (a trick used by later B&M gigas). The ascent still takes about a minute-and-a-half.
And don’t misunderstand – though Steel Dragon 2000 is clearly closer in substance to an Arrow / Morgan hyper than to what Intamin did with Millennium Force (i.e. most of its course being made of increasingly-smaller, out-and-back airtime hills), it’s still an absolutely stunning ride. By far the longest roller coaster in the world (8,133 feet), Steel Dragon 2000 is a landmark in its own right. (And made all the moreso by swapping its Morgan trains for open-air, elevated, B&M clamshell-restraint trains in 2013.)
Which is perhaps why, according to Coaster101, Morgan officials claim that Cedar Fair representatives approached them informally at the IAAPA conference later, suggesting that they wished Cedar Point had gone with Morgan’s proposal over Intamin’s. That’s all hearsay, of course, but given that Steel Dragon reportedly ended up costing between $40 and $50 million, Millennium Force’s $25 million pricetag probably seems like quite a steal.
In any case, that means that Millennium Force was the world’s tallest full-circuit roller coaster (and only gigacoaster) for just 80 days. Despite the speed at which Steel Dragon ended Millennium’s exclusivity in the gigacoaster category, full-circuit 300 – 399 foot coasters remain exceedingly rare even two decades later. A third gigacoaster didn’t arrive for another ten years.
Here at Theme Park Tourist, recently took a ride on each of the six existing gigacoasters on Earth. Of the four that came after Millennium and Steel Dragon, Intamin returned to the genre just once: Kings Dominion’s Intimidator 305 (above, a sort of fusion of Millennium Force, Intamin’s “Mega-Lite” model, and Cedar Point’s bucking, terrain-hugging Maverick). The other three are B&M creations, with various personalities (and varying levels of elemental divergence from B&M’s hypercoasters).
Of course, just as the 200-foot coaster was once unthinkable and now can be found dotted around nearly every major corporate amusement park in America, there may come a time when gigacoasters sprout across the industry like wildflowers. And you know what? That’d be alright! After all, Dick Kinzel’s assessment was right: you may not always be the only, but you’ll never stop being the first. And frankly, there’s not a better coaster than Millennium Force to retain the title.
The Wars End
As for the Coaster Wars? Well… At least spiritually, you might imagine 2000 as a topping out of the era. With Millennium Force crescendoing the decade-long redefinition of steel coasters, and – just a few hours away – the Lost Legend: Son of Beast opening to establish the upper limits of the wooden coaster, it seemed that every record that could be broken had been broken.
Which, of course, brings us to the controversial sequel to the story of Millennium Force… Though 11 years had elapsed between Cedar Point’s 100-foot record and its 200-foot record, then another 11 years between its 200-foot and 300-foot installations, the frenzied momentum of the Coaster Wars couldn’t be stopped overnight.
Just three years after Millennium Force, Cedar Point and Intamin together shattered every record all over again. That’s why we’d recommend making the jump to our Modern Marvels: Top Thrill Dragster feature to see how the world’s new tallest and fastest coaster – the world’s first stratacoaster – came to be… and why Dick Kinzel himself would call it “the worst decision we ever made.”
The continued story of the Coaster Wars, then, would briefly be that Six Flags retaliated with its own Intamin stratacoaster (Kingda Ka – currently the world’s tallest roller coaster at 456 feet), and that’s that. No one else has topped 400 feet, and no one seems interested in trying. (Why not? Suffice it to say that neither Cedar Fair nor Six Flags tends to work with Intamin anymore…)
Piling on staggering debt (Six Flags from overexpansion, Cedar Fair from the purchase of the Paramount Parks chain), both operators entered into a period of retraction, gently reorganizing their capital project calendars and reevaluating their reliance on $25 million roller coasters and the teenage audiences they drew.
And maybe that’s all for the best. As if waking from a decade-long slumber, in about 2008, Six Flags and Cedar Fair seemed to jolt into consciousness, looking around in a daze and recognizing that a decade of coaster competition had left their parks as sun-bleached midways of bare steel thrills at the expense of… well… just about everything else. Though their parks were packed with extreme, hyper-saturated, primary-colored coasters – each bigger and louder than the one before – neglecting the family audience had irrevocably changed parks’ audiences, pricing, and presentation, necessitating a decade of make-goods and re-orientations to convince families to return.
Which park has the most roller coasters doesn’t seem to factor much into marketing or even online discussion anymore. Maybe the idea of “quality over quantity” has finally taken root. Maybe – as we proposed in our in-depth look at Busch Gardens’ Pantheon and Iron Gwazi – a “New Coaster Wars” isn’t about breaking records, but about building customized, personality-filled rides.
Sure, Cedar Fair and Six Flags parks will always be coaster parks… but it’s not unusual to see five year gaps between headliners, filling the intervening seasons with “catch-up” improvements to dining; refurbishments of hotels; seasonal celebrations and food festivals; multi-year packages of flat ride additions and waterpark expansions; family-focused areas like 2023’s Boardwalk at Cedar Point or Carowinds’ Aeronautica Landing; even new and refreshed restaurants, restrooms, and dark rides… all components left behind in the fury of the Coaster Wars.
Legacy
But even if its drawbacks can now be plainly seen, living through the Coaster Wars was the thrill ride equivalent of growing up in the Disney Renaissance; a pulse-pounding, tailor-made era that can never really be recreated or recaptured. For those of us shaped by the frantic pace of the Coaster Wars, there are only the icons that remain. Millennium Force is probably the truest, purest example of the age… and certainly, its literal and figurative height.
Millennium Force pierced through the ceiling, shattering records at every turn. It’s bold, ambitious, relentless, and yet somehow, beautiful. A blazing blue Intamin icon of Cedar Point, it’s easy to see why so many people call it best steel coaster on Earth. But more to the point, from its powerful grace to its poetic layout; its infused technology to its 21st century style, one thing is certain: the future really was riding on it.
