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Thorpe Park: General Discussion

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Dhev123 said:
Was the parks lack of investment from 2013-2023 (bar flop train) due to the swarms lukewarm effect on park attendance? Or did other factors play into it? I think I read somewhere that the park blame their late 00s/early 10s branding when it was like “go nuts at the nations thrill capital” era.

That is, if hyperia helps the park reach new attendance milestones, will we be seeing more regular investments like the park had back in its hay day?

Of course it’s a different landscape, with the 2000s additions being at the time where the park had more room and also was still establishing itself as a thrill park, but would say, merlin give the park enough budget for a new attraction every 2 or so years?
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The 2000s saw a LOT of money being thrown at Thorpe in a very short period of time. This was primarily to get it up to bar after the Tussaud's buy out and turning it into an "older" park, offering a local graduating step from Chessington within the group.

I'm happy to be corrected, but I think off the top of my head there are only 4, 5 at most, attractions still standing which are pre-Tussauds. The level of investment we saw was always going to peter out, to continue would have been impossible.

The slouch after The Swarm launch, I'm sure, was down to a number of factors. Merlin going public, The Smiler crash (different park, same group) and a focus on some of the other properties within the group. We've seen this at Alton Towers too though, admittedly there wasn't quite as long between big projects / coasters at Thorpe.
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
The 2000s saw a LOT of money being thrown at Thorpe in a very short period of time. This was primarily to get it up to bar after the Tussaud's buy out and turning it into an "older" park, offering a local graduating step from Chessington within the group.

I'm happy to be corrected, but I think off the top of my head there are only 4, 5 at most, attractions still standing which are pre-Tussauds. The level of investment we saw was always going to peter out, to continue would have been impossible.

The slouch after The Swarm launch, I'm sure, was down to a number of factors. Merlin going public, The Smiler crash (different park, same group) and a focus on some of the other properties within the group. We've seen this at Alton Towers too though, admittedly there wasn't quite as long between big projects / coasters at Thorpe.
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Yeah I think Merlin’s only investments were saw + alive, storm surge, swarm, dodgems, ghost train and hyperia in 15 years if I’m correct? which is far from good.

I think looking back as well the park had an identity crisis for a while, with merlin and park management not really knowing what to do with thorpe

2009-2012 - thrill capital
2013 onwards - random angry birds land and new slogan/look, trying to make it a ‘resort’ with the shark cabins
2016 - commercial bomb of ghost train
2024 - sudden rebrand again

Whereas other parks in the merlin chain have maintained their brand image and identity for as long as I can remember.

Just find it odd that a park so close to london, with the thrilling edge over legoland and chessington (the latter of which has lower attendance than thorpe) saw little to no investment when the other two received regular investment and new attractions.

Obviously legoland is where the money is, and towers sorta had to recover after the smiler incident after shutting many of their rides,

But yeah the neglect the park has had was always so strange to me post swarm
 
I think the lack of meaningful investment post-Swarm, and particularly post-DBGT, is quite a complex and multi-faceted issue. My view is that it was caused by both Thorpe-specific factors and factors of the wider Merlin group that Thorpe were simply affected by.

I think it did start with The Swarm’s “failure” in 2012, when attendance was down by over 10% on the previous year. Some might argue that this failure was more multi-faceted than simply the ride itself; 2012 was the wettest summer in decades, and events like the Diamond Jubilee and London 2012 diverted attention away from the parks. It was a weak year for attendance across the board, with Alton Towers’ attendance also dropping by around 10% and that of many other parks across Europe also being drastically lower in 2012. Not to mention that 2009-2011 were absolute peak attendance years for Thorpe Park, and the attendance likely couldn’t have gone an awful lot higher. Regardless, the inability to raise attendance saw Swarm deemed a “failure”, which in turn caused the park to do a drastic u-turn on the hefty “thrills, thrills, thrills” positioning of the prior few years.

I’m led to believe that another big coaster was originally planned for 2015/2016, on the island next to Swarm, but this was scrapped in favour of Derren Brown’s Ghost Train after Swarm “failed”, as it was felt that the park needed to try something different after Swarm’s “failure”.

Of course, this ultimately didn’t work, as DBGT is also widely perceived to have “failed” despite the fact that it did ever-so-slightly raise attendance (albeit not significantly by any stretch). It was delayed by 2 months and didn’t open until July, it was horrendously unreliable, and its reception was mixed to negative at best. After a few months of operation, it was so unreliable and received so poorly that it had to have a pretty significant overhaul for the 2017 season, and even that didn’t seem to particularly save it. At one stage, it’s alleged that John Wardley was even asked to come in and save it, but he refused. Taking into account that DBGT was reportedly the most expensive theme park attraction ever built in the UK, I think it’s fair to say that the ride was not a resounding success by any metric.

After DBGT, I’m led to believe that the park was planning a major attraction for 2020. Indeed, the park hinted towards a 2020 coaster of some form at an Attraction Source event back in July 2017. However, later that year, Nick Varney announced wide-ranging CAPEX cuts across the Resort Theme Park estate, which this 2020 Thorpe project is believed to have fallen victim to. Given that Swarm and DBGT both “failed”, I wouldn’t mind betting that another major investment into Thorpe would have been high on the list of things to cut.

