Six Flags Wants to Bury Kingda Ka’s Ghost Under a Six Record Sea Serpent

A floorless, spinning, upside down launching coaster named for a moon eating serpent is rising over the Jersey Boardwalk, and Six Flags says it will rewrite the record book six times over.

Six Flags Great Adventure spent the better part of two years demolishing one legend before it would say a word about the one replacing it. On July 28, 2026, the Jackson, New Jersey park finally broke its silence, unveiling Six Flags Great Adventure‘s newest headline attraction: Bakunawa, a 382 foot spinning launch coaster the park says will claim six world records when it opens in 2027.

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Park officials are not shy about the math. According to the announcement, Bakunawa will become the world’s fastest spinning coaster at 100 mph, the world’s tallest spinning coaster at 382 feet, and the site of the world’s fastest inversion, clocked as riders flip upside down between 60 and 80 mph mid launch. Six Flags is also billing it as the site of the world’s first upside down launch, the world’s longest stall inversion, and the world’s first floorless spinning coaster, meaning the free spinning trains have nothing beneath riders’ feet as they rotate.

That is a lot of superlatives stacked onto one ride, and it puts Bakunawa in the same rarefied company as a small number of other coasters currently racing to claim the “world’s tallest” title outright. The park says the finished ride will rank among the five tallest roller coasters on Earth once it opens, a tier previously occupied almost exclusively by hypercoasters and strata coasters rather than spinning rides.

 

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Bakunawa is not simply a new ride bolted onto open parking lot. It is a direct replacement for one of the most mourned coasters in American theme park history. Kingda Ka, the 456 foot Intamin accelerator coaster that had held the title of world’s tallest roller coaster since it opened in 2005, shh ran its final rides at the close of the 2024 season. Six Flags Great Adventure confirmed the closure on November 14, 2024, citing the aging hydraulic launch system and a pattern of mechanical shutdowns that had plagued the ride for years, including a launch failure in June 2023.

The park imploded Kingda Ka and its attached Zumanjaro drop tower on February 28, 2025, clearing the footprint for what officials only described at the time as a “multi world record breaking launch roller coaster.” Construction crews began pouring foundations through 2025 and into 2026, with the project publicly nicknamed Project Purple online by coaster enthusiasts tracking the purple track segments arriving on site. The first sections of track landed in February 2026, and the ride topped out by early July, just weeks before the Bakunawa name was made official.

The timing of Kingda Ka’s closure lines up closely with a much larger corporate shift. Six Flags Entertainment Corporation completed a merger of equals with Cedar Fair on July 1, 2024, folding the two regional park operators into a single company with 42 amusement and water parks across North America. The deal was pitched to shareholders as a way to generate stronger cash flow for reinvestment across the combined portfolio, and the fallout arrived fast. Within months, the newly merged company had closed its Washington D.C. park, removed individual park presidents at several locations, and torn down Kingda Ka without advance warning to fans. Alongside that November 2024 announcement, Six Flags said it would commit roughly half a billion dollars toward new attractions across nine parks for the 2026 season, a figure that has since grown into a stated goal of more than a billion dollars in guest experience investment over two years. Bakunawa is one visible piece of a much larger balance sheet story playing out across the entire Six Flags portfolio, not an isolated bet by a single park.

Framed against that backdrop, the sequencing looks deliberate rather than coincidental. Retire an aging flagship, absorb the criticism from longtime fans, then reveal its much bigger replacement once the financing and construction pieces are actually in place.

The new coaster anchors a larger overhaul of the park’s oceanfront themed section, newly rebranded as Shoreline Pier within The Boardwalk. Mike Fehnel, park president of Six Flags Great Adventure, framed the project as part of a longer running investment push that has also touched Wild Safari, Hurricane Harbor New Jersey, and the on site Savannah Sunset Resort. “Bakunawa is our next defining milestone,” Fehnel said, describing it as proof of the park’s commitment to innovation and a reason for guests to stay longer and return more often.

 

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The coaster was built by Mack Rides, the German manufacturer whose roots in the amusement business trace back to 1780, when the Mack family business was still building carriages and stagecoaches rather than steel track. The company did not build its first roller coaster until 1921 and did not enter the launch coaster business until decades later, but it has spent the last thirty years becoming one of the more inventive players in the spinning coaster niche specifically.

