The Fifty Coasters that Doomed Six Flags
Introduction
It’s 2005. You’re Kieran Burke, and you’re fucked.
In 1999, it had been going so well. Arguably, you’d never peak higher.
And in the distant future of 2020, you’re not doing too bad for yourself either. You’re still alive and kicking for one- and you’re still running a theme park company from the same place and with the same name you made your debut: Premier Parks LLC in Oklahoma City. Not too long ago you entered a lease agreement with Six Flags to allow them to manage five of your amusement and waterparks, most of which you originally bought from them during their bankruptcy. Not bad.
But it’s not 1999, or 2020. It’s 2005, and you, Kieran Burke, are about to be hit by a semi truck.
(A figurative one, we already established you’re still alive.)
The real irony of it all is that after the fact, just about everybody is going to blame you. They might not all, or even most, know you by name. They won’t know you remain in the industry, and doing all right for yourself too- but they’ll all know in their heart of hearts how your leadership doomed Six Flags.
Too many parks, too many coasters. How were you ever supposed to make money spending like that?
But that’s years from now. It’s still 2005 and you’re still Kieran Burke, CEO of Six Flags, the largest regional amusement park operator in the world.
Except, a growing contingent of shareholders don’t want you to be.
A mutiny is brewing. A charlatan, a salesman, is by hook or by crook turning the company’s investors against you and convincing them he knows better than you. That you’re holding down their profits- that you’re taking the company’s money outright.
You’ve been in this business a hell of a lot longer than he has. And every argument is on your side. You know exactly why this salesman’s snake oil will prove poisonous, and you’re doing all you can to make sure everybody knows. You’re putting together a presentation that is going to cut to the heart of all this fool’s lies and expose his false promises, and you’re going to make sure as many shareholders as possible see it.
And it’s going to fail spectacularly.
It’s 2005. You’re Daniel Snyder, and before we get to anything else, fuck you dude. I’m from the future and fuck you. Asshole.
In 1999, it had been going so well for you. Arguably, you’d never peak higher.
In 2020, people will associate your name almost exclusively with the failures of one of the most high profile National Football League teams: Washington. (If the person reading this is racist enough to understand and be angry about what I just said, that sucks. If the person reading this has no idea what this aside is about, God bless them.) Fans will spit your name in disgust as they share stories about your heartlessness- such as the poor old woman you took to court because her medical bills became too steep to also pay for her season tickets.
You’ll no longer be the darling of the tight circle of NFL owners by then, either. Your ideas will get tired- $50 for an envelope will sound shrewd on its face, but nobody will use paper tickets anymore, and fewer than nobody will be leaving them at a will call window for someone else. Your NFL franchise will have already plummeted from its top spot, being passed up by no fewer than two of your direct rivals, among others, as it slips towards irrelevance.
A city that once breathed your burgundy and gold will have moved onto winners. A living legend will be drafted onto the National Hockey League team you share a market with, and he will slowly march them toward a title as he becomes one of the greatest in the sport’s history. A Major League Baseball team will be relocated to your market as well. They’ll suffer for years as the biggest joke of a loser in the league and suffer for years more as the biggest joke of a ‘winner’ in the league before ultimately becoming national treasures. They’ll bring home a World Series trophy against a team of cheaters nobody has hated worse since the Chicago Black Sox.
They’ll do this all before you’ve won your third playoffs game. In fact, by 2020, you’ll be universally considered among the worst owners in pro sports, still waiting to win as many postseason games as your predecessor had won Super Bowls. Local fans will beg you to sell the team.
You’ll invite them all to eat shit and die because your franchise will be worth about five times what you paid for it, roughly $4b.
But it’s not 2020. It’s 2005, you’re Daniel Snyder, your team is still the hometown favorite and hardly worth a measly billion-with-a-B.
You’re the most popular guy in the owner’s circle because you pull money out of thin air. Who could have imagined selling tickets to watch practice? ESPN can hardly get people to tune in for pre-game warmups, and you’re managing to sell tickets to practice? No wonder you’re popular! Good job, Daniel Snyder! ESPN loves it. The more people think this garbage is important, the more money they can squeeze out of b-roll.
But how did you get here?
First of all, you took some of Daddy’s money and started Snyder Communications, specializing in direct marketing such as billboards and junk mail. That was step one, and probably the hardest part.
