Holiday Gift Guide for Amusement Park Fans

The 2013 holiday shopping season is upon us and if you’re on the hunt for that special gift for a friend or family member who happens to be a fan of amusement parks and roller coasters then you’ve come to the right place! Listed below are my recommended gifts to give or receive this holiday season.

• Coasters 101: An Engineer’s Guide to Roller Coaster Design. Learn how roller coaster designers spend hundreds of hours creating, tweaking, and re-imagining ride paths to push the exhilaration envelope while carefully maintaining the highest safety standards. Features design example problems real roller coaster engineers face in the field today as well as career advice for any aspiring theme park engineers. Available in Kindle or paperback formats from Amazon.com.
• American Coasters: A Thrilling Photographic Ride is a  relatively new book by photographer Thomas Crymes. The pictures are large and crisp. The colors are vivid. The book’s simple design places more emphasis on the photographs. Nothing beats seeing pictures of roller coasters printed on a physical page (sorry, internet).
• Creating My Own Nemesis by John Wardley. The story follows John’s professional career beginning with how he got out of the boring family business and into the crazy world of theme parks If by any degree you’re into magic, illusions, theater production, theme park design, or roller coasters I highly recommend you read this thoroughly entertaining book. See the making of RCT3 with John Wardley.
• Theme Park Design by Steve Alcorn. Take a peek behind the scenes, with a theme park engineer, and learn about the multitude of roles and skills needed to design a world class theme park attraction – a must read for all aspiring theme park designers!
• RollerCoaster Tycoon Triple Thrill Pack Instant Download.  This compilation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 and expansion packs Time Twister and Wacky Worlds brings together all the rides, building tools, as well as five real-world Six Flags amusement parks and 25 of their signature coasters. My personal favorite of all the RollerCoaster Tycoon games.
• Transport Tycoon for tablets. Chris Sawyer’s Transport Tycoon is now available on tablet devices everywhere. Reviewers say they managed to bring this classic game to mobile devices extremely well.
• K’nex Rippin Rocket Coaster. Loaded with over 500 KNEX pieces including classic parts, this model boasts over 20 feet of twists, turns, and daring loops. A special motorized blaster launches the coaster car into its exciting journey around the track.
• Coaster Dynamix Models. The most realistic working roller coaster models currently available. Choose from Wooden coasters, steel coasters, Tumble Bugs, and Lego coaster sets.
• Cincy Amusement Park Shirts. From the early days of Chester Park to Americana and Kings Island, these vintage shirts will be a nice stroll down memory lane. This shop not only sells The Bat shirts, but also a few other defunct Kings Island coasters, including Son of Beast, Phantom Theater, and King Cobra!

I highly recommend joining Amazon Prime. If you order something off of Amazon on average once per month then it pays for itself, or if you're ordering a bunch of gifts this holiday season it probably will too. The FREE two day shipping is awesome and everything I've ordered really has come in two days or less. You can also stream movies, TV shows, and get a Kindle book every month. Great alternative for Netflix or Hulu and well worth the investment in my opinion. Cheers!

What's on your 2013 holiday gift list? Share in the comments below!

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Books in Theme Park Stores

This post is a continuationof the conversation I was having with a colleague about theme park books. Until this conversation happened, I had never really thought about trying to get a book stocked inside a theme park store before. Outside of Disney, there’s only one type of book I recall seeing in a theme park shop and they all belong to the same “Images of America” series (Holiday World and HersheyPark). Disney has a few smaller sized books such as the “Imagineering field guides” and “Fnd the Hidden Mickeys” that were intended to be taken into the theme park with you. In my experience and travels I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone reading a book at a park before. If you’re looking for something for guests to do while in the queue you’d be much better off developing some sort of interactive iPhone or iPad application.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. The Columbus Zoo does have a few books in their gift shops but they’re mainly picture books. I would try to get something physical put together first before pitching the idea to a park. Based on the books I mentioned above, it seems most parks might be more willing to stock a book in their gift stores if the content were about their specific park or product (you think you’d find a book about HersheyPark inside Cedar Point? Yeah, right).

