Throughout BGWFans’ more than 10 year history, we have leaked a lot of major Busch Gardens Williamsburg attraction additions. Historically, we have typically tried to identify yet-to-be-announced BGW rides by their anticipated debut year. For instance, prior to their official announcements, we identified Verbolten as Project 2012, Tempesto as Project 2015, InvadR as Project 2017, etc.

As we have begun to learn about projects earlier and earlier in their development cycles, it has become increasingly difficult to use this naming convention. Oftentimes, when projects are just getting off the ground internally, a final debut year has yet to be set in stone—see Project Madrid. Another complication of this naming scheme is that projects do sometimes hit unexpected snags during their development—for instance, Pantheon, previously dubbed Project 2020, has now been delayed until Spring 2022.

Given the recent issues with our previous project identification syntax, we plan to deprecate the use of the “Project [Debut Year]” format entirely on BGWFans. Following the delay of Project 2021, we have adopted the community-generated nickname, Drachen Spire, to identify the project in our coverage. Thus far, people seem to be happy with that choice so we are going to do the same moving forward.

So, basically, when the park utilizes a specific, non-year, codename for an in-development project and we are able to leak that internal codename, we will still identify projects by that park-provided moniker (as we did with Project Gemini earlier this year). However, when we start to learn about projects before we can uncover and/or leak an official internal codename, we will simply make one up or onboard the usage of a community-sourced nickname for the project.

This short clarification post will make a lot more sense soon™. Stay tuned…