Premier Rides Brand Guidelines: The Baltimore Maker of Magnetic-Launch Coasters

An aerospace engineer and a ride-repair business.

Premier Rides gives its founding year as 1995 and its headquarters as Baltimore, Maryland, with further offices in Europe and China. Its president is Jim Seay. Sources describe his start in two ways. Cornell Alumni Magazine said in July/August 2018 that Seay founded the company in 1995; a blooloop item of April 2010 said he joined it as executive vice president in 1995 from Six Flags Theme Parks, where he had been an engineering and maintenance executive. English Wikipedia, citing the company, says he has been sole owner and president since 1996. The 2010 item and a 2014 profile in Beach, the Cal State Long Beach magazine, both call him president and owner.

Seay’s route ran through aerospace. Cornell Alumni Magazine says he studied mechanical engineering at Cornell, then worked at Hughes Aircraft in California; blooloop adds graduate studies at California State University, and stealth missile work at Hughes. As government funding fell at the end of the Cold War, he moved into engineering for Six Flags, where his projects included the Viper at Magic Mountain. He told Cornell Alumni Magazine that the skills carried over: “You use the same tools for the computer analysis; you completely model the ride, to the point that you know what the experience will be before you build the equipment.”

The company did not begin as a coaster builder. Beach reported in 2014 that Premier started as a provider of technical solutions for problems that theme park clients had with their rides. Seay said his idea was to expand it into custom-built attractions based on new technology. The first customer for that plan, the magazine said, was Paramount Parks, which wanted a linear induction motor coaster that would simulate a NASA rocket sled launch.

From Flight of Fear to AlpenFury.

The first rides opened in June 1996. English Wikipedia, citing the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, says Premier’s first roller coaster was Runaway Mountain at Six Flags Over Texas, which opened on June 12. Six days later came the Paramount project: two matching indoor coasters at Kings Island in Ohio and Kings Dominion in Virginia, both named The Outer Limits: Flight of Fear, which English Wikipedia calls the world’s first launched roller coasters to use linear induction motors. The Roller Coaster DataBase credits the Kings Island ride’s design to Ing.-Büro Stengel and its steel fabrication to OCEM, and English Wikipedia credits the linear motor technology to Force Engineering.

Seay explained the appeal of the system to Beach: a linear launch can sit at the beginning or part-way through a ride, and a train can stop and restart, so a coaster can follow a storyline. That led to licensed work. Revenge of the Mummy, which opened at Universal Studios Florida in 2004, was designed with Universal and the director of the Mummy films, Cornell Alumni Magazine says; it has sister versions in Hollywood and Singapore and is a multi-year winner of the Golden Ticket Award for best indoor coaster. The magazine also says Premier worked with BMW on three coasters based on the MINI chase in the 2003 film The Italian Job.

Cornell Alumni Magazine called “multi-launch” coasters one of Premier’s signature concepts: trains catapult from a stop to high speed several times in a ride, sometimes backward. Its examples included Full Throttle at Six Flags Magic Mountain and Tempesto at Busch Gardens Williamsburg, both models in Premier’s Sky Rocket range. In 2021 Australasian Leisure Management reported the soft opening of Epiq at Quest in Doha, which the park called the world’s tallest indoor coaster. In July 2025 AlpenFury opened at Canada’s Wonderland; Theme Park Insider called it a Sky Rocket, and EuroAmusement Professional reported that the park calls it Canada’s longest, highest and fastest launch coaster, and that the operator claims a world record for its nine inversions. Amusement Today reported in September 2025 that the route through Wonder Mountain was mapped with laser and drone equipment. The Roller Coaster DataBase now lists 40 Premier coasters built, 35 of them still standing.

Steel, renderings and show floors.

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.

New rides, and the old ones too.

Premier’s own wording is about engineering and support rather than thrills. Its website uses the lines “Engineering Dreams into Reality” and “Leading the experience,” and groups its work under innovation, safety, quality and service. It has trademarked names for its aftermarket business, Premier Service and the Rapid Response Network, which it says run around the clock all year. That side of the company predates its coasters, and Beach called it the field’s largest aftermarket service provider in 2014.

On where things are made, the company says it “designs and fabricates” to ASTM F24, EN 13814, ISO 9001 and/or GB code requirements, with TÜV or CSEI certification available, and it lists European and American components among its spare parts.

Standards work is part of its public profile. Blooloop reported in 2010 that Seay chaired the ASTM F24 committee, which covers amusement rides, and sat on the board of AIMS, an industry group. Premier lists ASTM F24, AIMS, IAAPA and the Themed Entertainment Association among the bodies it supports, and its awards page names the Golden Ticket, the European Star, IAAPA’s Brass Ring and Popular Science’s Top 100, as well as Guinness World Records entries. Its website lists a presence in eleven countries, from Finland to Indonesia.

For a design guide, Premier Rides shows how a maker can build a name on a propulsion system and then lend it to other people’s stories. Compare Six Flags, the park chain where Seay worked and an early Premier customer, and Gerstlauer, the German coaster maker. For this guide we use navy, pale steel and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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