Batman: The Ride

Batman: The Ride opened at Six Flags Great America on May 9, 1992, as the world's first inverted roller coaster — a genuinely new category of coaster rather than an incremental improvement on an existing one. The concept originated with park general manager Jim Wintrode, who worked with Swiss engineers Walter Bolliger and Claude Mabillard and engineer Robert Mampe to solve a problem no manufacturer had cracked: how to seat riders with their feet dangling below a fixed track through full inversions, rather than the wide, uncontrolled swinging of earlier suspended coasters.

At $7 million, it was the single biggest investment Six Flags Great America had made in one attraction up to that point, and only the fourth coaster B&M had ever built. The finished ride packed five inversions — including the format's first-ever zero-gravity "heartline" spin — into a tight 2,683-foot layout themed around Gotham City, with a queue featuring a Wayne Enterprises sign, a crashed police cruiser, and a storm-drain tunnel leading to a Batcave-themed station.

The design proved so effective that it became the most cloned coaster layout in roller coaster history, with more than a dozen near-identical installations built at Six Flags parks and beyond over the following decade. American Coaster Enthusiasts recognized the original Gurnee installation as a Roller Coaster Landmark in 2005, and B&M's entire modern lineup — from floorless to wing to giga coasters — traces its inverted-coaster lineage directly back to this ride's 1992 debut.