Step two was to get lucky enough for Jack Kent Cooke to die. And die he did in 1997. He called a handful of teams his own- but you wanted his pride and joy, the franchise representing the most powerful city in the world, the one he had led to three Super Bowl titles and built an awe-inspiring stadium for in his dying years. His legacy to the League, a venue for his team to play in long after he was gone. His son, as interim owner, named it in his honor- Jack Kent Cooke Stadium.
Cooke’s will required his estate sell the team, but you still had to wait a couple years for Cooke’s son to fail to come up with the money to buy his father’s legacy himself. Guy sure did put up a fight.
You paid $800m for Jack Kent Cooke’s pride and joy. You immediately recouped $207m selling FedEx the rights to bump his name from the top of the stadium.
The final step was to ride the wave. NFL team values began to skyrocket after you bought in- taxpayer-funded stadiums, carriage fees and national broadcast contacts enabling the average NFL team value to double over and then some in the time between when you bought your team and 2005.
That is to say, now. Because it’s still 2005 and you own what is still the most valuable franchise in the NFL, and you can convince people to pay to watch a losing team practice.
You are fired up and ready for what’s next. In fact, you’re not ready, it’s underway. You’ve been buying up stock in this new target of yours since summer of last year. You know a bit about this company, and you’ve had to. In a fashion, they’ve been your competitor. They’ve been your parallel.
When you first started lusting over this team in 1997, the little amusement park you’d share Prince George’s County with hardly seemed like any competition. It was a glorified water park run by a company that only five years prior hadn’t been outside Oklahoma. The park had one major coaster anybody could care about, called Mind Eraser. Its lift hill faced Jack Kent Cooke Stadium and gave riders a dazzling view when lit up for night games.
By the time you actually took control of your team in 1999, that little company in Oklahoma had bought and become Six Flags, and Adventure World become Six Flags America.
It would be five years until you started to invest in it yourself. August 2004 you started buying up stock, gradually increasing your stake and preparing yourself for this moment that you’ll deliver the final coup de grace.
It’s 2005, your’re Daniel Snyder, and your adversaries are back on their heels. You are already preparing with your business partners exactly what changes need to be made to capitalize on your presumed victory.
And you, too, are destined for failure.
It’s 1999. You’re the writer of this article, and you’re fully unaware of the purge your brain is undertaking. It doesn’t want to hold onto anything, and thinks it’s going to protect the future you. So it’s memory after memory in the burn pile reduced to ash and dust.
In 2020, this will be why you’ll struggle to remember. Things won’t be going so well. You’ll be in quarantine with your husband as death and disease are on every channel, every site, every group chat and comments section.
You’ll start feeling doom. You’ll start to think about the possibility of this being the end. You’re not sick, but a lot of people are. It might just not be your turn yet. The odds might not be high but Russian Roulette is Russian Roulette. Someone loses.
They’ll have shut down the theme parks only weeks before opening day, and it will already have been a month and more since that with no change in sight.
You’ll have Six Flags and Cedar Fair memberships, and of all the things you might worry about, you’ll somehow find time to concern yourself that you’ll never ride a roller coaster again. It’ll have been up to then an abstract concept- some day I will die and there will be a roller coaster which was my last. What will that be? Is it even built yet?
It won’t be as abstract so suddenly. Just three months prior, in January, you and your husband will have flown to California for one of the first cruises of the Carnival Panorama. You’ll have given yourself an extra day in Long Beach to enjoy Knott’s Berry Farm. You’ll have gotten all the credits, and nothing will have disappointed. You’ll even have the GhostRider on-ride photo.
But you won’t remember what you rode last.
You’ll start wondering if this is how it ends, and you’ll feel compelled but falter in putting it all back together from the start. You’ll start thinking about the past. You’ll start trying to remember.
You’ll think an awful lot about 1999, and some of it will come to you. You’ll think bit about 1997, and some of that will come back, too. But you’ll try and hardly recall a thing from 1998. In 2020, you’ll remember 1998 and be on a Merry Mixer at the 4H Fair. You’ll resuscitate 1998 from 2020 and be in a blank, wordless phone call with the theme to Clarissa Explains it All in the background. You’ll be coming home from a sleepover at some kid’s house and Dad needs to talk to you. You’ll be at Kishacoquillas Park in your little league uniform that you changed into in the car, wishing you were somewhere else. And you’ll be ashamed how little else you’ll find. It’s all ash and dust.
