How I learned to stop worrying and love the Vortex

My home state of Indiana is not a natural habitat of roller coasters. We have a handful -including some award winners down at Holiday World- but for years, serious thrill-seekers had to cross the state line towards Ohio to get their fix. My family skewed towards Kings Island, but that presented a problem: I was the kid who wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of it. Eventually, though, friends coaxed me onto the Vortex. Shockingly, all those loops and corkscrews transformed me into a fan.

The Vortex. Image courtesy Wikimedia user ThrillZing under the CC BY 4.0 license. The story of the Vortex began with one of Kings Island’s biggest disappointments. In 1981, the park spent $3.8 million to build the Bat, a revolutionary suspended roller coaster designed by Arrow Development. With trains that hung beneath the track instead of riding on top of it, the Bat was unlike anything guests had ever seen! Unfortunately, though, its technology wasn’t quite ready for primetime. Mechanical problems plagued the Bat from day one1, and Kings Island permanently closed the ride in 1984 after only a few abbreviated seasons.

Instead of abandoning the site and its supplier, Kings Island gave Arrow another opportunity. The result was the Vortex. The $4 million steel coaster opened in 1987 and stood 148 feet tall. Featuring six inversions, the Vortex briefly held world records for height and the number of loops on a full-circuit roller coaster! It transformed one of Kings Island’s greatest failures into one of its biggest successes2. Similar Arrow designs sprung up elsewhere.

The Vortex’s loops and a corkscrew. Image courtesy Wikimedia user Chris Hagerman under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license . My step-siblings loved their voyages to Kings Island and, presumably, their rides on the Vortex. That said, they were markedly older than me. I was twelve when I finally visited on a school field trip. Forget the Beast hidden off in the woods- the towering Vortex dominated the park’s landscape! I rode on a tame Huss Troika nearby called Shake, Rattle & Roll, but even that made me nervous: the Vortex loomed so close that simply being in its shadow was enough to put me on edge.

I didn’t return to Kings Island until I was fifteen. By then, I was with friends with real thoosies who had no intention of leaving me behind on lame rides like the Troika or a Scrambler. Their mission was simple: I was riding everything, dammit, and I was under strict orders to conquer my fears. Our trip started at the giant monster in the park at the time, Son of Beast. As the world’s first wooden hypercoaster, the ride stood 218 feet tall. It also reached speeds nearing eighty miles per hour and featured a fifty-foot drop right out of the station! It looked every bit as terrifying as its statistics suggested.

Son of Beast. Image courtesy Wikimedia user WillMcC under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license. My innards descended as I entered the car. Dropping down Son of Beast’s first hill was exhilarating, but it wasn’t pleasant. I knew what to expect from a wooden coaster from riding its diminutive relative, the Beastie, but Son of Beast was so rough that the pair of glasses I thought were safe inside my pocket were smashed to smithereens during its famous double helix! I’m happy to have the credit, though, since the ride was torn down after a pair of serious incidents.

The loss of my glasses but not my life meant that I’d survived a trip on Kings Island’s biggest and baddest coaster! That opened the floodgates for me, and next up was the Vortex. My friends and I hopped in line, made it through, and the train rolled gently out of the station down a tiny drop. From there, it turned to climb the first hill with the unmistakable rhythm of its old Arrow chain lift and anti-rollback dogs. A small pre-drop came at the summit before a sweeping right-hand turn, and then there was the plunge. Regardless of everything my imagination had built it up to be, the first drop wasn’t nightmarish. It was exhilarating! The joy of a roller coaster finally clicked for me.

The Vortex’s station. Image courtesy Wikimedia user ThrillZing under the CC BY 4.0 license. Maybe my lack of spectacles helped, but the train of the Vortex sped through its course. Quickly, I discovered that vertical loops weren’t nearly as scary as they’d looked from the midway. They felt a lot like a drop- except instead of pulling out at the bottom, you just kept falling until you found yourself right-side up again. The corkscrews, on the other hand, caught me completely off guard: a mid-course brake brought the train to a crawl before pitching us upside down as we hung in the air, then again. As for the batwing? We blasted through its double inversion so quickly that I barely had time to register what had happened before we raced toward the Vortex’s final helix.

After that day, roller coasters stopped being something I feared and became something I sought out. I readily hopped on Flight of Fear, Diamondback, Banshee, and Orion, which each owe a small debt to Arrow. The company’s multi-loopers didn’t acquire a great reputation as they aged, but I knew nothing of that when I clambered into the Vortex. Its smooth track was completely different from older wooden coasters like the Beast and its ostensible son.

The Vortex’s loops and corkscrews. Image courtesy Wikimedia user ThrillZing under the CC BY 4.0 license. Unfortunately, Kings Island retired the Vortex in 2019 after more than thirty seasons of sending riders like me hurtling through its six inversions. Crews dismantled it the following year. I get it- steel roller coasters weren’t built to last forever, especially when their manufacturers have been out of business for decades. Still, though, reasons for the Vortex’s demise don’t make its absence any less jarring. For decades, its towering lift and tangled mess of orange track were among the first things I associated with Kings Island. Future generations won’t get the chance to stand beneath that batwing and wonder whether they were brave enough to climb aboard.

Most people remember the Vortex for the records it set, its six inversions, or the way it dominated Kings Island’s Coney Island Mall. I’ll remember it for something more personal: at fifteen, I hitched a ride completely convinced that roller coasters were terrifying murder contraptions best appreciated from a safe distance. Two and a half minutes after my trip, though, I headed right back for another round. The Vortex didn’t just spin me upside down six times; it turned my entire opinion on its head!

A Vortex train. Image courtesy Wikimedia user Eli Duke under the CC BY-SA 2.0 license. I’ve been on bigger, faster, taller, and smoother coasters in the years since, but none of them would have meant as much without that first upside-down trip through the Vortex. For all its records and engineering achievements, its greatest accomplishment, in my eyes, was teaching this apprehensive kid that the things he’d spent years avoiding could turn out to be some of the most exhilarating experiences of his life! The Vortex is how I learned to stop worrying and love roller coasters.

Sources Cited

1 Keeter, J. (2017, October 30). The Sporadic Erratic Flight of the Bat. Kings Island [Mason]. Web. Retrieved June 26, 2026.

2 Kings Island tops 3 million (1987, October 6). The Mansfield News Journal. p. B4.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Vortex

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