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[2024] Thorpe Park: Hyperia - Mack Hypercoaster

GooseOnTheLoose said:
The official Thorpe Park photos are most likely taken by Jack Silkstone, as he often does photography for them and it follows his usual visual style. They've most certainly been "warmed", just by adjusting the white balance.

I've taken one of the photos published yesterday and reset the white balance (telling the photograph what white is, so colours are more accurately represented). You can see that the track is gold, but definitely more yellow.

Incidentally the "warmth" for these photos was really cranked up.

*EDIT* - Added two more rebalanced photos for illustrative purposes.

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Blue and black for me 😂
 
djtruefitt said:
i asked about the track colour on the Thorpe page tonight as I thought the track would be faded from Gold to white like stealth. But apparently that’s changed since the planning and it will not just go from gold to white with no transition which I think is a bit of a shame.
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That's a shame! I did wonder how they where gonna fade it
 
djtruefitt said:
According to a reply it wasn’t a cost cutting measure but a creative choice.
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To be fair I’d imagine cost cutting is a backbone of the Merlin creativity department if their tenure thus far is anything to go by.

They’re like the alter ego of John Hammond out of Jurassic Park.
 
Josh555 said:
To be fair I’d imagine cost cutting is a backbone of the Merlin creativity department if their tenure thus far is anything to go by.

They’re like the alter ego of John Hammond out of Jurassic Park.
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In fairness, from the attraction source John Burton interview / presentation he did, he did say MMM now have much more creative freedom and input into projects than they did before, with the ability to speak up if they think something is wrong. This seems to match up with a noticeable improvement in attraction quality, especially at Towers. I have realtively decent hopes for this coaster too. New Merlin seem to know what they are doing much more. Takes a long time to change the course of a ship as large as Merlin though.

As for the colour change, surely the gold colour would be more expensive than white. Therefor there is a possibility that it was a creative choice.
 
Trouble with the “Merlin” jokes is we really don’t know what Merlin is right now. It’s had such a major shake up those jokes just don’t land yet.

I’m not saying they have become good, I’m just saying right now we really have no idea.
 
Dave said:
Trouble with the “Merlin” jokes is we really don’t know what Merlin is right now. It’s had such a major shake up those jokes just don’t land yet.

I’m not saying they have become good, I’m just saying right now we really have no idea.
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This is a very good point. I guess with upcoming projects, including Exodus, we will start to get a better grasp of the direction they are heading. All seems mostly positive so far, but I sense they are still very much in a transitional period. So it could conceivably go either way.
 
DistortAMG said:
I guess with upcoming projects, including Exodus, we will start to get a better grasp of the direction they are heading.
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I think subsequent projects will be far more telling. Exodus is very much a 'Merlin 1.0' project, having been started long before recent events (don't forget, projects like this are years-long, with information only starting to surface to us enthusiasts in the latter stages of a project).

Of far more interest, to see how Merlin will develop moving forwards, are the projects in early development right now, which will hit public planning consultation maybe next year or the year after...
 
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I think we can’t yet tell what the current “version” of Merlin is like.

The current head teams at both Merlin and the individual parks are mostly very new, having only joined the company within the last year in many cases. Scott O’Neil has been Merlin CEO for less than a year, Bianca Sammut has been Divisional Director of Alton Towers for less than a year, and I believe Thorpe Park might have had a new Divisional Director join very recently, if I’m remembering rightly.

A lot of the projects that have recently opened or are in an advanced enough stage of planning/construction for us to know about them are the swansong of the Varney tenure rather than things that the new management had a lot of input into. The people in charge at Merlin may seem like a pretty negligible factor in CAPEX investment and the guest experience at first glance, but I think it might make a surprising difference. A lot of the things that people hated about Merlin investments were things that Nick Varney himself staunchly believed in; for instance, the requirements of “a USP, a killer image and a succinct summarising sentence” for every Merlin investment came from Varney himself. If Scott O’Neil has different views to Nick Varney on this, then we could see a very different approach taken to CAPEX investment in the years to come.

So in conclusion, I think the new management teams at both the parks and Merlin have not yet stayed long enough in their roles for us to ascertain what their full impact is. I’d argue that early signs are promising, but none of the new team have yet had the opportunity to properly make their mark. Like others, I think that the next few years will be more telling than what we’re currently seeing.
 
Matt N said:
A lot of the projects that have recently opened or are in an advanced enough stage of planning/construction for us to know about them are the swansong of the Varney tenure rather than things that the new management had a lot of input into. The people in charge at Merlin may seem like a pretty negligible factor in CAPEX investment and the guest experience at first glance, but I think it might make a surprising difference. A lot of the things that people hated about Merlin investments were things that Nick Varney himself staunchly believed in; for instance, the requirements of “a USP, a killer image and a succinct summarising sentence” for every Merlin investment came from Varney himself. If Scott O’Neil has different views to Nick Varney on this, then we could see a very different approach taken to CAPEX investment in the years to come.
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I don’t actually mind the ‘killer image’ or ‘summarising sentence’ as a concept, but I feel it was taken too far as it was pretty much saying ‘cool thing that the guest will remember!’*


*so they don’t remember all the other areas we neglected
 
I wouldn't even say that projects being started now will truly be representative of new Merlin. There's so many changes happening across MMM right now that it's impossible to say exactly what the new standard will look like.

I'd estimate that over the next 5 years we'll see "stepping stone" style projects. Ones that are influenced by the new direction but not fully representative of it. The first key indicator will be the level of investment we start seeing in new attractions. But changing the way attractions are devdeveloped and delivered will be a long process, and no doubt need adjustment along the way.
 
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