ThemeParkRider

I've been on Demon Drop, I assume it was pretty similar. Nothing in comparison to Zumi or any other drop towers but still an interesting experience.

Impressive! I've recreated the Enchanted Forest in RCT2 and I've been working on making a more accurate version of GA. Lots of work, can't wait to see your parks completed!

Thank you, thank you, thank you for this Spotlight! Very helpful to see how it first started out. Seems like the original FlashPass and ADA entrance has been tweaked a lot since then too.

I wish they'd bring back the observation area. I loved watching the ride from there.

I think that the lack of any kind of observation area is a problem for the experience as a whole. Guests would be much happier if they could watch the rest of their group ride, even if they don't want to ride. Especially since standing on the exit bridge is not permitted.

I love how that lady is wearing a bag on the ride in the photo above. Would never see that today.

In a world before cell phones, this statue was our salvation if anyone in my family was to get separated.

Now that its been several years, I'm wondering what exactly the original queue looked like. Before everyone yells at me, hear me out: I've been searching the forums and the rest of the internet forever, and by this point most of the links to photos and other discussions are dead or not very helpful. Most discussion on this forum about the original queue is either hypothetical (what if it came back?) or not detailed enough because it was written in a time before anyone conceived of its changing. But you could say that I'm very familiar with what remains of the old queue line, so I know that there's an old queue house and that it crossed under the track at launch. I know the basics of what it did, but I also know that it changed at least one or two times since then and I can't seem to piece together a few things like where exactly the queue split of into two and where people entered and exited from, and where the current path on the right side of launch came into the equation.

Can anyone explain or direct me to a place where I can find out more? Thank you.

Would this be a setup similar to what Downtown Disney at Disneyland? I'd like to see something like Ghiradelli. I love walking by the smell of chocolate.

My verdict: Its good! I had more fun experiencing this ride for the first few times then I have for many others recently. But its not great, my main complaint is that its way too short. Also could have better theming, I was at least expecting a themed auto spiel with some voice acting. I could handle more. when I rode a bit over a week ago, my friend seemed to think that the green side was superior. I believe the Joker is a decent replacement for Fort Independence.

That's good to hear, thank you!

Thinking about making the trip up this Monday, do you think its necessary or worth getting the Fastlane? From what you say here it seems like that might not be necessary.

This looks like its from the Six Flags Great Adventure page on screamscape.com. I was curious as to whether this was going to come up, I hadn't really heard anything else to solidify this. Scroll down toward the bottom to see it in context.

Yeah I agree with all of these. Ka seems pretty overrated. I get the hype if its someone's first time and its definitely a great coaster but I don't think its aged well.

Skull Mountain is underrated, it actually ranks very high in my favorites at the park.

Yeah good point, then maybe they could make it green sticker exclusive.

It seems like the park has been putting a little more money into general maintenance and other things that haven't been a priority for the past few years, which is good. I'd really love to see some money go into bringing the Hayride back. I imagine that they could discontinue the Asylum and maybe Bloodshed and even bring some of those props over. As far as crowd control for the lines, maybe control the amount of people allowed per night with the wristbands, the stickers on the season passes or by incorporating flash pass somehow.

Six Flags really needs to do something about the bottles. I really don't want to leave my cup at those cup holders, in fear someone will steal it. I think they should scan your pass whenever you want to get a drink, so they can see if you actually have a bottle attached to your card. Not sure if this would actually prevent someone from stealing the cups, but it might.

I was surprised that the other day when I bought a souvenir cup, they asked to see if my pass to know if I already had one or not. I'd never seen them do that before.

Back before I had a smart phone I used to be able to manually attach my phone to my belt using a loop on the phone itself. Can't do that anymore.

I've always loved the idea of expanding Ka and making it longer, just a few more turns and dips.

How long has this been on the Great ADVENTure calender? It's got to be at least like three years.

Things have really changed since I started coming back to GA in 2009.

I feel like this forum should be called "Philosophy of a roller coaster"! I'm curious about the theming, I don't think it intuitively lends itself to looking like Harley Quinn aside from the train color.

Hey nice job! Just by coincidence I've been working on an Enchanted Forest recreation on Roller Coaster Tycoon 2. Except I didn't spend nearly as long on it as you have been. I never really played Minecraft but I can tell that took a lot of creativity. Its funny, most people would have no appreciation for the time it takes to build these kinds of things. My RCT2 recreation is here if you're interested.

As a kid one of my favorite memories was when my dad handed me the Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, Six Flags computer game. This probably got me into theme parks, and over a decade later I still play it. If you’ve ever played this version of the game than you know that some of the Six Flags parks are recreated as a scenario. Great Adventure is in there, but it always bothered me how inaccurate it was. Like it just felt like no love or passion was put into this place that is so awesome. So I decided that I wanted to make my own, but rather than re-create a modern version, go for a simpler version the way the park appeared in its opening season. I spent a few hours a day for about 3 weeks. I’m pretty proud of the results but I made a few goofs and there’s always room for improvement.

How I did it:

So I spent a decent amount of time framing what was and wasn’t there using the spotlights on this site. The yearbook was my main frame of reference. Sometimes I printed out photos, other times I sketched out diagrams on paper and for some of the modern-day remaining features I went by memory.

It was not easy replicating things in this game. Although it’s in 3D, a player is given only given four angles of perspective and you can’t construct anything on an angle except for 90 degrees. The controls aren’t the simplest either. Any time I wanted to place down an elevated wall section, I had to hold down shift and slide it into place. It’s long and tedious.

I also had to make a lot of judgement calls on what things to keep and what things to redesign to look aesthetically pleasing in such a simple game. I started from scratch using the game’s scenario editor. Every tree, every piece of path, every track was crafted in the game manually by me.

Building it from start to finish:

So I built Rootin’ Tootin’ first. Because it was a scenario editor, I couldn’t build any rides. This meant that for the Fort, for example, I had to pre-designate a spot for the Sky Ride to go. I did this by marking the ground with different colors of land.

Here you can see how I marked out the antique cars using a different colored ground. I made the mistake of not placing enough space in-between the fountain and the other parts of Dream Street. A lot of the things got squeezed too close together. Happy Feeling didn’t really translate well so that became more of a garden and food area.

There’s no hot air balloon in this game so I used an observation tower.

Ah, nostalgia.

I liked the idea of having the ride lockers accessible through the line like in Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey. The biggest problem being (and this is not exclusive to just this ride) the cramped conditions, especially on a very hot or rainy day.

I would be a little happier about this if TDK got a re-theme in the coming years.

Yeah definitely worth it, I didn't see the rest of the museum but there were a lot of little things that you don't really run into just by looking around the internet. Its small though, just a room and a hallway. But the New York model is really cool. I recommend touring the park for artifacts and making a day out of it like I did. And yeah I believe the elevators are gone, although it did look like there was a frame or some kind of elevator structure sitting at the bottom. But not the original, and this too hadn't operated in some time.