Six Flags Over Texas turns 65 this year, and it was never supposed to last this long. Developer Angus G. Wynne Jr. built it in 1961 as a short-term moneymaker, a way to squeeze cash out of a parcel of land before turning it into an industrial park. He’d just visited the newly opened Disneyland and came home convinced Dallas-Fort Worth needed something similar, built around Texas history instead of a cartoon mouse.
Construction ran through the fall and winter of 1960 on 212 acres between Dallas and Fort Worth, at a final cost of $10 million, a bet plenty of local business leaders thought was reckless.
The park almost opened under a different name. Wynne’s original plan was Texas Under Six Flags, honoring the six governments that had claimed the state: Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy, and the United States. As the story goes, either his wife or his entertainment director pointed out the obvious problem. Texas isn’t under anything. The name flipped to Six Flags Over Texas, and it stuck well enough to name an entire company.
The park opened to the public on August 5, 1961, drawing 8,374 visitors on a $2.75 adult ticket that included every ride, not just entry, a genuinely new idea called the Pay One Price model. Before this, parks charged separate admission plus individual ride tickets. Six Flags also introduced the log flume and the mine train ride to the industry, both of which became standard everywhere after Arlington proved they worked. Wynne recouped his entire investment within eighteen months and quietly dropped the industrial park plan. What was supposed to be temporary became the flagship of a chain that grew to more than two dozen parks.
Sixty-five years later, the park just opened the ride currently rewriting its own record books. Tormenta: Rampaging Run debuted July 9 in a new area called Rancho de la Tormenta, themed around the running of the bulls, and it broke six world records at once. At 309 feet, it’s the tallest dive coaster ever built and the first to cross into giga territory, any coaster between 300 and 399 feet. It’s also the fastest dive coaster in the world at 87 miles an hour, and the longest, running 4,199 feet of track in under three minutes.
A dive coaster’s signature move is the hold: the train climbs, stops at the edge facing straight down, and pauses before releasing. Tormenta holds that pause for three seconds atop a 285-foot first drop taken at a 95-degree angle, past vertical, itself a world record. From there it threads five inversions, including a 218-foot Immelmann, the tallest of its kind anywhere, and a 179-foot vertical loop, also the tallest ever built.
Built by Bolliger & Mabillard, the Swiss firm behind most of the world’s dive coasters, it’s engineered for smooth transitions even at that scale, so the fear lives entirely in the height and the angle, not in a rough ride.
Six Flags built Tormenta as the centerpiece of the park’s 65th anniversary season, and it’s now the tallest roller coaster in Texas. For a park that opened with a log flume and a ticket model that felt radical in 1961, a 309-foot giga dive coaster is the same instinct grown up: build what nobody else has built, and let Arlington be the place people drive to see it.
