Millennium Force

It’s one thing to hear a radio ad or see a television commercial hyping up Millennium Force; to see its concept art in the newspaper; to hear people talk about the world’s tallest roller coaster and the inevitable “would you or wouldn’t you?” that its staggering statistics ellicit.

But it’s something else entirely to arrive on the Cedar Point causeway and see Millennium Force looming over the park’s skyline. Even today – surpassed by its own younger cousin – Millennium Force is an icon. Its sleek first hill rising against the morning sky is a beacon for arriving coaster enthusiasts; the culmination of pilgrimages from around the world. This is one of those rides; a living legend, identifiable by its silhouette alone.

Still, nothing quite registers the scale and importance of Millennium Force like standing at its entrance. Thousands of guests occupy the sea of concrete and steel corrals that reside here, beneath the occasional tented shade structure. There’s even a DJ booth – much-needed on the hottest summer days when multi-hour waits for the world’s first gigacoaster build through the day.

Can a ride on Millennium Force be worth it? There’s only one way to find out…

The queue rises from the concrete plaza of switchbacks, climbing to a second story. On the left, a black steel fence places waiting riders within feet of the fluid blue track and a compressed airtime hill precipitously squeezed between banked turns. When the train finally arrives, it’s almost silent – sleek and aerodynamic as it races by – pht-pht-pht-pht-pht-pht like shuffling playing cards as the rows pass.

It isn’t for three or four Mississippi seconds after the train’s gone that the wind follows, bursting from around the phantom train as if it just barely tapped the sound barrier.

All eyes follow the train, of course, as it zags out of the airtime hill, slithering up an overbanked turn that crowd surfs across the queue, then aligns with the final brakes, entering them at what must be damn near the ride’s top speed. (Okay, so Morgan was right about the ride’s massive kinetic energy…) Nervous first timers make a note to themselves: when we reach that turn, it’s over. Little do they know, when the time comes, they’ll wish it wasn’t.

In what reads like a sinisterly clever bit of planning, the train that raced by us on the right seconds ago now returns to the unload station on the left, its riders breathlessly cheering, chattering, and applauding. “How was your ride?” No need to ask. Millennium Force speaks for itself…

For all the pomp and circumstance you might expect for challenging the world’s first gigacoaster, Millennium Force’s station is simple – an elevated steel shed. Correctly anticipating the sleek, metallic, Helvetica aesthetic of the 21st century, it’s bare but for metallic accents, geometric auxillary fans, blue and green corrugated steel garage doors, and – over the train – red flourescent lightbulbs. Yet it’s a frenetic place. A place buzzing with nerves and chatter. How couldn’t it be? Whether its your first or thousandth time, Millennium Force is special.

The iconic, electronic loop of Millennium Force’s station music – a continuous rising and falling arpeggio of muffled doo-doo-doo-doos with a hi-hat rat-a-tat – builds anticipation. It seems to sync to the coaster itself as the flourescent red lights all extinguish, then re-light from the train’s back to front, ushering it out of the station.

There’s no pre-drop; no drive tires to propel the train. In fact, observant riders can actually see the elevator catch car lower down the hill that begins right at the station’s end, swiftly and silently gliding under the train and settling into place as riders board.

The Future is Riding On It

Another relative innovation for the era – the ride’s trains. Nine cars – each arranged with 2-by-2 seating that elevates the second row slightly over the first, yeilding an impressive 36 riders per train. But more to the point, Intamin’s hydraulically-secured lap bars omit the click-click-click racheting of other restraints. Like the ride itself, they’re silent. Precise. And in the open air sleds and extreme statistics of the train, surprising. Feeling so open and exposed is one of Millennium’s most fundamental features, though, and knowing that you’ll be hoisted 300 feet over Lake Erie in no time flat with nothing but this yellow lap restraint over your hips is a formative experience for any coaster enthusiast.

Speaking of which, the start of the ride is likely to catch you by surprise, too. A slight jolt forward signals the start of the catch car’s ascent. Then, in a whisper, the train is gone. Row by row, it bends upward. The 45° ascent is unusual by most coasters’ standards. But the most notable feature here is that it’s fast. Whether you love or loathe the precipitous, slow, clack-clack-clack climb of a coaster, it’s absent here. While the wary can spend just 22 seconds contemplating their fate, the bold are known to lean forward, trying to catch a view of Canada across the lake (possible on a clear day).

But either way, the peak appears. And while a traditional coaster may see a train disengage from the lift – its first few cars dangling as the train’s back half catches up – it’s not so for Millennium. Without so much as a breath, the catch car crests the top of the hill and pulls the train right over the top with it.

Obviously, any 300 foot face-first plummet at a near-vertical 80° will whip a tear from your eye. But Millennium’s opening act is glorious for another reason…

It’s butter smooth. With a sort of stunning, precision engineering the likes of which only the Swiss could muster, the train’s 10 mile per hour cable lift transitions without so much as a tease into a full-on plunge. The train slithers – somehow frictionless – down the plunge, reaching its top speed of 93 miles per hour.