What do you think? Have you ever seen anyone reading a book in a theme park? Are there any specific park stores which come to mind that stock a variety of books? I would love to hear your feedback!

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2012 Amusement Park Ticket Price Per Coaster

There are a lot of variables that go into amusement park entrance ticket pricing but from the viewpoint of a roller coaster enthusiast – someone only going to the park to ride the coasters – might look at the ticket price as cost per coaster. I decided to do a little quick research and proceeded to go to a few amusement park web sites to see what their one day ticket price at the gate is and then went to RCDB to confirm how many roller coasters they have. I charted out the results shown above (I use Excel spreadsheets a lot).

A few interesting notes from my research:

• Six Flags has an affiliate program with 5% commission for selling park tickets. Very smart. Why don’t more parks do this (or maybe they do and I've never heard about it before?)
• Six Flags has one of the harder websites to find out how to buy tickets while Kings Island was by far the easiest.
• Holiday World has the highest cost per coaster while Cedar Point has the lowest.
• I omitted the heavily themed parks such as Disney and Universal for obvious reasons (extremely high cost per coaster).
• Lagoon Park seems to be pretty good value as it's the same price as Holiday World but offers 5 more coasters. That is until you actually see the roller coasters that they do have to offer.

Of course this is just all fun and games as I stated to begin with there are many other factors which go into ticket prices like what other perks are included - water parks, parking, soft drinks, world class shows, etc. At the same time, those folks complaining about how expensive Cedar Point is need to realize that Cedar Point is very affordable compared to other parks as well as alternative forms of entertainment.

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Roller Coaster Freakonomics

I wrote an article featured in the latest issue of Theme Park Geekly where I attempted to analyize some roller coaster data in a unique way. I compared the speed of wooden and steel roller coasters versus their height and found that they were pretty much the same. Then, I looked at height versus length and noticed a very interesting trend. Joel, the Coaster Critic, was able to take my data and create a pretty cool interactive chart that you can play around with. Check it out for yourself!

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Holiday Gift Ideas for Theme Park Fanatics

The holiday gift giving season is upon us and if you’re looking for that special gift for a theme park fan or a roller coaster enthusiast I've got a couple of suggestions for you.
 

Coaster Dynamix Launched Sidewinder Roller Coaster  

CoasterDynamix, Inc - "The Comet" Wooden Roller Coaster - Kit HO

Do you like assembling your Christmas presents? The Lego Carousel is right up your alley. Unfortunealty, the set is no longer being made or sold at Lego stores, so the best you can do is to find it online. At $720.95 on Amazon, it’s not a cheap buy, but the carousel “spins and plays music while the horses and swing boats move up and down.” This is the perfect addition for any special edition collection.

K'NEX Collect & Build Amusement Park Series #2 - Ferris Wheel. Combine with Corkscrew Coaster and Vertical Viper for a working amusement park (each sold separately).

 

Theme Park Design: Behind The Scenes With An Engineer. Have you ever gone to a theme park and wondered, "How did they do that?" At last there's a book that shows you. Theme Park Design reveals the secrets behind some of the world's greatest attractions. Take a peek behind the scenes, with a theme park engineer.

Another great book for any readers is the American Amusement Park. This marvelous photographic retrospective distills more than 100 years of the sights, sounds, smells and vertigo-inducing thrills associated with the American amusement park.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to design and build a roller coaster? At last, there’s a book that shows you. A mix of engineering and art, roller coasters are complex three-dimensional puzzles consisting of thousands of individual parts. Designers spend countless hours creating and tweaking ride paths to push the envelope of exhilaration, all while maintaining the highest safety standards. Coasters 101: An Engineering Guide to Roller Coaster Design examines the numerous diverse aspects of roller coaster engineering, including some of the mathematical formulas and engineering concepts used. This is an e-book only but you should be able to download a free e-book reader for your PC.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311

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