On the 28th of July 2020 Europa-Park has opened the new version of Piraten in Batavia. The original ride from 1987, located in the Dutch area of the park, burnt down in May 2018. Over the last years the park has redesigned the ride and today the new version of the ride is finally opened to public. Our DRdb Team is present at the opening day to experience the new Piraten in Batavia.
As we told in our recently published special on Piraten in Batavia, the design of the new ride is largely bound to the previous version. The ride is still a classical dark ride including large scenes with many animatronics depicting small scenes. Riders will still board boats, seating 16 people, to set sail to the city of Batavia. When they arrive at the city walls, they discover that the city is under attack from pirates. They break into the city, start robbing and plundering and set parts of it on fire.
Piraten in Batavia was mainly designed in-house by Europa-Park, with the main designer being Patrick Heinzelmann. He acknowledges that the park wanted to keep the orginal atmosphere: “It is not that easy to rebuild this ride. We want to have the old atmosphere and give people the nostalgic feeling of the old ride, while simultaneously offering something new.” Some of these new additions were already announced by the park. Modern techniques are used to manufacture new animatronics, such as fighting pirates. The story of the ride is also worked out into more detail, which means that riders will pass through a queue themed like buildings from Amsterdam in the 17th Century. From there, they board their boats in the Amsterdam harbor and set sail to Batavia.
Piraten in Batavia uses a free-floating ride system, built by Mack Rides as most other rides in the park. MackMedia and MackAnimation are also responsible for all projections that can be seen in the queue line and during the ride. The animatronics are built by Hofmann Figuren, Garner Holt and LifeFormations. Decorations are built by diverse companies, among which Jora Vision who was responsible for some of the buildings of the city of Batavia. The music of the ride is a renewed version of the original ride soundtrack, which was composed by Joachim Schnitzer. The new version is composed by Hendrik Schwarzer from T-REX Classics.
Piraten in Batavia is 500 meters long and contains a ca. 5 meter tall drop. The ride takes ca. 8 minutes. Other details revealed by the park today are the ground size of the ride (ca. 14000 m2) and the amount of water inside the building (1,8 million liters). From today, the new ride will be open for all visitors of Europa-Park. We will keep updating new photographs of the ride below (and on our socials) during the rest of the day, so stay tuned!