Mack Rides introduced its first spinning coaster, Euro Mir, at the family owned Europa Park in Germany back in 1997, and has since built out an entire “Xtreme Spinning Coaster” product line that Bakunawa reportedly belongs to, according to ride tracking database Captain Coaster. The company has also spent recent years pushing into much bigger, faster hyper coaster territory, most visibly with Hyperia at Thorpe Park near London. Bakunawa effectively asks Mack Rides to merge those two specialties: giga scale height and speed on one end, and a free spinning, floorless train system on the other, a combination no manufacturer has attempted at this scale before.

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Six Flags has released an unusually detailed play by play of what the two minute, seventeen second ride will actually feel like. The experience opens with a launch from a standstill to 60 mph, sending the train up and over the Boardwalk before it climbs the tower’s spine. Riders reach the top, pause briefly, and slide around the outside of the structure before losing speed and dropping back down, essentially repeating a slowed down version of the climb in reverse.

From there, the train enters what the park is calling the ride’s signature moment: a second launch that flips riders completely upside down while accelerating from 60 to 80 mph, a sequence Six Flags says has never been attempted on any coaster anywhere. A third and final launch then pushes the train to its top speed of 100 mph along the remainder of the 3,163 foot circuit. Throughout all of it, the two twenty passenger trains, each made up of five cars seating riders two across in two rows, spin independently and without warning, so that no two riders necessarily experience the same rotation at the same moment. Six Flags has been explicit that this unpredictability is intentional: every ride cycle is meant to produce a different combination of spins, sightlines, and disorientation.

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The name itself is doing real narrative work. Bakunawa is a serpent from Philippine folklore said to rise from the sea and try to swallow the moon, an origin story that traditionally explained lunar eclipses to coastal communities across the islands long before the science of orbital mechanics caught up with the legend. Six Flags has built the ride’s story around that same arc: guests are meant to follow the creature’s ascent skyward before it spirals back down toward the water, a narrative shape mirrored directly in the coaster’s climb, inversion, and descent.

It is also a notably specific piece of folklore for an American regional theme park to reach for, and it lines up with a broader pattern in New Jersey, a state with a sizable Filipino American population concentrated in towns not far from the park itself.

🎡 #BoardwalkNights is happening on select nights now through August 2! Check out this video for a sneak peek at the exciting attractions, entertainment, and experiences waiting for you on the Shoreline Pier! 🌊

Event details https://t.co/NR5kLCVTfv pic.twitter.com/oMw10HZ5Lm

— Six Flags Great Adventure (@SFGrAdventure) June 27, 2026

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Bakunawa’s six record pitch is not happening in a vacuum. Six Flags’ own Texas property has spent 2026 promoting a nearly identical framing for a different ride entirely. Six Flags Over Texas is preparing to open Tormenta Rampaging Run, a 309 foot dive coaster themed to the running of the bulls, which the company is separately marketing as breaking six world records of its own, including the tallest, fastest, and longest dive coaster titles along with the tallest vertical loop and highest Immelmann inversion in coaster history.

Seeing the same parent company push two “six world records” campaigns in the same calendar year says something about how thoroughly record claims have become a marketing category unto themselves in the coaster industry, alongside actual engineering achievement. Both rides may well hold every title claimed for them. Whether either does so cleanly, without an asterisk from a rival manufacturer or a records body, is generally something that only gets settled once a ride is actually open and independently measured.

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For all the detail in the July 28 release, notable gaps remain. Six Flags has not named an exact opening date beyond “2027,” has not detailed the full scope of the Boardwalk area’s redesign beyond the Shoreline Pier branding, and has not said either any record claims will be independently verified by a body such as Guinness World Records or industry tracking groups, as opposed to simply asserted by the park itself. Coverage across outlets including Attractions Magazine and ride database Coasterpedia has repeated the same six claims from the park’s own materials without independent verification of the underlying figures, which is standard practice for a ride this far from opening but worth noting plainly.

Construction continues on site, visible from the surrounding Ocean County roadways thanks to a 450 foot crane that has become a fixture of the local skyline. Six Flags has paired the announcement with the launch of 2027 season pass sales, giving prospective riders roughly a year to decide whether six new world records, or one very tall, very fast, very upside down serpent, is reason enough to plan a trip back to Jackson.