Rachel Richardson, and Henry Molski

CIN

An Ohio man became The Beast's 50 millionth rider on Friday night.

Mark Specht, of Berea, Ohio, took the coveted ride during Kings Island's Halloween Haunt event late Friday night, park officials say.

Specht received eight 2015 VIP tour tickets, a large sign proclaiming him as the 50 millionth rider, a Beast t-shirt, hat, ornament and picture frame.

It's been a record-breaking 42nd year for the Mason amusement park, which debuted its newest adrenaline-pumping attraction, Banshee, in April.

Less than four months after it opened, the $24 million, world record-breaking coaster gave its 1-millionth shriek in July to Grant Pederson, of Lexington, Ky.

Later that month, Mike Brogan of Cincinnati became lucky rider No. 10 million to brave Diamondback, which set a new height record -- 230 feet at its highest point -- for the park when it opened in 2009.

And in August, the park's oldest coaster, The Racer, delivered its 100-millionth ride – the most rides ever in park history – to Angela Marshall, of Chattanooga, Tenn.

But for many adrenaline junkies, The Beast remains among iconic among coasters both for its nostalgic appeal and the bone-rattling thrills it delivers.

"The Beast is the 'Holy Grail' of wooden roller coasters," said Don Helbig, park spokesman. "There's a lot of wooden roller coasters out there, and then there's The Beast."

BUILDING THE BEAST

Nobody knows Kings Island like Jeff Gramke, the park's manager of facilities, engineering and construction.

In 1971, the then 18-year-old draftsman landed a job doing heavy labor as the park was being built. When the park opened in 1972, he was asked to stay on as part of a surveying team working with Al Collins, the park's chief engineer, who died in 2005.

"As soon as we opened the park, Taft Broadcasting, which owned the company, realized we had to expand," Gramke said.

That mapping job soon turned into a planning and development and project manager position. Since then, not a ride has been installed or a building constructed without Gramke's input.

Kings Island already boasted a record-breaking coaster with The Racer when park officials began to plan the next thrill ride. Built in the fall of 1971, The Racer broke records as the world's biggest wooden roller coaster. At speeds approaching 60 mph, it was the fastest, too. In May 1982, it became the first coaster to run trains backward on one side of its tracks.

Since their debut at Disneyland in 1959, steel coasters dominated the amusement park landscape, said Gramke. Not only did steel allow for death-defying loops and corkscrews, it also made coasters faster, smoother and quieter. The Racer proved to be an industry game-changer.

"When we built this park, the twin Racer was pretty much the rebirth of the wood roller coasters," Gramke said.

Park officials solicited Racer designer John. C. Allen, of the Philadelphia Toboggan Co., to design their next big attraction. He declined, but passed on his design formulas to Gramke and Collins.

"It wasn't that dissimilar from what we were used to doing," explained Gramke. "Most everything you're doing in surveying is trigonometry. Essentially, a roller coaster is just a fancy road, just a lot more fun."

Planning for the coaster that would become The Beast began in 1976. The two engineers-turned-coaster-designers faced steep challenges, beginning with the tens of thousands of formulas to calculate 7,359 feet of wooden mountains and rickety valleys. Allen's calculations for smaller-scale coasters had to be reworked to accommodate the record-breaking coaster demanded by park officials.

"It was very labor-intensive," Gramke remembered. "There were no scientific calculators, no computers. Everything had to be calculated by hand."

The coaster's densely-wooded 35-acre site, with its heavy foliage, steep ravines, sharp inclines and a lake, presented other obstacles.

"We would do a design, go out in the field and whack through the woods and cut through the trees and see where the coaster was going. If we didn't want to hit a tree, we'd go back and redesign again. It got to be way too problematic to do that. Once you make a change in a coaster, it affects everything from there forward," Gramke explained.

The designers decided to work with the topography by going underground, a decision that serendipitously resulted in one of The Beast's most popular and terrifying elements: three pitch-black tunnels.

"There had been a couple smaller coasters with tunnels, but nothing to the extent we had here. It turned out to be a great element of the ride, (but) it was more a necessity to make the ride work," said Gramke.

BREAKING RECORDS

In the summer of 1978, park officials announced plans to build "the biggest, baddest, longest, fastest, wooden roller coaster in the world!" but it would be several months more before The Beast would gain its iconic moniker, said Helbig.

"The maintenance crews and construction managers would give (then-public relations manager) Ruth Voss updates and say, 'This is a beast of a project,' and 'It's a beast to work on.' It evolved from there," he explained.

When Kings Island unleashed The Beast in 1979, it broke all existing records, as the tallest, fastest and longest wooden roller coaster in the world. Even today, the coaster still holds as the longest coaster of its kind at 7,359-feet. Crowds waited five hours in line to ride the wooden behemoth.

"It was hugely popular right from the start," said Gramke. "Nobody had ever seen anything like that before."

And the crowds weren't just locals. Before The Beast opened, Kings Island operated as a regional draw. The record-breaking coaster put the park on the map, Helbig said.

"When the Beast opened, word spread and you began seeing people come not only coast to coast, but internationally. We're still seeing people come from all over the world specifically to ride The Beast."

The Beast revolutionized the industry in other ways, too. Traditionally, roller coasters used a bell system to alert ride operators when a car approached the station. The Beast was among the first coasters to use an analog computer to keep track of the cars on the track.

The coaster, built for a paltry $3.5 million by today's double-digit coaster budgets, is approaching 50 million rides, the third-most in park history behind The Racer (100 million) and the K.I. & Miami Valley Railroad (51 million).

"The Beast was truly a Kings Island coaster. We didn't just design it here, we built it here," said Gramke. "That didn't happen in the industry anywhere. This is probably the first park where a coaster was designed and built in-house by the owner of the company."

A GREAT EXPERIENCE

While Kings Island's latest throwdown in the amusement park wars, Banshee, breaks new ground in thrills and chills, the continued popularity of coasters like The Beast shows that a good coaster is about more than record-setting gimmicks as the tallest, longest, fastest or downright scariest coaster, Helbig said.

"We're now in a period where it's about delivering a great experience," he said. "It's great when you first come out with a ride to say it's got all these records, but it's about the experience, and that is what's going to get people to come back and ride the rides over and over again."

In the end, he says, having the daylights scared out of you – and then jumping right back in line – is what it's all about.

DID YOU KNOW…