I’m not sure if this one has already been mentioned, but having thought about it a bit more, I must say that I can imagine Silver Star at Europa Park having been quite a surprising addition at the time.
Up to that point, Europa Park had remained a fairly mild park, with all of their attractions being quite mild mannered and not overly thrilling, as well as a pretty big emphasis on theming and experience.
But Silver Star was just a complete contrast to that. Unlike the mild-mannered Mack family coasters that adorned the rest of the park at that time, Silver Star was a massive B&M beast; a 240ft, near 80mph B&M Hyper, and the (then) tallest and fastest coaster in Europe, hardly aligns with Europa’s other pre-2002 coasters in terms of thrill level and general scale! Heck, even now, it towers over the rest of the park by a considerable margin, has relatively little company in terms of proper extreme thrill rides (I’d argue only Blue Fire and Wodan are really comparable in terms of thrill level), and is the park’s only ride with a 1.4m height requirement.
It also was (and to a pretty big extent still is) a complete contrast to the rest of the park theming-wise; most of Europa’s rides have loads of theming, and have immersion very much at the centre of the experience, but Silver Star… doesn’t really have much theming to speak of at all. I’d call it more styled than themed, and the ride itself in particular is totally devoid of theming. That is par for the course on hyper coasters, so certainly not a criticism (it doesn’t really need theming, in my opinion), but an unthemed coaster of that style doesn’t seem like the type of ride that EP would ever normally have gone for.
So as much as I love the thing to pieces, I can imagine that Silver Star, when you combine the relatively high octane ride experience and relatively minimal theming, was a pretty surprising addition to Europa Park at the time!
