Intamin reveals new multi-dimensional dark ride system

Intamin is a Swiss-Liechtenstein company.
Vekoma is Dutch.

Very interesting.

Maybe Epic will have a new ride system in the future.

This is pretty cool, but the reality is that this concept is just a combination of different, already proven ride systems into a single turnkey product. It has the speed/acceleration of RSR/TestTrack, the trackless movements of RotR, Ratatoile, and MMRM, the drop features of RotR, BotM, and Transformers, and the interactivity of MarioCart, Symbolica, and M.I.B. I guess the real leap here is that the vehicles and ride controls would be from the same manufacturer and hence likely to communicate more consistently and reliably, but I'm not sure what market Intamin is going after here. Yes, Universal could have really used this system for MarioCart to create those moments of speed, but this is not really a game changer. Sure, they're making it easier for parks to create attractions by giving creative teams a 1-stop/soup to nuts shop for a new attraction (previous innovative attractions have involved multiple subcontractors working together under the design team who had to coordinate and get sometimes diverse skills and equipment to blend/mesh smoothly), but I highly doubt a company like Disney or even Universal would buy something like this. Smaller parks probably don't have the resources for a complicated and likely expensive ride system like this (and if they do, they're probably not using all of the noted features in a single ride), which leaves a few midsized parks and a handful of other parks (i.e. Middle East and China) that might need to farm out all of the technical coalescing to deliver a more complicated attraction that they couldn't otherwise do by trying to juggle multiple vendors.

Intamin made a big deal of this announcement, and on the surface, it is a really cool product. However, I just don't see the industry really buying this, at least not in its fully fleshed out form with all of the bells and whistles.

If Disney put this into any of their parks - it would be the most intense ride they ever had. HAHAHAHAHA

Russell, I have to disagree - not only do I believe that Universal would buy into this system (probably not Disney), but I see Herchend as a prospective buyer. They are working on Nightflight Expedition, a heavily themed indoor ride, not to mention Fire in the Hole and their other well-themed coasters. And if SeaWorld's next dark ride is a success, it's not impossible that they might consider one of these.

Universal loves Intamin (with good reason), but they don't seem to like trackless. Maybe the unreliability has kept them away. If they needed multi-dimensional movements for a new ride, my guess would be they go with Intamin's multi-dimensional tracked coaster. I would love to see what Universal (or Disney) Creative could do with that system, similar to Movie Park Studio Tour or some of the others out there.

I fixed the brain fart in the lead. Thanks for the catch. (I had been working on another post about Vekoma and had that on my brain.)

This feels like something less targeted at the destination parks (which often design heavily customized systems for their attractions) and more for the regional theme park that's looking for a world class dark ride. I don't see anything here that we haven't seen done already, but I think it makes the technology a lot more accessible to parks without $100+ million budgets for new attractions and fits with a market shifting increasingly toward attractions aimed at the entire family. Will there be a buyer for something like this? Maybe, but probably not one of the big chains.