Yup, it was in Aurora, OH just west of Cleveland and it’s got a whoooole crazy story about its downfall. I’m not sure when it opened but there are pictures of me there in 1983. It was right across the lake from a small family amusement park called Geauga Lake.
In the mid-90s Geauga Lake was sold to a park conglomerate who started moving toward making it more of a thrill park with some bigger coasters, then in 1998 Six Flags bought that parent company and in 2000 they rebranded it as Six Flags Ohio and just dropped $40m worth of rides into the existing footprint (and if you think you detected a note of contempt in that last statement, you’re absolutely correct… the park was kind of a dump, but with brand new rides… we had free tickets and we still only went once). They also built a small waterpark.
“That’s nice,” you say, “but what does it have to do with Sea World?” Well, this was happening at exactly the same time Busch was deciding to start putting coasters into their parks. They had 3 big problems with trying that in OH: 1. The biggest coaster park in the world was an hour away, 2. There was another burgeoning coasterpark literally steps away from their location, and it had mostly brand new coasters, and 3. There was a 150’ building height restriction on their side of the lake (the two sides of the lake were in two different townships).
Given the fact that they were already competing with other local parks in FL and TX that wasn’t their biggest concern (though I think they underestimated what Cedar Fair would do to keep local competition minimal) so they decided to make Six Flags and offer in 2000. Six Flags was like “We don’t want to sell, but we’ve always wanted to take on a whole ass large animal park even though we aren’t in the animal keeping business. How hard can it be? Plus, we’ll be the BIGGEST PARK IN THE WORLD!”
They rebranded again for the 2001, this time as Six Flags Worlds of Adventure. The slogan was “3 worlds for the price of one!” because all the parks were connected (they built a boardwalk connecting the ride side and the animal side) and one ticket gave you admission to all 3. They also put in a B&M flyer in 2002 and they traded Shamu for some Aldi-brand Shamu.
They had huge crowds at first, but people went once and had no desire to ever go again. Things went downhill very quickly. As I mentioned above, they just kept pouring money into new rides but they weren’t investing in anything else, including the various infrastructure or local facilities necessary to support a park with that kind of draw. It just was a crappy park, and it was very poorly run. Nobody wanted to go there when Cedar Point was an hour away. Within 2 years they lost like 60% of the attendance gains they’d made even though they were doing crazy offers to get people through the gates.
In 2004 they sold to Cedar Fair who immediately shipped out the animals (which nobody had been going to see anyway… on the whole, the SeaWorld purchase gained SixFlags nothing at all) and announced plans to transition back to a family park. Cedar Point maintenance guys I knew who went to work there after Cedar Fair bought it were disgusted by how badly maintained everything was. It just wasn’t saveable at that point. Within a few years they’d sent the big coasters to other parks (especially once they bought Paramount parks) and eventually only the waterpark was left. That closed in 2016.
And thus ends the story of greed, foolish ambitions, whales, and whale-sized carp.
. Universal traumatized me when they did away with Twister. Shrek was also sort of special to us, and it’s gone too.