While Disney constructs its massive 14-acre Star Wars-themed addition to Disneyland in Anaheim, California, guests have turned to a modified version of Space Mountain for their Star Wars fix. Unlike Star Tours, the newly named Hyperspace Mountain is a classic ride retrofitted with projections of Star Destroyers and X-Wings. It’s neat, but this fan-made Planet Coaster creation puts Hyperspace Mountain to shame.
Released by Frontier Developments last year, Planet Coaster is an amusement park simulator in which players create their own roller coasters, a sort of spiritual successor to the RollerCoaster Tycoon games. One user channel, Guitar Covers Inc., has been playing the game for a while, and just released a video of a coaster that re-creates the attack against the Death Star from Star Wars: A New Hope.
When you think of it, a roller-coaster ride of a starship dogfight is pretty fantastic. The ride currently running at Disneyland has riders also fly through a dogfight, passing by video of X-Wing and TIE fighters. This video does one better, by having your riders fly past physical props of the fighters, right into the Death Star, through explosions and a debris field.
Just watching it put me on the edge of my seat, and I can imagine what Disney has in store for its rides built from the ground up with Star Wars in mind. At least we have Planet Coaster videos until we see the new rides for ourselves.