At the bottom of this gargantuan, first-of-its-kind drop, the train pulls out, racing skyward and entering one of the ride’s signature elements. Its second hill is 169 feet tall – taller than any other coaster in the park but Magnum – but winds smoothly skyward in a sprawling turnaround, tilting riders in a 122° overbank. It’s an incredible and unusual way to utilize the ride’s massive kinetic energy (where any Arrow, Morgan, or B&M hypercoaster would simply begin an out-and-back layout of increasingly-shrinking airtime hills with no lateral forces whatsoever).

(It’s here, nearly inverted, that you’ll go rocketing past one of the coaster’s more unusual features – a steel support column with a notch cutaway to account for the extreme overbank’s impact on the rider safety envelope… you can see it just ahead of the train’s zero car above, and look for it in the point-of-view video below!)

The ride dives out of the overbanked turn into a massive, sweeping plunge that levels out for just a moment, then pulls left. It’s a continuous turn that rockets through a metallic tunnel, emerging back into the sunlight (though unrecognized by riders) on the previously-inaccessible island at the park’s center. As it charges forward, the coaster reorients itself and sweeps upward. Millennium Force’s third hill (if you’re counting) is 182 feet tall.

The climb into this hill isn’t abrupt or intense and really, its peak provides one of the ride’s few moments of relative relief from speed, providing just a second to gaze across the park at Gemini, dwarfed below. How far we’ve come…

…. and yet, how far we have to go. Where one day – in the not too distant future – Cedar Point’s own Maverick will be a testing ground for Intamin’s evolution toward instantaneous directional changes, extreme manuevers, and snappy transitions (translating into their second gigacoaster, Intimidator 305), Millennium isn’t about that. It’s a soaring, powerful, graceful creation. Unrelenting in its speed, but slow to transition between sweeping manuevers and oversized elements.

(For that reason, momentarily slowed against that hill, you might understand why some thoughtful and well-traveled coaster enthusiasts – and some outright contrarians – deride the ride as “Millennium Forceless,” “squandering” a moment where an Arrow or Morgan would opt for ejector airtime for such a gradual rise and the almost-calm drop to follow.)

After all, having risen in its third hill higher than most coasters do on their first, Millennium Force doesn’t so much drop as descend, diving through an elongated curve, spilling against the ground, and then pulling up into a massive, oversized, overbanked turn.

In a wide, continuous arc, it returns to ground level, practically skimming substrate. The trains rocket ahead, rising into another overbanked turn to the left, and again defaulting back to ground level at full clip. There’s no mid-course brake; no moment of reprieve; just a fluid layout of soaring track that alternates between sweeping banks, boosted straightaways, and sailing hills.

Cross under itself, the ride realigns parallel to the hill that served as its entry to the island, hopping over an elongated hill (above left) and then plunging into another corrugated steel tunnel – this one mirrored from the one that brought us to the island, leading back toward the coaster’s station.

Millennium Force now enters its final elements. Now, you are the riders who bolt past guests in the queue, pulsing by in a flash. The trains arc over a bunny hop, seemingly still traveling in excess of 90 miles per hour.

It’s here that even the coaster layperson would come to realization that Millennium Force is fast and powerful… but it’s not ultra-intense. It’s big, but not wild. Instead, it’s almost… joyful? It makes sense now – as we pass by and are reminded of that unload station – that riders don’t return nauseous or shaking or dead-eyed, but elated. Millennium Force may be 300 feet tall, but it’s not a trial so much as a transformation. Is it too late to put your hands up?

Pulling out of the hop with a final ground-level curve, there’s a wonderful, distinctly-Intamin moment (above) where the train snaps to attention, aligning with an odd straightaway that somehow feels like a speed boost for the already-rocketing train as it enters what we know to be its final move: a last overbanked turn “crowd-surfing” over the queue. The train pulls up one last time, lingering for a moment over the crowd and then resettling, aimed back at the unload station.

What we assumed would be a heartbreaking signal of the ride’s end is. And frankly, just as Morgan anticipated when seeing Intamin’s designs, the train comes in hot, having seemingly shed very little of its top speed over the more-than-a-mile course. Intamin might’ve been able to work another 1,000 feet or so into the layout just using the energy siphoned off in the brakes. But as all 36 riders collectively lean into the deceleration and gather their first full breath since the ride began, it’s over.

Relive the experience of conquering the world’s first gigacoaster with this official point-of-view video, capturing the ride’s gargantuan, oversized elements and its relentless speed from beginning to end.

When it’s all said and done, it’s no surprise that riders return to Millennium Force’s unload station in a state of ecstasy. Clapping, cheering, chattering… Whether you realize the ride’s “importance” in the story of the roller coaster or not, Millennium Force speaks for itself; a goosebumps-inducing, one-of-a-kind, milestone experience. It feels special because it is.

Especially contextualized as a groundbreaking, millennium-shaking highlight of the Coaster Wars and a contemporary to Arrow and Morgan’s hypercoasters, Millennium Force was a reinvention; an early and adept example of how the Coaster Wars would change our collective idea of what coasters looked like, felt like, and could do. Sure, an Intamin giga built for the first time today would look, feel, and do a whole lot differently… but inherent in the ride’s name is its status as a time capsule; a sort of timeless landmark of what awaited in the future of the roller coaster. Dare we say that – true to the ride’s marketing message – the future really was riding on it?

Speaking of which, we can’t finish our look at Millennium Force without addressing how this legendary coaster had influenced rides to follow, and what its position in the story of the Coaster Wars really means…