Dark Ride Count

I may well be in the minority when I say that the experience of a dark ride can easily rival that of a good rollercoaster. Travelling the world to ride all the latter will inevitably lead you to finding a lot of the former, so I used to be surprised that no one (to my knowledge) really attempts to collect, count and categorise these other types of attractions in the same way that has taken off so strongly for the coaster counters out there.

Without the tools that we take for granted these days like RCDB and coast2coaster, it’s rather difficult to stay as accurate, so after joining Dark Ride Database in 2020, I’ve gone on to help maintain and keep track of the wonderful world of dark rides with the team. Make sure to check it out for detailed listings, dark ride news, in-depth articles or even to use as a handy trip-planning tool.

Alongside this I put together some form of dark ride count for myself on the faithful spreadsheet.
The other expected difficulty, as with coasters, is what do we classify as a dark ride? There’s a huge amount of variety out there and some obviously fit the criteria a lot more than others. With water rides, thrill rides and coasters themselves utilising what we’d call dark ride features there’s a lot of overlap into what could technically count.

Definitions are never perfect of course and open to interpretation, so just like coaster counting. According to my own current listing, I’ve ridden 542 dark rides across the world in 223 different locations.

Of course maintaining this exercise led me to want to rank and rate these attractions for fun, just as I would with coasters. It’s difficult. Very difficult. There’s variety in rollercoasters for sure, but the hardware is always at least comparable in the loosest sense. I can sit back in my chair for a couple of hours, play the Hymn of Reflection and come out with a numbered list that I feel is reasonably solid. I’ve tried this with dark rides on a number of occasions and it just doesn’t fall into place in the same way.

So what have we got here below? Well I think I’ve scraped a top 10 together and, as with the coaster rankings, I don’t think this is enough to represent the wide range of amazing attractions out there. I then pushed on for 45 more to make it into a rough Top 10%, but I can’t yet claim that these are in any particular order.
As the site develops I aim to elaborate on the reasoning behind as many as possible, so stay tuned.