Intamin Brand Guidelines: The 1967 Ride Maker With Swiss Roots and a Liechtenstein Base

Three colleagues and an export order.

The name is an abbreviation. Intamin stands for “international amusement installations,” and it dates from 1967. German Wikipedia says Intamin AG was founded on 25 January that year by the brothers Robert and Reinhold Spieldiener with Alfons Saiko. The Swiss business magazine Bilanz, in a long portrait published in November 2015, tells it slightly differently: Robert Spieldiener and Saiko set up on their own in 1967, and Reinhold joined a little under a year later, once it was clear that the business would hold. The three then held equal shares for many years, until Saiko retired.

Bilanz also explains where the idea came from. The brothers came from Zell am See in Austria and moved to the Swiss canton of Valais around 1960, where they found work at the cableway builder Willy Bühler, as did their compatriot Saiko. An order from Gröna Lund, the Stockholm amusement park, for an observation tower produced the Gyro-Tower, a slim column with a ring-shaped cabin that winds its way up. Buyers followed, above all American parks. The Bühler family, Bilanz says, spoke no English and were wary of foreign business, so the export trade left with the three colleagues.

Intamin’s website adds the domestic detail: a company “formed by three men sharing a small apartment as an office in Bern.” Bilanz gives its roots as the Valais and the canton of Schwyz. German Wikipedia says the firm worked mainly with Swiss makers of ski lifts and cable cars in its early years, and began with transport systems before its first big amusement order. That order was the Oil Derrick, a 91-metre tower of 1969 in Arlington, Texas, at Six Flags Over Texas. Patrick Spieldiener told Bilanz that Six Flags was certainly the most important customer of the first decade.

Towers, boats, brakes and launches.

The product range widened year by year. Bilanz names the Drunken Barrels, tub seats on a tilted rotating platform, as the first classic ride, and lists round boats for water rides, magnetic brakes and freefall towers among Intamin’s own innovations. The magnetic brake, which Intamin patented, was used first on towers and later on coasters. The company says it partnered with Six Flags AstroWorld in 1979 on Thunder River, which opened in 1980 and which it describes as the world’s first river rapids ride; it dates its first Free Fall to the 1982 season at Magic Mountain and its Giant Drop to 1995.

Coasters came later. German Wikipedia names Wilderness Run at Cedar Point, built in 1979, as the first, and says it led to an American branch. In 1974 Intamin had taken over international sales for the German builder Anton Schwarzkopf, Bilanz reports, and through that work met the Munich engineer Werner Stengel; German Wikipedia says most Intamin coasters since have been developed in close cooperation with him. Stengel’s office supplied the design and structural calculations for Kingda Ka, Bilanz says, and Stengel told the magazine that working with Intamin had always gone well.

Launch systems became the signature. Bilanz credits Intamin with bringing linear motors into the amusement business on Superman: Escape from Krypton, opened at Magic Mountain in 1997, which ran up a 126-metre tower. Each launch drew several megawatts, and the local grid sometimes flickered, so Intamin developed a hydraulic catapult as an alternative. That system drove Kingda Ka at Six Flags Great Adventure, 139 metres high, which Bilanz called the tallest coaster in the world in 2015. English Wikipedia records that it closed in 2024.

Records have stayed central to how the firm presents itself. Its website dates a linear-motor launch for vertical climbs to 2022. It says its Dueling Dragons coaster won a Brass Ring Award for Best New Product at IAAPA Expo 2019. In December 2025 Theme Park Insider reported the opening of Falcons Flight, an Intamin Exa Coaster at Six Flags Qiddiya City in Saudi Arabia, as the world’s new tallest, fastest and longest coaster, with a top speed of 155 mph. Intamin itself gives 250 km/h and 4,325 metres of track.

Wood has been part of the range too. English Wikipedia describes prefabricated laminated wooden track, made by industrial methods rather than fabricated on site, on Colossos at Heide Park and El Toro at Six Flags Great Adventure. Outside the parks, Intamin builds monorails: English Wikipedia lists the Moscow Monorail and the Marconi Express in Bologna, which opened in 2020.