You’ll find an excuse to write about the time, about things you cared about, and you’ll do it in the second person point of view you learned from your Goosebumps Choose Your Own Adventure books.
Most of what will come back are snippets of moments, expressions and feelings. Some of them will be amalgamations of things you’d done hundreds of times, some will be moments so singular yet banal it’s frightening how seared in they are, as if your soul knew the import better than your conscious self. Your Mom driving you to preschool along Belleville’s backcountry roads and the funny feeling in your stomach when she goes over the tight hills just a bit too fast. Getting on the bus in kindergarten for a field trip to Happy Valley Friendly Farm and sitting next to a shy kid from the afternoon class you’d never met and being so impressed he already had a moustache. The same table at McDonald’s you’d sit at every Saturday with your Dad and Pap before grocery shopping. Your Mom putting a canister in the bank’s air tube system as you ask if your best friend can sleep over tonight. Watching coaster shows on cable television with your brother in the living room. (Not the mean older one, the younger one that even in 2020 people will mistake as your twin.) You’ll remember how the CRTs would crackle with static and hum when turned on, how the light they shined looked warm, was warm, like incandescent bulbs. You’ll remember how the blank black glass would get so cold once it was off. Warm to cold. Ash to dust. You remember touching cold makeup.
The images will be so disjointed, and all the moe overwhelming for it.
You’ll try to remember and think Raging Wolf Bobs was your first big boy coaster, but there’ll only be so many things you really remember from that whole trip: That the Corkscrew was your first inversion, not the Double Loop. A souvenir message-in-a-bottle from Sea World Ohio you intended to give to your best friend when you got home. Agonizing over the perfect thing to shout as you went over the first big drop of your coaster life.
It will be 2020 and you won’t remember the ride, but you’ll vividly remember you screamed “I’m going to diiiiiie!” and God only knows what inspired you.
But it’s not 2020 and you’re not trying to remember Belleville’s roads, your best friend’s moustache, or watching TV with your younger brother. Not yet.
It’s 1999, you’re 11 years old, and you are watching TV with your younger brother. It’s ESPN, and Penn State is one of the hottest teams in the country. Your brother loves LaVar Arrington, and says that whoever drafts him, that’s going to be his NFL team from now on. You’re not as interested. You open the channel guide to see if Discovery or Travel Channel are showing another coaster show- and they are!
You’ve only ever been to three amusement parks: Bland’s Park, Geauga Lake, and Hersheypark. In that order. Not a lot, but enough to know that you love roller coasters. You’re barely tall enough to ride but you’ve never seen one you didn’t want to immediately jump on.
Sucks how your Dad hates them. And your Mom gets anxious in crowds. They don’t even want to walk you the two blocks down to the 4H Fair when it sets up each summer, so they send you and your brother, or your best friend when he would have slept over, on your own with $20 to ride the Salt and Pepper Shaker and Merry Mixer all night and come home smelling like cigarettes and manure.
(Your best friend especially liked to ride with you. His parents hadn’t let him ride the exciting rides. He had only got to do that with you. You are not yet thinking too much about that. So it goes.)
You gawk at the incredible coasters on the TV, amazed at every ride. They all seem bigger and faster and more extreme than each other, an impossible Escher landscape of records. And every other one is at some Six Flags. You don’t understand product placement and native marketing at that age, that Six Flags is paying to get you to think exactly what you’re thinking at that moment: Six Flags has the most amazing coasters.
They’re all so far away. . You live in Central Pennsylvania, and if New Jersey seems a distance then Illinois and California might as well be different planets. There’s even a Six Flags in Ohio now, how close is that one to Geauga Lake?
You feel lucky Hersheypark even exists. And you are, because when you go Wildcat has PTCs and the fragrance of chocolate permeates everything down to the concrete.
But you’ve been to Hersheypark. You want to see a Six Flags in all its glory.
A commercial comes on the TV, professing how there’s now a Six Flags practically everywhere.
“Just a hop, skip and a jump away!” the announcer boasts.
