Six Flags Qiddiya City Opening Ceremony

On 29 December 2025, the opening ceremony for Six Flags Qiddiya City announced a destination of extraordinary scale to the world: Saudi Arabia's first-of-its-kind theme park, Qiddiya City's first major asset, and Six Flags' first destination outside North America.

Held under the patronage of the Governor of Riyadh Region and set against the Tuwaiq Mountains, the show had to match a park defined by record-breaking ambition — Falcon's Flight, the world's tallest, fastest and longest roller coaster; Iron Rattler, the tallest tilt coaster; Spitfire, the tallest inverted coaster - while keeping the guest experience beyond the gates intact.

So we built the spectacle to create anticipation rather than give the park away. A 180-degree stage was constructed into the main entrance gateway, turning the falcon-wing architecture and the landscape beyond it into part of the visual world. The result placed 2,500 guests inside the show - not in front of it - and carried the same sense of scale to millions watching remotely across MBC, Shahid, YouTube and X. The panoramic canvas swept between vast landscapes, intimate detail and virtual-camera moves that flew the audience through the scene.

The signature "wow" arrived when the boundary between live performer and digital image simply dissolved. A real performer-golfer struck a virtual ball that travelled across (panoramic digital world) and transformed into a football reaching another live performer.

Across the sequence, performers entered, affected and emerged from the media as if film visual effects had escaped into real life - no green screen and no post-production. It happened once, live, in front of the audience's eyes. The city's pillars - water theme park, sports, culture, entertainment, e-gaming and motorsport - flowed into one another as a single cinematic journey rather than a series of chapters.

The Six Flags sequence played by a different rule. The theme park keeps its own lands, record-breaking rides and stories for the guest experience, so our task was to translate speed, height, scale and duration into choreography and effects - flashes of worlds and movement that let the audience feel the theme park's energy without revealing it. The Saudi family from the theme park's first marketing campaign then appeared live on stage, turning a national advertising story into a physical, emotional payoff.

The night culminated in a world-first finale: as Falcons Flight raced through the dark, synchronised fireworks ignited along its course, a Red Bull wingsuit athlete soared through its monumental structure, and a drone show lit the sky above Qiddiya City - a real roller coaster choreographed into a live show at architectural scale.

If we could show the judges only thirty seconds, it would be the unbroken chain of magic moments where one live action transforms the digital world and hands the story to the next performer. That is what made the ceremony spectacular: movie-level visual effects created live, at the scale of a building, with the audience not watching from outside the frame, but seated inside it.