Since the beginning of 2022, German theme park Europa-Park has been working on the construction of their newest addition. The park will add a new Croatia-themed zone, including a major roller coaster, between the existing Greek and Russian-themed zones. Teasing for the new additions started in March, when the first episode of the construction video series was launched. In the newest episode, launched earlier this week, the park revealed that the roller coaster (so far named Omega) is to include a dark ride section.
The newest episode of “Omega – Die Baudokumentation” was released on Europa-Park’s own streaming service VeeJoy on 29 September. A large part of the episode is dedicated to showing the scale of the project, by putting up balloons over the project site showing the height of the construction of the roller coaster and theming objects. By the end of the episode, some questions of viewers are answered, among them the question whether the roller coaster will feature a dark ride section. To this question, the answer was affirmative.
In earlier episodes, more details on the ride itself were already announced. The roller coaster will be 1.385 meters long and 32 meters tall, and uses 7 trains hosting 16 people (in four rows) to reach a capacity of 1.600 people per hour. The ride’s theme will be based around Nikola Tesla, a Croatian inventor known for his work on modern electricity supply systems. Eye-catcher for the ride will be the station building, including a 26 meter tall scaled version of Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower, dubbed by the park as Tesla-Tower. An official name of the new ride is not yet known, though Europa-Park already claimed the brand name Voltron in early 2022.
The addition of dark ride sections to rides is common practice in Europa-Park, and quite some of these sections include enough scenes to apply as semi-dark ride on the Dark Ride Database. Examples are Blue Fire Megacoaster and Fjord Rafting. Only time can tell whether the new Tesla-roller coaster will also feature a dark ride section extensive enough to count on our website. The opening of the roller coaster is expected in 2023, though the themed area of Croatia will not open until 2024.
