A Roller Coaster Vomitorium Trivia Quiz

Answer: El Toro

El Toro, located at Six Flags Great America in Jackson, New Jersey, is a monstrous wooden coaster boasting a 176 foot first drop, followed by several camelbacks that clear 80 feet. The ride was built by Intamin and opened in 2006. El Toro is the only American example of the Intamin pre-fab wooden coaster (the same ride model as Balder at Liseberg, Colossos at Heide Park, and T Express at Everland). Using wooden track parts that were laser-cut in a factory, pre-fab woodies are noted for their size, fast construction, and smooth ride experience.

Unfortunately, El Toro has gotten much rougher over as it's aged. A single large pothole cause a train to derail in 2021 and, in 2022, caused more damage after it was improperly repaired, resulting in over a year total of downtime.

Answer: Pantherian

Pantherian opened at Kings Dominion as Intimidator 305 in 2010, a towering bright red structure themed to Dale Earnhardt. In the 2025 season, it was repainted orange and given its new name to fit with the park's jungle theming. Pantherian is one of only a handful of coasters worldwide to stand over 300 feet tall. Few rides of any kind match its intensity: for three seconds, the first turn pulls between four and five positive g-forces (the sensation of being crushed into your seat).

In its first season, the park got so many complaints of blackouts around its first turn that it was completely reprofiled - meaning what stands today is actually the MILDER version of the ride.

Answer: Steel Vengeance

Steel Vengeance is a steel conversion of the former Mean Streak wooden coaster at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. The company Rocky Mountain Construction (RMC) retrofits their buttery-smooth I-box track onto several existing wooden rollercoasters, resulting in extreme rides that breathe new life into aging structures. Mean Streak was already a huge wooden coaster and opened as the world's tallest.

After adding 40 more feet of height to the first hill during refurbishment, Steel Vengeance opened as the longest, tallest and fastest RMC hybrid coaster (Zadra, a ride at Poland's Energylandia, later beat it by one foot in height and one mph in speed).

But its most notable statistic is its "airtime": the sensation of floating or being flung out of your seat as you crest a hill.

The ride opened heavily advertising the "most airtime of any coaster", with riders spending 27.7 seconds feeling airborne.

Answer: Velocicoaster

Velocicoaster is a launched Intamin steel coaster at Universal Islands of Adventure in Orlando, Florida. The ride is based on a Jurassic World theme, featuring extensive setpieces and animatronics in the ride queue and during the ride itself. Unlike many themed coasters, however, it doesn't skimp on forces.

It features two launches that reach a maximum speed of 70 mph, a 155 ft tophat element, and a final inversion called the "Mosasaurus roll," a type of heartline roll. Heartline rolls are designed to invert the rider around his own center of mass, rather than twisting the rider around the track, making the flip feel less jerky but more dizzying.

Answer: Iron Rattler

I don't know if anyone's called Iron Rattler a "LATIN TERROR", but you'll find it at the Southwest-themed Six Flags Fiesta Texas in San Antonio, Texas (where the Alamo is, remember?). The Iron Rattler is another beloved RMC conversion which opened in 2013, this time revamping the park's 1992 Rattler coaster.

When it opened, the Rattler held the record for the tallest drop on a wooden roller coaster, beating none other than the Mean Streak, the ride which became Steel Vengeance. However, the ride was so rough that the record-breaking drop needed to be reduced to just 124 feet. Thankfully, when it was updated to Iron Rattler, the ride was restored to its original height, and became another success story for RMC.

The ride is praised for the death-defying way it careens off, back up, and once more down the sheer quarry wall that surrounds Fiesta Texas.

Answer: GhostRider

GhostRider is another large wooden coaster at Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, California. The Knott family believed their park had almost everything it could ask for, including several small-scale steel roller coasters, but it needed a classic wooden ride to feel complete.

They contracted Custom Coasters International, a manufacturer known for completing projects at many different scales, with the intention of building the longest wooden ride on the West Coast. The result was GhostRider, which looms over the park's Ghost Town section.

Answer: West Coast Racers

The "CAR CREW" West Coast Racers is based on is West Coast Customs, a famous auto customization shop. Based in Los Angeles, the shop appeared in many TV shows, most memorably "Pimp My Ride." West Coast Racers, located at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Los Angeles County, California, features trains and queuing areas modeled after the shop's look and style. West Coast Racers features a yellow and a white track, which launch simultaneously and race to the station.

Although many of the other rides on this list are faster and taller, WCR's compact layout and interactions with the other train make it no less thrilling.

Answer: Wildfire

Wildfire is located at the Kolmarden Wildlife Park, a huge Swedish zoo overlooking the Baltic Sea's Braviken bay. Kolmarden is a large zoo with several other rides and a kiddie coaster, but Wildfire is uniquely extreme among its rides. Wildfire gives amazing views of the Baltic as you turn around a pre-drop section before it drops you 183 feet, the tallest drop on a wooden coaster (tied with T Express).

It's also been tied for the fastest wooden coaster record, with Goliath at Six Flags Great America. Wildfire (along with Goliath) is an RMC ground-up wooden coaster.

As opposed to their hybrid conversions, which use the existing structure of a defunct wooden coaster, every part of these rides is assembled by RMC. Only four total have been built: Wildfire, Goliath, Outlaw Run at Silver Dollar City, and Lightning Rod at Dollywood.

While these rides have received much acclaim for combining a classic feel with surreal forces, they've also been criticized for wearing down quickly; Lightning Rod put such forces on its track that it needed to be itself refurbished with RMC's steel track.

Answer: Hyperion

Hyperion is a hypercoaster built by Intamin for Energylandia, a park in Zator, Poland. It opened in 2018 as one of the park's headliner rides (along with Zadra, which opened the following year). It's themed to a journey to Hyperion, one of the moons of Saturn.

Energylandia has an interesting history - or should I say, an interesting lack of history. The park opened in 2014 with three coasters. It opened three more the next year, another the year after that, and three more in 2017. By 2024, just ten years, it had grown to 133 attractions in total, of which 19 were coasters. In 2025, Energylandia tied Six Flags Magic Mountain for the world record for most coasters (after the latter shut down its Superman coaster). The park was able to expand so fast thanks to extensive grants from the EU's Regional Development Fund. Strangely, other than a few family coasters, this expansion slowed after 2021, Energylandia's growth has slowed, with several rides being delayed years; this coincides with the end of the ERDF grants in 2020.

Answer: The Smiler

The Smiler is one of the best-known attractions at Alton Towers, one of Britain's best-known theme parks. Being a historical estate, Alton Towers is in one of Britain's cultural Conservation Areas and so it faces strict height limits for its rides. Instead of a limitation, the park uses this to find other ways for its rides to stand out. Oblivion, the world's first "dive coaster," stands at only 65 feet but dives 180 feet straight down into a pitch-black underground tunnel.

The park has a penchant for the creepy and dystopian, so other rides stand out through theming alone: Wicker Man is a wooden coaster with an elaborate, ominous wooden sculpture above one of its tunnels.

The Smiler, built in 2013, is both creatively themed and creatively laid out: opening with fourteen inversions, including sidewinders, sea serpents, corkscrews and dive loops, it shattered the world record for most inversions (Thorpe Park's Colossus, which has only ten).

The ride's tagline is "Smile Always"; it features many hypnotic-looking implements designed to "marmalise" riders into smiling by any means necessary.