From steel to spectacle.

Ride makers sell to parks rather than to the public. The park usually names and themes the ride, and the maker’s own identity sits further back, in the engineering. That shapes how these firms present themselves.

The factory floor is usually the first picture. Long curved lengths of steel track, jigs, welded supports and finished trains waiting for shipment do the work of a product shot, because a coaster cannot be photographed whole until it stands in a park. Alongside them come CAD renderings, which let a maker show a layout, a station or a new train to a buyer long before any steel is cut.

The trade stand is the second stage. IAAPA Expo, the industry’s large annual show, is where makers put full-size vehicles and scale models in front of park owners, announce new models and compete for the show’s product awards. Company websites tend to follow the same logic, leading with reference lists and record claims rather than with a founder’s story.

The third stage belongs to the ride itself. On-ride films, shot from the front seat and released by parks and makers, are a common way to show a layout to people who will never see the drawings, and a park’s opening day puts the finished work in public view. This guide sets out who founded each firm, who owns it and where its work is made, and it attributes every claim to its source. Colours and typefaces here are our own interpretation, not the companies’ standards.

Two seats, one family.

Intamin is not one company. German Wikipedia describes a Swiss-Liechtenstein group that includes Intamin AG in Wollerau, in the canton of Schwyz, and Intamin Amusement Rides International Corporation Establishment in Schaan, Liechtenstein, the name that appears on the website’s legal notice. The website lists offices and partners in eight countries on three continents. Separate German and Dutch companies carry the name, with their own web addresses, and German Wikipedia says a German Intamin company runs the small railway and chairlift at Westfalenpark in Dortmund. The company says the group grew into “a number of independent and self-supporting Intamin companies.”

Liechtenstein has a specific history here. Intamin says Robert Spieldiener set up a separate company there around 1980 to concentrate on other attraction types, and that it was at the forefront of the emerging simulator market. Bilanz adds a harder reason for the later seat. In 1986 a fatal accident on Mindbender, a Schwarzkopf coaster at Edmonton in Canada, led to court cases that pushed Schwarzkopf into bankruptcy. Intamin was Schwarzkopf’s sales partner, and it set up a new company seat in Liechtenstein so that legal risk from North America would not endanger the Swiss business. That caused tension with the tax authorities, which Patrick Spieldiener told the magazine was in the past. German Wikipedia adds that Intamin took over patents and rights from the bankrupt firm.

The firm is still family-held. EuroAmusement Professional called Patrick Spieldiener, son of Reinhold, its second-generation owner and chief executive in October 2022, when he received an Entrepreneur of the Year award in Liechtenstein; a jury member called Intamin a “hidden champion” that was “hardly known.” In 2015 Bilanz put the staff at about 200.

Where the steel is made is less visible than the name. Bilanz reported in 2015 that Spieldiener had welding done by Slovak firm Stakotra, among others, at about a third of Swiss wage costs. Intamin’s own pages describe “designers and masterplanners” and call the firm a manufacturer.

The firm’s reach shows in its alumni. Bilanz says Intamin rescued and took a majority of the Monthey steel builder Giovanola, a supplier whose ride staff Walter Bolliger and Claude Mabillard left in 1988 to found Bolliger & Mabillard. It also names Peter Schnabel, who ran Intamin’s American sales and founded Premier Rides in 1994.

The brand’s own language is industrial. Its website calls the firm “The Innovation Factory” and “fun factory,” and describes “designers and masterplanners,” while its records and awards pages put the rides first and the company second.

For a design guide, Intamin shows how a syllabic name can cover a family, a group of companies and a run of record claims without changing. Compare Bolliger & Mabillard, which grew out of the same Swiss steel work, and Cedar Point, which opened its first coaster. For this guide we use a deep teal and a warm gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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