New Texas Giant

Texas Giant opened in March 1990 as the tallest wooden roller coaster in the world, a 143-foot Dinn Corporation design by engineer Curtis D. Summers that used over 900,000 board feet of lumber and briefly made Six Flags Over Texas home to the era's premier wood coaster record. It earned Amusement Today's Golden Ticket Award for Best Wooden Coaster in the late 1990s before roughness typical of aging wood track set in during the 2000s, and the park closed it in November 2009 rather than continue costly retracking.

Rocky Mountain Construction rebuilt the site almost entirely with its steel I-Box track profile, keeping much of the original wooden support structure but replacing the running surface and adding ten feet to the lift hill. Where the original coaster topped out around a 53-degree first drop, RMC's version plunges at a dramatic 79 degrees — a transformation that turned a rough, aging woodie into one of the smoothest, most intense hybrid coasters built up to that point when it reopened in April 2011.

New Texas Giant became an early proof point for RMC's hybrid conversion business, which the company would go on to replicate at dozens of other parks facing the same choice between demolishing or rebuilding their struggling wooden coasters. The ride still traces the same general footprint through the park's Texas section that Texas Giant carved out more than three decades ago, but almost nothing about how it rides has stayed the same.