You see the dots on the map, and you don’t know geography but you do read well for your age. You can read “Baltimore,” where Dad took you and your younger brother to an Orioles game a couple years before. You went by train, the first time you’d ever been on one. You went to Hooters and were most intrigued by the male server with balloons under his shirt. Your Dad reluctantly ordered you a whole bucket of clams, and you choked on one. He bought swimsuit magazines for you and your brother and the waitresses signed them as if they were celebrities.
At the game, you had the time of your life. At least a good enough time. You had ice cream in a helmet. The organ played “Pop Goes the Weasel” and when the scoreboard said “CHARGE” you yelled it with all your might. The ballpark wasn’t brand new, but new enough, and state of the art. Everybody was talking about Camden Yards, at least whenever you watched ESPN with your Dad.
Even in 1999, you don’t remember who played, who won. You remember every time a fan caught a foul ball, the announcer said, “Give that fan a contract!” You thought they were really getting signed to play.
Baltimore isn’t that far. We’ve made that trip before. From what the commercial said, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump. Why don’t they ever talk about that Six Flags in the shows? You have to go, you just have to.
Dad doesn’t agree.
It’s still 1999, you’re still the person who will one day type these words into a Medium.com text box, and you’re still watching TV with your brother.
But the show’s over. Some getaway beaches thing is on now. You go upstairs and put on your sister’s gymnastics leotard and prance around on her bed, performing halfhearted roundoffs. Mom encourages it, Dad does not.
You’re bored. Your sister stays up all hours talking with her friends on the phone. You’ve been told that’s the only thing teenagers do, is spend on the time on the phone with their friends. But it’s 1999, you’re the person writing this, and you don’t have a friend to call.
You leap and pose like you watch your sister do at her meets. You hop, skip and jump off the bed before turning to your brother in mock offense.
“WHY AM I NOT AT SIX FLAGS?!”
I’m gonna stop narrating in the second person now. Because you’re very extremely probably not Kieran Burke or Daniel Snyder. I know you’re not me.
It’s a bold statement, not just to say that I’ve identified and properly ordered all the roller coasters that led to Six Flags’ demise- but also pinpointed exactly what that demise was. It’d be easier if the company had been simply absorbed into the ether of time, but it didn’t. It’s still around, and with most of the same parks involved, as well. However the company went through obvious turmoil, and today no longer has the kind of reputation it did when Premier Parks felt more than comfortable paying Time Warner nearly $2b for it. It probably can never again regain the stature it had. What happened?
Was it a credible moment or event, like the closing of too many beloved parks, or the 2009 bankruptcy? Was it a round of purchases that had put them just too far into the red with no way out? Was Premier’s acquisition itself the fatal flaw, as the parks were absorbed into an unsustainable business model? Or is it a fuzzier thing, something you can’t really pinpoint, a gradual transition from having such a great reputation among enthusiasts to… just not?
Prepare to agree or disagree because I’m just going to define it.
The turning point, the point of no return for Six Flags as it was known and loved, was the takeover by Red Zone LLC in 2005. Daniel Snyder headed Red Zone along with a close business partner, Mark Shapiro, then Vice President of Programming and Production at ESPN.
This is the one event that the company has been unable to fully recover from with its 2009 bankruptcy stemming directly from decisions made by Snyder and Shapiro.
Disagree? Damn, that’s a problem. You’re not really going to like the whole concept of this series.
Everybody else, let me lay it out for you:
In 1981, a real estate company called Tierco Group bought Frontier City, a western-style theme park that had thoroughly failed. Tierco planned to raze the park and build housing to accommodate the state’s oil boom.
The boom busted and Tierco was stuck with a theme park to run.
Surprisingly, they turned the park around. After years of no new rides and deteriorating conditions, people had simply stopped going back. Immediately Tierco demonstrated an acumen that would become synonymous with Premier-era Six Flags in purchasing used rides. A Schwarzkopf Looping Star, still operating at the park as Silver Bullet, dramatically increased attendance. Over about a decade of gradual investment Frontier City had turned around so dramatically that Tierco shifted gears to become solely an amusement park company, taking its first baby steps in 1990 by buying Oklahoma City’s White Water Park from Silver Dollar City Inc. to control their home market.
In 1992, Tierco would take their first big step toward expansion.
