As Fun Spot Atlanta prepares to permanently shutter next month, the future of the high-budget ArieForce One remains up in the air.
It always felt a little weird, and honestly a little too good to be true that a world-class, Rocky Mountain Construction-made steel roller coaster would be at a small theme park south of Atlanta next to some batting cages and go-karts.
Fun Spot Atlanta turned plenty of heads earlier this decade with the announcement of ArieForce One, a 154-foot tall RMC coaster that boasts a 146-foot drop, four inversions and a top speed of 64 miles per hour. At a cost of $13 million, it became the largest single investment into a ride in the history of Fun Spot theme parks, with the chain also operating parks in Orlando and Kissimmee.
AF1 opened on March 31, 2023 to rave reviews, with the park hoping the renowned coaster would make attendance at the park skyrocket and provide a reason to travel down to Fayetteville for any thrillseekers that happened to be in the Atlanta area.
I was thankfully one of those thrillseekers, as I ended up in Atlanta due to a conference my wife had in May 2024. I ensured that I had the time to take an expensive and lengthy Uber ride from downtown Atlanta to Fayetteville to see and ride AF1 for myself.
While I was undoubtedly thrown off by just how small the park is and the extremely liminal arcade indoors, AF1 was open and running – despite the park only being populated by myself and five or six other coaster enthusiasts who were also marathon riding the coaster.
Although my rankings may have shifted after finally getting a ride on Fury 325, I came away from my eight rides on AF1 believing it was the best roller coaster I had ever gotten the chance to ride. Though its stats don’t at all jump off the page, this coaster provides a concise package of all of the elements thrillseekers are looking for on a coaster.
From a steep first drop to a dive loop and an amazing zero-g roll, the ride also offers several moments of force thanks to a spree of ejector airtime hills towards the end of the coaster and a helix that offers close to 4 Gs as riders are pushed deep into their seats.
Though this is far from the scariest ride out there, it is certainly among the most fun and thrilling, standing out as an example of RMC not going all-in on thrills and fear as they perhaps have with other creations such as Steel Vengeance at Cedar Point and Goliath at Six Flags Great America.
Ultimately, the $13 million investment from Fun Spot was not enough to get droves of people to the park to ride AF1, resulting in the closure of both the coaster and the park itself on Aug. 2. There are currently no plans for the still brand-new roller coaster, with its future left up in the air as the park prepares to close.
Though far from a guarantee given the relatively unsteady financials of the industry, this coaster is a prime candidate for relocation, with several parks offering a much better opportunity for this ride to reach more people than Fun Spot Atlanta did.
While just about every park can use this coaster, I singled out four that would have their catalogue greatly improved by the addition of ArieForce One.
1. Six Flags St. Louis
While this park’s future is also up in the air due to its recent change in ownership from Six Flags Entertainment Corporation to EPR Properties, this park remains an oasis for thrillseekers in the Greater St. Louis area – and is one new, high-budget ride away from having a quietly solid catalogue of coasters.
This park was undoubtedly among the more neglected properties while under Six Flags ownership, with the last new non-kids coaster opening in the park back in 2008 – a wooden coaster now under the name of American Thunder.
If EPR decided to make Six Flags STL a flagship park of sorts among the properties it recently acquired, adding ArieForce One would be an excellent way to both boost crowds and reignite interest in the park.
It’s not as if AF1 would become the only coaster to ride at this park. With a Batman: The Ride clone, Mr. Freeze and wooden behemoth The Boss, thrillseekers would still have their hands full enough for at least a few hours in a park that already caters to children and families better than many others in the country.
Just about everyone can use ArieForce One, but Six Flags St. Louis is an AF1 away from a potential rejuvenation of one of the first parks in Six Flags history.
2. Canada’s Wonderland
One of the most stacked theme parks in the world, Canada’s Wonderland in the Toronto area offers a lineup of 18 roller coasters – tied for the second-most of any park in the world.
While this feat alone makes the inclusion of Canada’s Wonderland on this list a bit of a headscratcher at first, it’s worth noting that this park has taken plenty of flack from thrillseekers for offering an incredibly top-heavy coaster lineup.
Beyond the B&M heavy hitters of Leviathan, Behemoth and Yukon Striker and the record-setting AlpenFury, Canada’s Wonderland is filled to the brim with many older, forgettable coasters that often serve as one-and-dones for enthusiasts visiting the park.
While I’m currently 30 years old, there are a whopping eight roller coasters at Canada’s Wonderland that opened before my date of birth, offering plenty of opportunity to dismantle and remove a less popular ride to replace it with ArieForce One, filling the RMC void at the park while offering a fifth coaster that falls into the general enthusiast’s top tier of rides to get on.
Though this may come off as a case of advocating for the rich to get richer, Canada’s Wonderland can streamline their coaster catalogue by replacing an older, overlooked ride such as DareDeviler with the still new ArieForce One – although perhaps it could use a predominantly red-and-white color scheme to go along with a new home north of the border.
3. Six Flags Discovery Kingdom
Another park that is decisively lower on the Six Flags corporate food chain, Discovery Kingdom is likely just two years away from becoming the lone major theme park in the Bay Area, with the impending closure of California’s Great America expected by the end of 2027.
As of now, the zoological Vallejo park boasts a passable but forgettable coaster lineup. Highlighted by Medusa, a B&M floorless coaster, and The Joker, an RMC creation that revitalized former wooden coaster Roar, the park has a small handful of rides to keep enthusiasts busy while not exactly taking up a whole day in the way some other parks in the chain can.
Yet with the future of California’s Great America and its handful of coasters remaining uncertain, Discovery Kingdom can help strengthen its position as the premier theme park in the Bay Area with the addition of ArieForce One – which would be the park’s second RMC coaster.
While that fact left me with a little hesitancy when selecting this park, the rides remain quite different – with AF1 being a ground-up Steel coaster as opposed to a reimagination of an existing ride in the way The Joker is.
Even with Medusa and The Joker, this park needs more elite attractions to get more people through the gates – especially in a large, wealthy market like the Bay Area. It’d be a big swing, but a worthy one given the impending erosion of its most serious competitor (and current corporate sister park).
4. Carowinds
Perhaps no park has grown more in prominence over the past 20 years than Carowinds, which went from being an overlooked Paramount park to one of the flagships of the current Six Flags Entertainment Corporation chain, featuring several rides that routinely attract enthusiasts from across the country and world.
Headlined by Fury 325, the world’s tallest roller coaster with a traditional lift hill, Carowinds also offers another B&M hyper in Thunder Striker, a hangtime-filled launch coaster in Copperhead Strike and one of the largest B&M inverts in Afterburn, headlining a diverse lineup that also features plenty for children and families.
If there is one notable absence from the park however, it’s the lack of an RMC coaster – an omission that grows more conspicuous each year as RMC continues to establish itself as an elite manufacturer of some of the world’s most thrilling coasters.
While AF1 doesn’t nearly approach the height and thrills of Fury 325, it would be a distinct, unique addition to Carowinds’ catalogue, offering a mid-size thrill ride that still delivers on all of the elements that riders are looking for in one package.
This may indeed be an example of an increasing theme park inequality between the haves and have-nots, but there is a clear void that AF1 would be filling in this park. While this coaster would be a more redundant addition at a park like Cedar Point or Six Flags Magic Mountain, it would be the perfect ride to complete one of the country’s most impressive lineups on the border of the Carolinas.
Leave a Reply