R.I.P. Kingda Ka, 2005 to 2025. Long live the king!

JACKSON, N.J. – The king is dead. Long live the king.

Kingda Ka, the tallest and second-fastest roller coaster in the world, died Friday in a controlled implosion, crumbling into a pile of steel just before 7 a.m.

Kingda Ka survived routine mechanical failures that precipitated months-long closures, occasional lawsuits from injured riders and even a lightning strike. But two months shy of its 20th birthday, the self-proclaimed “King of Coasters” succumbed after a brief and valiant struggle with what its owner, Six Flags Great Adventure, called “growth and dedication to delivering exceptional new experiences.”

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The roller coaster opened to great fanfare at the theme park in 2005, shooting riders up a 456-foot tall “top hat” hill at speeds of up to 128 mph – making Kingda Ka, at the time, the fastest roller coaster in the world.

Since the final piece of track was laid in January 2005, Kingda Ka’s top hat was the closest thing to a skyline Ocean County had to offer, with its highlighter-green track and bright orange shoulder harnesses visible for miles on a clear day.

“It’s one of the first things you can see when you drive in. Before you even get to the park, you can see it,” American Coaster Enthusiasts regional representative Matt Kaiser said. “It brings in people from all over the world. It’s iconic.”

‘Are we going to space?’

To countless millions of guests at Six Flags Great Adventure, Kingda Ka offered a trade: If you were willing to wait on the longest lines in the park, sometimes upwards of two hours, Kingda Ka would give you perhaps the most thrilling 30 seconds of your life.

(Unless you were one of the lucky ones to experience the rare “rollback,” when a train couldn’t make it all the way up the hill. The train would simply roll backward and launch again, giving riders a ride-and-a-half.)

After strapping into the shoulder harness, riders would anxiously murmur as the Kingda Ka train left the station. First-timers often sat in the middle of the train, holding on for dear life as they realized that they’d officially missed their last opportunity to chicken out. Veteran thrill seekers knew the front row was worth the wait, so the only thing between them and blue skies a few thousand feet of coaster track and a small signpost warning to keep their “arms down, head back, hold on.”

After what seemed like an eternity (but was only about 10 seconds), the train would slowly creep back a few feet. Then, a telltale hiss would let riders know that Kingda Ka’s hydraulic launch system was ready.

For a second, there was nothing. And then – everything.

Every face muscle would ripple from the force. Tears – not of joy or sorrow, but wind – would pool at the corner of your eyes, if you were courageous enough to keep them open. All 18 riders, from front to back, erupted into the anthem of Kingda Ka: “AHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!.”

Within five seconds, the train would barrel up the top hat, spinning around until cresting over the top, a split second vista showing countless acres of Pinelands and suburban New Jersey.

“The launch felt like it was forever,” Brick resident Christine Shenkman said. “But when the train hit full speed and headed up, my mind wondered, ‘where is the top of this thing? Are we going to space?’”

And then, of course, riders would look down – just in time to see the ground to come corkscrewing back at them as the train plummeted back to earth. There was one last 129-foot hill before another hiss – the hydraulic brakes – signaled that the ride was over.

“And just like that, we were back at the station and unloading – but forever changed,” Shenkman said.

Breaking records … at what cost?

Kingda Ka’s birth served as the climax of the decades-long roller coaster wars, as theme parks across the country battled to build the next big thing in thrill rides, breaking speed and height records and engineering gravity-defying designs to pull visitors away from the competition. The wars hit a fever pitch after the 9/11 attacks, as theme parks built coaster after coaster to attract nervous, rattled Americans back to crowded places.

“That was the age of the giant rides. They were trying to go bigger, better and faster,” said Dave Hahner, historian with American Coaster Enthusiasts, a nonprofit club of more than 7,000 roller coaster lovers around the world. “There were no limits to the records they would try to break, and Kingda Ka was the pinnacle of that.”