Wild World, outside Washington DC, was caught up in the Savings & Loan scandal after two decades of identity crisis after identity crisis. Originally opened in 1972 by a division of ABC as the Largo Wildlife Preserve, it was quickly sold to Jim Fowler whose group renamed the park Wild World. However in 1983 the park would ultimately sell off all of its animals in unregulated, highly suspect transactions and operate solely as a waterpark. Being the owners of the world’s largest wave pool at the time, this seemed to be playing to the park’s strengths. But later that year lack of safety regulation led to the drowning of a nine-year-old boy and earned the park a bad reputation.
Perhaps the biggest bust was its namesake ride: Wild One, the relocated Giant Coaster from Paragon Park was not only becoming a maintenance nightmare with its brutal triple-down turnaround but simply wasn’t bringing in the people they’d hoped it would. The ride and park sat dormant for 1991.
The coaster wars were already underway, however, and the investments showed it. The year that Wild One spent SBNO, Cedar Point spent $7.5m on Mean Streak. In 1991, Kennywood paid a little over $4m for Steel Phanton. The next year, Busch Gardens paid about as much for Drachen Fire. None of these coasters are still around today. The latter two didn’t even make it ten years.
In the same year that Cedar Point spent $7.5m building Mean Streak, Tierco bought the entirety of Wild World, Wild One and all, for $5m.
They changed their name to Premier and away they went. Only a few years later, they bought Funtime Parks as their second major investment. It’d take them only a couple more years after that to acquire the biggest name in regional amusement parks.
1999 would bring the official transition for many parks: Adventure World becoming Six Flags America, Reino Aventura becoming Six Flags Mexico, etc. etc. So it goes.
This is just about where we start to pick things up.
Under the reigns of Kieran Burke, Premier/Six Flags built over 70 major thrill coasters (what RCDB classifies as extreme), about 6–7 per year from the company’s acquisition of Wild World in 1992 until 2006, when the final major projects begun by Burke were completed. So we have a pretty specific timeframe and list of coasters to consider, which is nice.
I’ll approach this from a very specific perspective as well: rooted firmly in 2005, the POV of a hypothetical Six Flags investor. To be extremely specific, I am a Six Flags investor in the exact moment I’m viewing Burke’s presentation which I have recreated in part below.
Throughout 2005, Six Flags stakeholders received tremendous attention from Snyder’s Red Zone LLC, who effectively offered a price floor on the company’s stock and bought in until he gained enough control to go for the jugular.
Snyder had no known stake in Six Flags before August 2004, and yet by the end of 2005 he would own and run it with his close friend Mark Shapiro, the VP of Programming and Production at ESPN.
From my perspective as a SF investor, I don’t need to presume I’m being lobbied heavily by the pair. We have the primary source documents that demonstrate their aggressive strategy to turn stockholders against Burke and his team.
We initially invested in Six Flags stock in August 2004, and over the course of the past year we have urged the Board and management to take immediate steps to improve the Company’s operating results and protect and enhance stockholder value. We have met with both management and the independent members of the Board and explained our view that there are many opportunities that Six Flags should pursue to increase park attendance and revenue and decrease expenses as well as opportunities to capitalize on the Company’s excess real estate holdings.
They also establish Burke’s counterstrategy- organization of a sale to the highest bidder which would potentially satisfy investors as well as prevent Snyder’s taking control of the company’s operations- or at least making him go to auction to do it.
But again, to be specific about time, I’m putting myself in the mind of an investor as I’m viewing Burke’s arguments against what Snyder feels is best operational practice for the company. Why? Because in that moment I’m most sensitive about how all of these expensive construction projects have impacted me. Each of these coasters moved the needle on stock value in some kind of fashion- and if I’m leaning toward Snyder’s argument, I’m feeling that the company has been wasting my money building too many roller coasters.
I’m really just kind of mad about it.
In that moment, which coasters would be at the forefront of my mind? Which would have me so upset with management’s choices that I wanted to vote to remove them entirely? Which others would I have felt were more appropriate, and which might have I thought were an outright shrewd investment, a model for moving forward?
That’s the idea, and that’s how I’ll rank them, in ascending order of blame.
That is to say, you can think of #50, the first roller coaster we’ll discuss, as the ‘best’ major coaster investment Premier-era Six Flags made in terms of keeping investors happy. And by extension, #1 will be the coaster project that had me and my dickhead investor friends most upset, the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back,’ so to speak.