In general, I think Thorpe was seen as a poisoned chalice for a number of years after both Swarm and DBGT failed, but I’d also wager that there were projects planned at some stage that fell victim to Merlin’s wider CAPEX cuts in the late 2010s. There was nothing major in the pipeline at any of the RTPs post-Wicker Man until after the company went private again; you used to get a major new ride investment at a Merlin RTP every year, but we got none at all between Wicker Man in 2018 and Jumanji at Gardaland in 2022. This wouldn’t have been caused by COVID, either, as major projects planned for 2020 and 2021 would have been signed off before COVID.
 
Squiggs said:
6/7 depending on your criteria:
  • Rapids
  • Tea Cups
  • X - The Walking Dead
  • Flying Fish
  • Mr Monkey's Banana Boat
  • Depth Charge
  • Amity Beach
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I'd forgotten the tea cups!

I guess my point was the park got to a point where it wasn't viable to keep investing in it at the same level, or really necessary apart from small things. The problem is that they didn't refine what they had in that time either.
 
Squiggs said:
6/7 depending on your criteria:
  • Rapids
  • Tea Cups
  • X - The Walking Dead
  • Flying Fish
  • Mr Monkey's Banana Boat
  • Depth Charge
  • Amity Beach
Click to expand...
In the alternative timeline where the Wicked Witches Haunt never burnt down and Detonator was never installed in its place, I wondered whether it would still be running today, given some sort of apocalyptic retheme to match the rest of Thorpe’s rides of recent years or demolished anyway when Derren Brown came along (if a second dark ride would have even been on the cards).
 
KolonelKlink said:
In the alternative timeline where the Wicked Witches Haunt never burnt down and Detonator was never installed in its place, I wondered whether it would still be running today, given some sort of apocalyptic retheme to match the rest of Thorpe’s rides of recent years or demolished anyway when Derren Brown came along (if a second dark ride would have even been on the cards).
Click to expand...

Can’t remember where I read this, possibly the Making Thorpe Park book but there were plans in 2000 to integrate/retheme Wicked Witches Haunt with Amity Cove as an old 50s waxwork museum.
 
Justice for Tropical Travels building.

Pretty much an extension of the current arcade/KFC building that went down to Inferno pretty much. Though I don't recall much of the layout.
 
Fairly pleasant day in Thorpe today. Might've seen a few people from here? Wasn't fully sure so didn't say anything but I think there was someone wearing energylandia merch...

in any case, the park seems to be in pretty good shape overall (or better at least). The free suncream dispensers around the park are a great idea. Hyperia queue management was pretty competent. Did ghost train for the first time, it was certainly an experience of all time. Operations were reasonably strong all day. Queue times reported by app largely overstated. Park was largely clean
 
Dhev123 said:
Was the parks lack of investment from 2013-2023 (bar flop train) due to the swarms lukewarm effect on park attendance? Or did other factors play into it? I think I read somewhere that the park blame their late 00s/early 10s branding when it was like “go nuts at the nations thrill capital” era.

That is, if hyperia helps the park reach new attendance milestones, will we be seeing more regular investments like the park had back in its hay day?

Of course it’s a different landscape, with the 2000s additions being at the time where the park had more room and also was still establishing itself as a thrill park, but would say, merlin give the park enough budget for a new attraction every 2 or so years?
Click to expand...
I'd certainly say Ghost Train had an effect on investments and attendance over the last decade.

It was an experimental dark ride system that didn't work out well. If Ghost Train had been more successful, we'd have seen the park in a slightly better position.

I'd imagine we'd see a different coaster to Hyperia on the island behind Swarm and a refurbished Loggers Leap in Old Town.

I believe that Thorpe had every intention to refurbish Loggers but it didn't happen - in my view, I feel the issues with Ghost Train and possibly Slammer had been a factor in why it didn't happen.

With the Swarm, I'd say it opened during the year of the UK Olympics so it would've had an effect on attendance regardless. If it opened a year earlier or later, it may have been a slightly different story.

I'm hoping we do see regular investments after Hyperia and it seems promising with the site of Slammer potentially being a new ride.
 
I’ve heard it said before that there was originally money set aside for a Logger’s refurbishment that was later redirected into DBGT’s 2017 overhaul, so I’d argue that DBGT was quite a direct reason why Logger’s didn’t reopen if this is true.
 
Call_um said:
On Tuesday I noticed they had started laying some green turf and wondered what it was for.

Today, I could see there is now a screen, a bar and a little Ben and Jerrys stall. I imagine this will be for the Euros?


IMG-8675.jpg
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It would look good if they could also lay some of this around the lake on the Hyperia site.
 
owenstreet7 said:
It was an experimental dark ride system that didn't work out well. If Ghost Train had been more successful, we'd have seen the park in a slightly better position.
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The dark ride wasn’t really the experimental bit, it’s the VR which wasn’t successful, together with a strange plot that was hard to understand on the dodgy VR.
 
Derren Brown wanted to design the Ghost Train so that it blurred the lines between what was real and what wasn't. In theory, it was actually a sound idea and some aspects worked i.e. Walking onto a Victorian suspended carriage but actually ending up on a London tube, the fake gift shop etc. These were intended to cause some disorientation and i think they worked quite well. The point at which the illusion was ruined was when putting that VR headset on, it either didn't work or the quality was just so poor that it just made that section of the ride a chore. They would have been better having screens in the train windows, rather than battling with a clunky headset. I believe the final ride wasn't what Derren Brown had envisioned anyway.
 
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