Six Flags Great Adventure was no exception. For a time in the mid-2000s, it was something of a roller coaster nirvana, with eight “extreme” coasters operating at once.

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“Overnight, Great Adventure became a worldwide destination. New Jersey was at the center of the amusement park of the world,” Glen Ridge resident John Wiley said. “Most coaster fans would agree it was a flawed ride and, clearly, the economics weren’t working. But its launch was unlike anything else.

“More than that, it represented a level of ambition in engineering and scale that few parks in this part of the world can stomach anymore. I hope whatever replaces it lives up to that legacy.”

Over its 20-year run, Kingda Ka faced a myriad of mechanical issues, including routinely closing for weeks or months at a time as the hydraulic launch system that was its calling card became unreliable and increasingly expensive to maintain, Hahner said.

When Six Flags and Cedar Fair merged last year, its executives likely saw Kingda Ka at the top of a list of problematic rides that were too expensive to maintain, Hahner said.

“They wanted to push the envelope. They wanted a record-breaker at Great Adventure,” Hahner said. “But there are a lot of technical problems, a lot of repairs and, of course, they have to make it safe. And unfortunately, there were a couple of incidents involving these types of rides.”

In 2023, a guest at Cedar Point theme park in Ohio filed a lawsuit against Cedar Fair after she was struck in the head by a metal bracket that fell off Top Thrill Dragster, a similarly designed roller coaster to Kingda Ka also manufactured by Liechtenstein-based Intamin. The woman suffered a traumatic brain injury, requiring $10 million in lifelong care, and the case was settled out of court last year, according to Cleveland.com.

That might have been the final blow for Kingda Ka, Hahner said. The coaster was simply guilty by association.

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‘When I’m gone…’

Kingda Ka is survived by seven siblings – including Nitro, El Toro, Medusa and Batman: The Ride – and predeceased by three more: the Great American Scream Machine, Rolling Thunder, and Batman & Robin: The Chiller.

The Chiller closed in 2007 after a decade of operational issues and, in 2010, when the Great American Scream Machine was dismantled after a 21-year run. The wooden Rolling Thunder was demolished after the 2013 season, the last major coaster at the park to close until now.

In November, Six Flags announced that Kingda Ka, Zumanjaro (the world’s tallest drop ride, a separate attraction built right into Kingda Ka’s steel structure), and the Green Lantern roller coaster (a poor replacement for the Scream Machine, in the opinion of anyone who rode both) would all be retired.

Unlike Rolling Thunder and the Scream Machine, there was no advance notice. Theme park news websites and roller coaster insiders reported rumors of the closure for months, giving aficionados the chance to get one last ride on Kingda Ka.

The park made no formal notice until after the season was over, but the signs were there.

After sunset on Nov. 10, as the last Kingda Ka trains made the 30-second trip to the heavens and back, guests walking away from the King of Coasters for the last time could hear Anna Kendrick’s “Cups” song playing from the public address system: When I’m gone, when I’m gone, you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone…

“It’s hard to overstate how much this ride meant to me as a kid growing up in New Jersey,” Wiley said. “I was 11 years old when Kingda Ka first opened, and 30 when I rode it one last time on its final day.”

Three months later, on Feb. 28, a horn blared loud enough to be heard from the Adventure Crossing parking lot on Route 537. All along the highway, gawkers sat up from their lawn chairs and got out of their cars to pull out their cell phones and start recording. One onlooker had an LED sign flashing a tribute to the King of Coasters.

They craned their necks to see the towering green arch of Kingda Ka reflecting the sunlight as it had for the last 7,351 days.

One last time, they gulped with anticipation.

For a second, there was everything. And then, with a thunderous boom — nothing.

Mike Davis has spent the last decade covering New Jersey local news, marijuana legalization, transportation and a little bit of everything else. He’s won a few awards, which make his parents very proud. Contact him at mdavis@gannettnj.com or @byMikeDavis on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Six Flags New Jersey: Kingda Ka implosion in Jackson Township

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