Whether you’re slowly climbing that 300-foot chain lift hill or racing out of the station on the freeway faster than a sports car, roller coasters are very effective at attracting thrill seekers and the brave for a quick adrenaline rush. Usually, the logo of any amusement park is the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the area. Or theme parks might advertise the number of times their roller coaster reverses, or the amount of time the ride puts the rider through high levels of gravity.
Sometimes, however, the key to marketing roller coasters is to design something really weird, so much so that you wonder if you’re looking at a real roller coaster or a Photoshop passion project with clickbait posters. So here comes Taiwan’s Gravity Max roller coaster, which has no problem making a statement.
Here it is; probably the most used click-bait roller coaster of all time, or at least as much as I could find combing through the annals of YouTube. Also known as 搶救地心, Gravity Max is located in Taiwan’s Discovery World, and it was built by Dutch manufacturer Vekoma in 2002. If you take out the lift hill, Gravity Max is almost your standard corkscrew model, taking riders through one inversion at 56 mph.
The strangeness factor of Gravity Max, however, lies in its 114-foot lift hill. The ride takes its passengers on a piece of track that goes up an elevator, similar to Tower of Terror. And then it flips said track downward at a 90-degree angle, holding its horrified riders there before eventually dropping them through the rest of the track. Gravity Max is definitely the most likely roller coaster to trick its riders into thinking that they’re about to fly off the track, and Vekoma has only ever made one roller coaster with this type of lift hill.