The good news is that Burke was very kind to lay out for those of us in the future exactly what Snyder was planning, so it doesn’t need to be a mystery. These are the changes Snyder wanted to make, directly from Burke’s presentation to shareholders, the one I’m hypothetically in the middle of viewing as I decide my vote on the board of directors’ fate.
The whole thing is an interesting read, but I’ll be excerpting here the direct arguments Burke makes against Snyder as they do establish an intention to radically change business at the parks as well as framing the kind of arguments I would have been expecting to hear from Snyder as he sought control.
Snyder hated Mr. Six. How could you hate Mr. Six?! Just about all of you probably know who Mr. Six is, while some of you are just learning who Daniel Snyder is, and that’s the problem.
As owner of Snyder Communications and the Washington football team, Snyder was the most visible figurehead of each. This is only supposition, but I think Dan Snyder just doesn’t like the idea of someone associating a Daniel Snyder owned company with somebody other than Daniel Snyder. Why let this creepy old fuck get all the visibility? Nope, gotta end that ad campaign immediately.
If you’ll recall, Snyder got his start with direct marketing. So yeah, of course he wanted to do direct marketing.
As well, Snyder wanted to alter the focus demographics for the park from teens to…mothers and their daughters. We will see that this is part of a larger effort to make Six Flags a more “Disney” experience, at least in terms of price.
Snyder will repeatedly apply to Six Flags logic from his investment in his football despite no immediate correlation, and this may be the best example.
Snyder wanted to outsource concessions- while Six Flags itself was, with each of its parks operating lengthy schedules feeding thousands of guests each day, already one of the larger food service providers in the country. Concessions are major profit streams for just about anybody that operates a business where people will stick around for awhile and might want a bite to eat or a beer: think movie theaters and baseball games.
But movies roll every day. Baseball teams play 81 home games a year and the structure of the game itself lends to 5+ hours contests. NFL teams host 8 regular season home games per year, and their guests are nearly guaranteed to be out of the building within two hours of entering.
Hey wanna know what else Daniel Snyder owns? Johnny Rocket’s.
Remember Tony Hawk rides? Tony Hawk if you’re reading this you are so cool but come on. Come on.
Six Flags already owned the rights to use the DC and Looney Tunes characters, there was no cost associated with it. Licensing rights to more popular properties rarely worked out well for parks in the past for a variety of reasons.
But perhaps worst of all, Snyder apparently wanted to focus on brands that Six Flags would be paid to theme their rides to. So we’re talking less like actual themes, and more like advertisements. How much longer would Snyder have had to be in charge before we legit had a Twix racing coaster?
This is kinda meh but wait for the next one.
Would y’all be surprised to learn that the guy who charged fans to watch practice wanted to raise prices, and on practically everything? Investors thought that Six Flags was undercharging for its product, when it was attempting to market to a demographic that other theme parks were not totally appealing to. This entailed being a budget-friendly option, and “budget-friendly” is not in Daniel Snyder’s vocabulary.
Dan Snyder wanted to murder Six Flags America. The same way that Kieran Burke murdered AstroWorld. You can’t convince me otherwise. Six Flags America was and is the most direct competition for local dollars with Snyder’s football team. You can’t convince me he didn’t want to return SFA to a glorified waterpark and sell the rest of the land to himself to make a second practice facility or something. For real, you don’t think that’s what he would have done? We’re talking about the same Daniel Snyder, right?
You’re not going to see me making the argument it was a good decision to sell AstroWorld, either, by the way. But let’s move on.
You’d feel like this would be obvious and yet, not to me and my dickhead investor friends in 2005. The business models couldn’t be more different aside from a commonality of selling tickets to attend a venue. But investors wanted to assume Snyder knew best.
I said I would be approaching this from the POV of a 2005 SF investor, I never said 2005-era Six Flags investors weren’t huge dumbasses with awful foresight.
Cedar Point and Valleyfair had merged to become Cedar Fair years before Tierco had ever laid eyes on Frontier City, but I get the feeling these investors were looking for more immediate results. They wanted Magic Mountain to be Cedar Point and Great Adventure to be King’s Island. And if they haven’t done it in the six years Premier has owned them? Sell em off.
