That was even likely the case in some of the more recent conversions, such as Six Flags Discovery Kingdom’s Roar-into-The Joker or Six Flags Over Georgia’s Georgia Cyclone-into-Twisted Cyclone-both were still good wood coasters, both lost a big element of what made them good in the process, and both still more than made up for it with a dash of RMC’s gravity-warping gee-wizardry. That was certainly the case with their earliest efforts, all lumbering wooden dinosaurs that had long since been bastardized to the point that whatever there may have once been to like about them had fallen into a black hole with no possibility of return, and on the day they were decommissioned the only thing the coaster was good at was shaking loose synapses apart. I won’t try to use my old contrarian schtick to argue otherwise: every single IBox steel coaster is better than the wooden coaster that it replaced. Is it okay to replace a mediocre aging roller coaster with a new one that’s absolutely top-of-its-class? What makes this challenge so vexing is that for their first ten conversions the response was unequivocally unanimous (including yours truly): Yes! Unquestionably, Rocky Mountain Construction has posed what is possibly the single greatest philosophical challenge to coaster preservationists. It’s also not purely out of the romantic notion of the unsurpassable masterwork that I make this wish. Yet if there’s anything about Steel Vengeance that prevents future IBox conversions from being built, it’s not going to be fear that its perfection cannot be eclipsed it’s fear that its mishaps will be eclipsed, be it trains bumping, flying cellphones or hot sauce, or stuff falling off that’s… not supposed to. 2 It took seven years of waiting since New Texas Giant for what every coaster fan in the country knew would be RMC’s golden opportunity to build their biggest and most stunning creation possible, and when the details were revealed and the first riders came back, it did not disappoint. This is why I feel I can say with some confidence that even if there are some other very good RMC conversions in the future, I’m doubtful they can 100% eclipse the scale and ambition of Steel Vengeance, for the simple reason that there are no other remaining wooden coasters that offered as grand of a canvas for RMC to work their magic on as the former Mean Streak provided. pre-existing wooden coasters) that’s steadily dwindling in both number and quality, and thus the brighter this innovation burns the more quickly it will be exhausted. IBox track is an unusual invention in that it’s dependent on a very finite resource pool (i.e. But from now until eternity, future IBox conversions can only be a disappointment in comparison, so it’s better that they quit while they’re ahead. They can continue to build new coasters and a successful business with all-new Topper Track, Raptor Track, T-Rex Track, and whatever other designs come next. With Steel Vengeance, I can only hope that the IBox conversion technology will be declared by Fred Grubb and Alan Schilke to have reached its apogee, and that Rocky Mountain Construction will voluntarily suppress their own patent so that they nor anyone else can never convert another wooden coaster to steel ever again. Perhaps my favorite of these stories: the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein published the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921, upon which he declared all of philosophy was solved and spent the next twenty-five years teaching school children in rural Austria and obsessively building a house. The musician known as Captain Beefheart changed the face of American rock-and-roll with his uncompromising music until 1982, when he declared he was “too good at the horn” and permanently retired to pursue painting. David Lynch quit moviemaking after 2006’s ambitious Inland Empire, even though he continued to produce work in a variety of different media. Harper Lee famously only ever published To Kill A Mockingbird, although she continued to be an active presence in the literary world. Sometimes you encounter a work so monumental that the only appropriate follow-up on behalf of its creator is to never produce anything within that medium ever again, even if they might remain active in other fields.
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