Someone mentioned on PointBuzz that Cedar Point announced Millennium Force ten years ago. It's kind of amazing to think about. Those were amazing times to be a roller coaster enthusiast. CoasterBuzz was still eight months from launching at that point.
I had just started working at Penton Media a week or two before that. I had just met Tim, who worked as a sales rep at CP back in the day, and would later be in both of my weddings and be director of marketing at the park. Weird how you never really know how things are going to pan out. Tim worked for another magazine on the same floor as me, and we met when I figured out he and Lois were members of Guide to The Point. In fact, I got the job in part because Tim had put the GTTP T-shirt phrase "W8 4ME @CP" on the company outing posters he was organizing, and I recognized that when I was in for an interview, and that impact impressed my boss.
Back in those days, they didn't have dedicated Web sites for new ride announcements, and they mailed out press kits the day before the announcement. I'm sure I still have mine somewhere. The park was good enough to e-mail me the scanned renderings, and I got them up on GTTP that afternoon.
I snapped hundreds and hundreds of photos of that ride during construction, which was expensive since I had to use film. And the worst part of it was that the park embargoed posting any of them on the Internet when they invited you in for a tour. The reasons were many, but it was rooted in a culture that believed you could control the message despite the Internet. Those rules persisted through 2004, when they finally let go.
Those were good times. Lots of fond memories of the tours, first rides, the media day... definitely made it fun to be into coasters.
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