Throughout its 62 years of operation, Six Flags over Texas’ themed areas have heavily contributed to the guest experience. After all, theming is what separates an amusement park from a theme park. Except lately, the park seems to be playing much looser with its theming and what distinct areas still exist.
So what exactly is going on with Six Flags themed areas these days? When Guide to SFoT launched in 2010, the park’s areas were fairly well defined: Boomtown, Goodtimes Square, Gotham City, Mexico & Spain, Old South & France, Texas, Tower, and USA. Rides and attractions within each section mostly stuck to the theme. Each area played a different soundtrack. When you crossed from Boomtown into Goodtimes Square, you noticed and felt it.
This park map from 2008 showed the same designations:
As the park maximized the value of its licensing deal, they added more and more DC Comics-themed attractions, and by 2016 Gotham City had completely taken over the 1950s-themed Goodtimes Square area.
In recent years, the distinct feel of each themed area has increasingly seemed to fade. The same generic pop music started to play throughout the park. More and more in-house dining options have been taken over by franchises or outside brands.
Park Areas Combine?
SFoT’s 2022 park map oddly dropped the area designations altogether, but attractions still followed a color code which made 2 strange implications: Texas and Old South & France were combined into one section, and that Boomtown and USA were another single section.
2023’s Park Map Clouds Things Up
Skipping forward to the present, 2023’s park map brought the area designations back once again, but things are far from being clear. The 2023 map dropped the USA section designation and numbers all attractions from the entrance’s Flags Funnel Cakes all the way to Mine Train as being Boomtown.
The France section—but not the Old South—also returned. That’s not surprising as the park has increasingly disassociated itself with the area originally known as The Confederacy. Still, even though the France tag was added, attractions such as Runaway Mountain are still listed under the Texas section.
The changes to the 2022 and 2023 park maps pose several questions. Is the USA section no more? And if so, why would rides such as Justice League and Aquaman share an area themed to a mining town with other more theme-appropriate attractions such as Mine Train and Dry Hole Charlie’s?
And has Six Flags over Texas finally put the Old South section to bed? Does the France area still exist if its attractions have been absorbed by Texas?
The Future
We must be careful trying to extrapolate too much from park maps. It’s entirely possible the apparent changes to themed areas are nothing more than conveniences for the park map’s graphical layout, or even simple oversight.
And despite a slow trend toward genericizing the themed areas, recent developments at Six Flags over Texas give hope. New restaurants in the France area serving crepes are a positive sign that the park is still embracing its distinct sections. Themed areas add a tremendous amount to immersive guest experiences as Disney and Universal parks have shown, and are a necessity for a chain hoping to reposition itself as offering a “premium guest experience.”
Six Flags over Texas was developed on the concept of being able to step into six different, historically significant worlds, and it remains just as important today for the park to maintain immersive lands if it wants to distinguish itself from just an amusement park.
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