In the mid-1980s, the now-closed Action Park amusement park in New Jersey offered intrepid employees $100 cash to test out its insane Cannonball Loop waterslide, which shot riders down a steep hill before launching them through a loop and spitting them out into a pool of water. (Legend has it that actual human beings were asked only after a crash-test dummy emerged from the slide in one piece, which apparently took quite a few attempts.) When the Schlitterbahn Kansas City Waterpark attempted to build the tallest waterslide on the planet in 2014, engineers used sandbags to determine whether the ride was safe. No one wanted to test the slide after the sandbags flew off, so park owner Jeff Henry braved it himself, taking his assistant and the slide's head designer along as human guinea pigs. When Henry survived the plunge, he invited journalists to test the slide before opening it to the public. When the Six Flags in Largo, Maryland, was ready to test its new Apocalypse rollercoaster, the park tapped coaster fanatic Sam Marks — who runs a coaster club in Virginia — to test its latest creation.
For the most part, this is how ride launches work: The first brave riders to test new
amusement rides are park employees, owners and designers, along with the journalists and theme park fanatics who will help spread the word and pump up interest in the ride.
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