Snyder believed that the company’s focus on the teenage demographic attracted people who would make other guests uncomfortable. Without doubt, there were incidents of gang-related activity at Six Flags parks- incidents of fights and even stabbings dotted newspapers here and there during the era- but they occurred not only at other major parks but generally wherever crowds of people gathered.
Burke wasn’t wrong to question Snyder’s sincerity. In 2007, Joshua Martin left Six Flags Over Georgia after park security observed other guests making explicit threats toward him. The Atlanta Constitution recounted the event in 2013:
At a bus stop within sight of the park gates, Martin was assaulted and left permanently disabled by a gang that included four Six Flags employees. Six Flags contested its share of responsibility until a decade after the original event, the company and family finally reaching a settlement in 2018.
Court records showed Martin, who was 19-years-old at the time, had gone to Six Flags with his brother and another friend to celebrate the friend’s acceptance to college. Earlier that day, several young men tied to a gang known as YGL had harassed and threatened at least two families inside the amusement park, and later in the parking lot.
Notably, according to police, the gang included employees of the amusement park.
Just before the park’s closing time of 9 p.m., Martin, his brother, and his friend left the park and walked to a nearby hotel to use the restroom. By the time they returned to the front entrance of the park to await the bus, they had missed it and had to wait on the next one. They sat on a nearby guardrail to wait.
After noticing a large group of similarly dressed men and hearing murmurings of a fight. They left the guardrail and began to walk back toward the bus stop itself, but the group of men followed them. It had grown considerably dark by that point, and the group included the young men that had accosted the families inside the amusement park.
For no apparent reason, they attacked Martin when they got back to the bus stop, beating him with brass knuckles, knocking him to the ground and repeatedly stomping on him.
Four Six Flags employees — Willie Gray Franklin Jr., Brad McGail Johnson, DeAndre Evans and Claude Morey III — were each convicted of aggravated assault and violating Georgia’s Gang Act in criminal court in connection with the attack on Martin.
However much gang violence may or may not have been an issue at Six Flags under Premier’s rule, Snyder certainly wouldn’t make changes significant enough to protect Joshua Martin.
I think the critical thing to take away from here is Burke’s note that there are no “significant maturities” until 2008, essentially that they have no risk of going under in the next few years. Wild, to me, how close that lines up with when the company would inevitably file for bankruptcy. As if Snyder did absolutely nothing to improve the company’s position despite shredding operational budgets and investment in rides.
And there can be no doubt that Snyder absolutely eviscerated the ride budget. From 2006–2010, Snyder’s Six Flags commissioned two major roller coasters.
Yes. Two.
Snyder’s Six Flags contracted GCI to build Evel Knievel (now American Thunder) at Six Flags St. Louis and Terminator: Salvation (now Apocalypse) at Six Flags Magic Mountain. From 2007–2010, no Six Flags park received a newly commissioned major coaster save for two GCIs two years apart.
At the same time, Snyder-era Six Flags removed the following rides: The Chiller, Great American Scream Machine, two of their giant inverted boomerangs, Nightmare at Crack Axle Canyon and the aforementioned Two Face. In addition, they also sold AstroWorld’s Hornet to another company rather than relocate it elsewhere within the chain.
AsrtoWorld’s heartline twister, which showed up on site at Six Flags America but was never built, was also a casualty. The common understanding is that it was damaged in transit with no hope of repair, but straight up I don’t believe that. Snyder cancelled the project and sold it for scrap.
You guys think you hate Six Flag America? Daniel Snyder absolutely fucking hates Six Flags America.
I’m probably forgetting some others but knowing me I’ll edit this about eighteen times once I publish it anyway.
I will be looking at coasters built between the late nineties and culminating in 2006, the last year that projects planned by Burke’s management team opened. I will count them up until we get to #1, the coaster I believe would have most soured investors on Burke and turned them to Snyder.
For a variety of reasons, I have discluded SLCs and Boomerangs. There are a few other fuzzy cases usually surrounding coasters being commissioned as parks changed hands, but whatever, in the end I got to a nice round 50. If I have to write so many of these articles I’m at least going to make it a number that’s easy to remember. I’ll try to do one per day but I’m only human and that’s a lot of writing to do. (UPDATE- It turns out I’m extremely human.)
Thank you for reading this far and I hope you’ll join me as I start things off with #50, the coaster we can least blame for Six Flags’ demise: