I've noticed somewhat of the same in the past few years too. And it seems to be all over the place:
Last tallest/fastest Invert - Wicked Twister - 2002
Last tallest full-circuit Invert - Alpengeist - 1997(!)
Last fastest full-circuit Invert - Volcano, TBC - 1998
Last tallest wooden coaster - Son of Beast - 2003 (since dismantled)
Current tallest wooden coaster - Colossos - 2001 (and apparently SBNO at the moment)
There are some exceptions, though. Lightning Rod just took the "fastest woodie" record last year, and Fury 325 became the world's tallest non-launched coaster in 2015. The tallest vertical loop record is being broken by a coaster under construction, if I recall correctly, and 2014's Gatekeeper has the highest inversion ever. All coasters on the "most inversions on a woodie" list have been built (or refurbished) after 2012.
But the trend seems clear - in recent years, few parks have even tried to shoot for world records in many of the most notable categories. Length seems to be the worst affected, of the longest 25 coasters in the world, only 6 have been built in the last 15 years. Of the 9 coasters ever built longer than 2000 meters, only two - Fury 325 and Formula Rossa - have been built since the year 2000. Formula Rossa is even debateable, since its length is listed as exactly 2000 meters, which I doubt is more than an estimate. Also, the longest coaster in the world is more than 800 meters - or 50 % - longer than the 25th longest. By comparison, only 120 metres separate the 25th and 50th longest coasters.
Exactly why the industry seems to have stopped shooting for so many records, I don't know exactly. But I suspect it's a mix of three factors:
1. Beating records is expensive, and the return marginal.
Basically the sentence above. Most records are related to size in some way, and building a huge coaster costs a huge amount of money. As the record breakers become bigger and bigger, beating it would mean an even larger investment. By virtue of their size and intensity, such coasters make a lot of noise that spreads far from a high vantage point (comparable to a church bell - there's a reason why people haul those heavy bells all the way up those tall towers, it's to broadcast the sound). They require all sorts of permits from the aviation authorities. And they take up an awful lot of space too. All this to build a coaster that only the thrillseekers dare ride, that you have to be this tall to ride (there goes the kid demographic, and since kids can't ride, at least one of their parents can't either), and whose tagline "Superlative coaster in the world!" might not mean that much in the grand scheme of things. Okay, a record might net you, say, 5 % more guests within a given period of time, but if it would cost you 50 % more to build the ride, you're better off being more modest. And if somebody beats the record the year after, you can wave the marketing tagline goodbye (or you could do as BPB, and ignore the fact that your record is beaten, but the public is going to call you out eventually).
2. Not many parks were beating records anyway.
Cedar Fair and Six Flags drove the competition in several categories, most notably the overall speed/height records. Few other parks could even afford to. And as a chain keeps churning out record breakers, eventually it fills the gaps in the parks' line-ups. So, you build the world's biggest woodie. Then your competitor builds a bigger one. What do you do? Now you already have a really big wooden coaster, enough to satisfy your guests' yearning for good wood for 15 years or so. You have nothing to win by building a bigger woodie, apart from retaking the record itself. You don't necessarily have room for another one either, not if you plan to build more diverse coasters in your idle spots in the future.
Likewise, if you build a taller, say, invert than all your competitors, you've won the competition. Now what. Nobody else will build taller inverts, every park with the finances to compete already built one. But having the tallest invert won't lead guests to your park indefinitely. You can market it for two, three years or so, and then another park will capture the public's attention with something completely different. They will quickly forget that your invert war ever happened, or at least stop caring about the winner. And all the parks that didn't participate in the "record wars" managed to do reasonably well anyway.
3. One-trick coasters are becoming less common.
This one is a pet theory of mine: Coasters used to be a lot like RCT2. Not that they were designed element-for-element with snappy transitions and poor banking, but in that the various coaster types used to adhere to very specific limitations. A looping coaster did inversions, that was it. Look at the essential layout of old multi-loopers like Vortex, SFMM Viper, or SFGAdv Medusa: Lift, drop, loop, loop, loop, MCBR, loop, loop, loop, helix, end (I'm using the wrong term because "inversion" is a hassle to write repeatedly). Likewise, a hyper coaster was tall and had airtime hills, that's all. Launched coasters had the launch as their focal point, then just bled speed until the brakes. Vertical drop coasters had done their entire job after the first drop, and might as well just brake down afterwards.
In a sense, beating the record of that one trick amounted to making a more ideal ____ coaster. A looping coaster with 8 loops was much more loopy than a looping coaster with 7 loops. It was like a more extreme execution of the idea of looping coasters. Similarly, the tallest-looping coaster would be more tall-looping than its predecessor (therefore better), the steepest-dropping coaster would be the best steep-drop coaster around, et cetera.
Then at some point in the mid-2000s, it was as if somebody said "what if we could make a coaster that just does all kinds of stuff, instead of sticking to one trick?". Have a launch, continue with a full set of inversions. Build a large coaster with three inversions, instead of seven - use sweeping turns and airtime hills and dives and such instead of just repeating the trick of going upside down as many times as you can. The modern coaster is a Maverick, a Helix, or an Outlaw Run. Steep drops, airtime hills, launches and inversions are just elements to be utilized, rather than tricks to be spammed. Do a little bit of everything, and guests will love it. Even though you won't get a single concept to pin down and use as a marketing trick anymore.
I guess there are other factors too. Maybe the thick clouds of enthusiasts swarming around every marketing outlet for parks (primarily on social media) have diminished the impact of "extremeness" over quality. Maybe the marketing analysts just figured out that a modest coaster will draw approximately as many guests as a record-breaker, for a fraction of the costs. Maybe Six Flags showed the world that you could break records left and right, and still be swamped to the neck in financial problems. Maybe some other park showed the world that you could ignore records completely and still do very well.
Anyway, another great topic for discussion! Well done, Ian!
