Concept art of the Falcon’s Flight coaster coming to Six Flags Qiddiya City in Saudi Arabia. (Courtesy of Six Flags)
A controversial comedy festival in Saudi Arabia may provide a sneak peek at what theme park fans can expect soon.
Saudi Arabia’s Qiddiya Investment Company is building the Six Flags Qiddiya City theme park, which will be the first Six Flags-branded park outside North America. While there is no opening date yet for the park, it is expected to debut sometime within the next several months.
The park will feature what will be the world’s tallest, fastest and longest roller coaster. Falcons Flight is an Intamin coaster that will reach a top speed of 155 mph with a drop of 519 feet on nearly 14,000 feet of track. The park will feature seven other coasters as well as multiple dark rides and water rides. That has made the park a dream destination for many fans around the world.
But anything involving Saudi Arabia invites controversy, especially in the United States. Saudi Arabia has been hosting its first Riyadh Comedy Festival in the nation’s capital city. Stand-up comedians who took that gig have been getting roasted online, both by fans and other comedians.
Many fans are not buying the claim that Saudi Arabia is attempting to diversify its oil-driven economy by creating more tourist attractions and events that welcome Western visitors. Instead, they just see a cynical attempt to whitewash the country’s reputation for violent repression — and those who go along as sell-outs.
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I expect to see that same debate when the Six Flags park opens, as some influencers and bloggers who were not invited to the opening, or turned down their invitations, opt to criticize those do attend, dividing the fan community. It’s the perfect type of conflict to drive the ragebait engagement that social media and search engine algorithms love. That means traffic — and ad revenue — for those who stoke such conflict.
This phenomenon is not limited to entertainment and travel, of course. With algorithms controlling so much of the traffic that publishers need to survive online, there is huge pressure to deliver hot takes above all. Unfortunately, that often crowds out real news and insight.
Many visitors will not consider a trip to Saudi Arabia for any reason, and that is their right. Others, especially many of us in America, never will be able to afford such a trip. But asking Western consumers and creators to boycott oil-rich Saudi Arabia to force reform there is like asking a squirrel to dive into the ocean and beat down a whale. Ironically, the only way that Western consumers might ever exert any economic influence over Saudi Arabia would be for attractions such as Six Flags Qiddiya City and Riyadh Comedy Festival to become so successful that they drive real economic growth for the Kingdom.
Six Flags Qiddiya City is a huge news story in the theme park business. Its new attractions and technical innovations deserve to be covered. So does the harsh political and social context in which they were developed.
Providing that demands more work than just throwing out another hot take. I hope that theme park fans will remember that when this story inevitably blows up the community.
Originally published at Robert Niles