United States Freestyle Music Park (Hard Rock Park)

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Park Status
Defunct
Location (US State)
South Carolina
RE: Hard Rock/ Freestyle Music Park

:( All of the parks coasters are no longer for sale. http://www.italintl.com/category.php?category=Roller%20Coasters

I guess they are going to Asia after all.
 
I just saw an old picture of my girlfriend and there's a B&M in the background. I asked her about it and apparently it was Led Zeppelin: The Ride. So naturally I searched ParkFans and found this thread.

It seems that it was mediocre from what I'm reading in this thread but I'm curious if anyone remembers it differently. Anyone ride it in Vietnam by any chance?
 
I think Theme Park Expedition or Defunctland also covered this park too - you have a chance to watch either of those?
 
I'm not advocating for engagement in illegal activities, but I will say that if anyone is in Myrtle Beach and has an itch to see the park, the front gates are wide open and the property isn't monitored. Not much is left (pretty much just some decrepit buildings, foundations, & signage), but it's really a fascinating place. Managed to find a couple of HRP drink bottles and HRP/FMP park maps as well.

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Those photos are fantastic @zachclarke2!

Hard Rock Park will always be my white whale. I desperately wish I had experienced it. It seemed damn near perfect.

(Also Nights in White Satin was best darkride, don't @ me. The fact that it only operated for like three months is CRIMINAL. I'm sure obtaining the rights to the ride would be a nightmare, but damn I wish someone could buy the plans for it and bring it back to life.)

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It wouldn't have been the same if it had originally opened with the FMP concept using generic tunes to reduce licensing costs, but I'd be curious to know if it would have had a better chance of surviving if they went that direction.

Still though, for a tiny start-up to have the rides and experiences they offered, I really wish they would have succeeded.
 
zachclarke2 said:
I'm not advocating for engagement in illegal activities, but I will say that if anyone is in Myrtle Beach and has an itch to see the park, the front gates are wide open and the property isn't monitored. Not much is left (pretty much just some decrepit buildings, foundations, & signage), but it's really a fascinating place. Managed to find a couple of HRP drink bottles and HRP/FMP park maps as well.

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It’s not illegal if it’s public property 😌, JK, but that’s neat they left it open for people to see it I guess?
 
Seems the park's remaining infrastructure is in the process of being demolished. As of January the entire entry plaza was reduced to rubble, but some of the buildings farther into the park remain standing. Not sure if there are any concrete plans for the site, but it may likely become a distribution site for Fedex. Bit of a bummer as I've always held a sliver of hope that it would be repurposed as a park, as far fetched as that was.

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This place was so awesome. Glad I got to go while it was running, just a shame in how it went. Unfortunately doomed to fail because of the location.
 
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I'll be honest, I'm not sure why everyone keeps parroting that the park closed because of poor location, because it makes no sense. Myrtle Beach draws about 14 million people a year and supports multiple daytime/evening attractions. The closest large amusement park is Carowinds which is almost 4 hours away.

Much more likely reasons are their poorly planned marketing campaign and ridiculous ticketing structure ($50 admission across the board with no senior/child discounts, evening entry, etc). The economic downturn in 2008 also likely did them dirty, with a dramatic decrease in tourism and presumably a decrease in spending from people who did travel to MB.

Theme Park University has an amazing series of pieces on the development and demise of the park if anyone's interested in reading more in depth.
 
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I thought that the pricing structure changed a few times but the main reason for the location argument is that the park wasn't near the tourist destinations/beaches (a few miles over) and that tourists came for the beach and not an amusement park.

But I also thought that those items were extra straws on the camel's back; the camel was being tripped by high expenses/debt by a small group of individuals that couldn't absorb it at about the same time as the 2008 recession... Where banks were pulling out of risky loans and tourism generally declined. If this was a larger organization such as a regular park chain that could move money around to keep it open or if they scaled down the park and grew it over time, it may have survived.
 
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The location is absolutely an issue. Just because an area has a lot of visitors doesn't mean that a business can do well.

Myrtle Beach is a top beach vacation spot for families. Most commonly, people spend all year working to save for their yearly family vacation and go down to Myrtle Beach for a week to enjoy the beach. I myself have been visiting North Myrtle Beach since I was an infant. I have seen numerous different parks of various scales and different areas in this town close down, simply due to not enough patrons. This isn't like Orlando where people travel for the parks, they travel for the beach, and when these families are already spending the cash they are to be there, they are more likely to spend their few days at the restaurants and the beach itself. The one park I have seen carry on there is Family Kingdom, and they are very much a small OCMD Jolly Roger style park where the access threshold is low (low price) and it is a good spot to have some casual fun for an evening. The all-day park style that was the Freestyle Park simply doesn't work here, as they rely on far too many people wanting to shell out the cash to spend one of their few days at the beach at an amusement park they could probably get closer to home.

Parks of this tier don't belong in vacation towns. Smaller parks succeed in vacation towns due to the high accessibility and low time requirement, and insanely large parks like Disney and Universal survive because they attract the vacationers themselves. Parks of this size need a continuous and sizable local audience as well as nearby travelers to break even, since they definitely weren't running the place on the cheap side. Competition was never an issue, it was simply just a market that didn't exist.
 
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Doesn’t Medieval Times, which is located right next to the old park, somewhat discredit the location argument? It serves a similar tourist demographic and has successfully outlasted the park by more than a decade.
 
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Mushroom said:
Doesn’t Medieval Times, which is located right next to the old park, somewhat discredit the location argument? It serves a similar tourist demographic and has successfully outlasted the park by more than a decade.
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But that's basically a dinner theater show - the idea is you only go for a meal and get some entertainment alongside for the price.

It's not designed to keep you there all day, so it's reasonable that beach tourists may venture out for dinner there one night during their stay.
 
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Jonesta6 said:
But that's basically a dinner theater show - the idea is you only go for a meal and get some entertainment alongside for the price.

It's not designed to keep you there all day, so it's reasonable that beach tourists may venture out for dinner there one night during their stay.
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Why is it reasonable that beach tourists may venture there at night, but not reasonable that they would make the same trek earlier in the day?

I would contend that Medieval Times might even have more of an uphill battle with the location, since like you said, it’s essentially a glorified restaurant. I would think that it’s much harder for a restaurant to convince people to go out of their way to visit it, rather than a theme park which requires lots of planning anyway.
 
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If anyone wants to learn more about why Hard Rock Park failed and its short-lived life, I would highly recommend checking out this talk that the former CCO John Binkowski did a couple of years ago. The video won't play on the forums, but leads to youtube and is really worth a watch as there was a multitude of reasons that lead to its untimely demise.
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