Six Flags Magic Mountain: Thrill Capital of the World
California
Off to your left is Six Flags Magic Mountain, a park that has spent more than fifty years in a single-minded pursuit: building the most roller coasters in any theme park on earth. Today it is among the parks with the most roller coasters anywhere on earth, a title it has traded back and forth with a handful of rivals, and it has earned the nickname Thrill Capital of the World.
The park opened on May twenty-ninth, nineteen seventy-one, as simply Magic Mountain, an independent venture built on the hillsides near Valencia. Opening day admission was five dollars for adults and three-fifty for children. The early lineup was gentle by today's standards, with a mine-train coaster and a few family rides among the thirty-three attractions. The park bet on scenery and spectacle, building into the natural contours of the Santa Clarita hills.
In nineteen seventy-nine the Six Flags chain acquired the property and immediately began pushing it upmarket, adding coasters at a rate that reshaped the entire theme park industry's expectations for what a park could deliver. Revolution, added in nineteen seventy-six before the Six Flags purchase, was the first modern steel looping coaster in the world, and it set off a looping-coaster arms race that spread to every major park on the planet.
By the late nineteen nineties, Magic Mountain was competing with Cedar Point in Ohio for coaster supremacy, a rivalry that theme-park enthusiasts followed the way sports fans follow pennant races. Each park's new addition drew national press coverage and sold season passes to people who traveled specifically to ride a single attraction. Superman: Escape from Krypton, which opened here in nineteen ninety-seven, reached a hundred miles per hour and was briefly the fastest coaster on earth.
The park has appeared in dozens of films and television shows, and it remains one of the top theme parks in the western United States, drawing more than three million visitors each year to this stretch of the Santa Clarita Valley.
