I am not a rollercoaster enthusiast, but there was a time in my life when I was very enthusiastic about rollercoasters. It was that brief window – perhaps you experienced this too – when my fading childhood obsession with trains overlapped with my burgeoning adolescent obsession with danger.
The closest amusement park was Canada’s Wonderland, which featured plenty of thrill rides. I rode them all, but the park was so popular, the lines so long, and the temperature somehow perpetually 10 degrees hotter than the rest of the city, that it wasn’t often a great experience.
My favourite rollercoaster as a kid was not at Wonderland. It was a two-hour drive away, in a poorly-designed and morally questionable theme park called MarineLand. And if you’re not sold yet: it was never finished.
The ride in question is Dragon Mountain.
I can understand why I liked it as a kid; it was long, it was fast, it had the word “dragon” in its name. It was also huge, spreading over 30 acres on an actual mountain purpose-built for the coaster, and this meant that as you approached the ride you could never see the whole track. It disappeared on the other side of the hill, leaving you to wonder what thrills might be in store.
There was a rumour that someone had vomited while upside-down on a loop, and then been showered by said vomit when the train was right-side up again. This was both apocryphal and physically impossible, but I believed it. I wanted to believe that I was brave enough to ride something that turned the contents of people’s stomachs into hair gel.
Years later, I went back to ride it again. In the intervening years I’d been to many more parks, and I was amazed that MarineLand was able to stay in business. No new rollercoasters had been added since I was a kid. The layout of the park felt wandering and aimless. Multiple stories of animal cruelty made me feel guilty for giving them my money. The singer who featured in the park’s ear-wormy jingle from my childhood was so upset by the allegations that she had reportedly demanded that her voice be removed from the song.
The ride itself – Dragon Mountain – was virtually unchanged. It was still fun, but I noticed more as an adult how some stretches of track seemed to serve no particular purpose. There was strange latticework in some sections that suggested the ride was still under construction, which, it turns out, it kind of was.
A huge volcano structure had been planned when the ride was built in 1983, but funds ran out, so the volcano wasn’t completed until 2006…and even then, it wasn’t really completed at all. The structure looks approximately like a volcano from the outside, but of course riders experience it from the inside, where it looks more like an incomplete stucco house than a volcano. Marineland’s visitors can’t see the “volcano” either, because it’s on the side of the hill that faces away from the rest of the park..
Another part of the ride features an uninspired, long, straight section of track that feels pointless. This was originally going to be a 1:4 scale replica of nearby Niagara Falls; imagine a coaster running right behind a curtain of water, so close you could almost reach out and wet the tips of your fingers. In old videos, you can see the steel framework where the waterfall was supposed to be built, but it never happened. Because the framework has since been removed, that part of the ride now is about as thrilling as a trip on an elevated subway train.
But despite all this, I still liked it.
It was like stumbling upon an unfinished child’s drawing of the world’s greatest rollercoaster – an ambitious project with all the right ingredients, but whose creator had become distracted and walked away before the vision could be seen through. Something about that makes me inexplicably sad.
This flood of amusement park nostalgia came to me thanks to a fantastic video game called Planet Coaster, in which players design, build, and manage their own theme parks. It’s a game that 11-year-old me would have loved, and a soundtrack that current-day me can’t listen to enough.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The melody and instrumentation evoke all the best parts of a day at an amusement park – fun, excitement, curiosity, wonder. The quick 16th-notes in the guitar remind me of the rhythmic clicking as a rollercoaster climbs a lift hill.
2. A good video game soundtrack has to strike a difficult balance: it can’t stand out enough to steal attention from the game itself, but it can’t be bland enough to fade into the background either. Guthrie and Ipsen’s talent in this regard is uncanny.
3. Nothing to do with the song, but I cannot tell you how happy I am to tell you this: someone has used Planet Coaster to finish Dragon Mountain.
Recommended listening activity:
Imagining a rollercoaster that runs from your house to your best friend’s house.