What is the Wipeout?
The Wipeout is a trampoline park game built around being knocked down: a center post spins two padded arms over eight small pie-shaped trampolines while jumpers try to leap over the lower arm and duck under the upper one.
If an arm touches you, you are out. That is the game. It is billed as light-hearted fun, marketed to birthday parties, and operated in many parks by teenage court monitors. What guests are not told is that the attraction's own record, developed in litigation, reads like a warning label no one ever posted.
The Wipeout is banned in multiple states. It has been recalled by most parks as too dangerous. And it is still in operation.
Dangerous by design
The Wipeout is unreasonably dangerous by design, not by accident.
The problems come down to a few plain points. Trampolines are rebound devices; they were never designed to be landing surfaces. The Wipeout inverts that principle: an attraction built to knock jumpers down turns its small, rigid, pie-shaped beds into landing zones with no true center to land on. The arms change direction mid-game, forcing jumpers to track a moving object instead of their own landing. And the whole activity pushes jumpers toward inverted positions that the ASTM consumer trampoline standard flatly prohibits, because those maneuvers can lead to significant injury or death. These are the conclusions of experts who helped write the ASTM standards for indoor trampoline parks and have worked on hundreds of trampoline court cases.
The attraction also never underwent the testing the applicable ASTM standards require to establish that it was safe for people to use at all.
We have handled multiple Wipeout cases.
This attraction is not a one-off in our practice. Humphrey, Farrington & McClain has handled multiple cases involving the Wipeout, and we are continuing to investigate new ones.
The injuries follow the same mechanism across parks and states: a jumper is struck or clipped by a rotating arm, or misjudges a landing while tracking one, and comes down hard on a small rigid bed or its padded steel edges. The results range from fractures to catastrophic spinal cord injuries. Our Wipeout work includes the $15.6 million Collins arbitration award, and every new case starts from a record we have already developed: the hazard analysis, the operations manual, the regulatory history, and the attraction's documented injury pattern.
One unit's paper trail: injured in Iowa, moved to Kansas
The single best-documented Wipeout is the one at the center of our Collins arbitration. Before our client ever stepped onto it in Kansas, the same unit had already injured a series of jumpers in Iowa, been shut down by state regulators, and been the subject of a written risk calculation that put the danger in numbers.
This is the sequence the arbitration record established.
A string of injuries
In the operator's own words, "a string of injuries in a short time frame" occurs on the Wipeout at an Iowa park. The Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals shuts the attraction down and requires a formal hazard analysis before it can operate.
The park's own engineer puts the risk in numbers
The professional engineer retained for the analysis calculates that a jumper going over the upper arm faces a 1-in-400 likelihood of critical injury, and that training operators to stop the attraction the first time it happens would cut that risk to 1 in 500,000. Iowa does not allow the Wipeout to return.
The same unit is moved to Kansas
Rather than retire the attraction, its owners relocate the Iowa Wipeout to their Kansas park. It is reinstalled without the recommended operator training, with the operator station positioned where the monitor cannot see every jumper. Kansas regulators and Kansas customers are never told about Iowa.
Damion Collins is paralyzed
At a birthday party, 34-year-old Damion Collins jumps over the upper arm repeatedly. No sign prohibits it, and the 16-year-old court monitor never stops the attraction or warns him, exactly the failure the 2019 analysis warned about. Attempting a backflip, he lands on his neck and suffers a cervical spine fracture. He is now a quadriplegic.
Colorado bans the Wipeout statewide
Colorado prohibits the attraction across the state. It remains banned there today.
Illinois orders every Wipeout closed
The Illinois Department of Labor issues a safety alert ordering all Wipeouts in the state closed until operators make mandated changes: lowest speed only, cycles capped at two minutes, arms turning in one direction, and jumping restricted to a marked outer section of each bed.
The manufacturer acknowledges the arm is the problem
The Wipeout's manufacturer issues a bulletin to operators stating the spinning arm mechanism may need to be removed, with instructions for converting the attraction to a basic trampoline without the arms that define the game.
The $15.6 million award
The arbitrator finds a systemic failure to bring necessary information to the patron and enters an award of $15.6 million, holding the local operator, the national franchisor, and the attraction's manufacturer each accountable.
Likelihood of critical injury for a jumper going over the Wipeout's upper arm, as calculated by the professional engineer the operator itself retained.
Operator's 2019 hazard analysisWhat that risk would have fallen to if operators had simply been trained to stop the attraction the first time a jumper went over the arm. The training was never implemented.
Operator's 2019 hazard analysisThe operator's own engineer put the risk at 1 in 400. The attraction kept running. If you were hurt on a Wipeout we already have the file.
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What our investigations keep finding
The Wipeout files do not just document a design problem. They document how the attraction was actually run, and the pattern repeats.
The warnings that were not there
In one of our cases, the operator claimed a rules sign told jumpers to duck under the upper arm. The version of the sign in the attraction's own operations manual says no such thing, and enlarged stills from the incident video did not match the sign the operator produced. The evidence did not establish that any sign prohibiting the maneuver was posted on the day of the injury, and no one gave the warning out loud.
The safety hardware that was not wired
At one inspection of a Wipeout, experts pulled the emergency stop switch on the operator kiosk and found it had never been wired into the attraction at all. The button was there. The wiring was not.
The monitors who could not monitor
In our cases, the court monitors operating the Wipeout have been teenagers, stationed at control panels positioned where they could not see every jumper, with no documented training on the attraction. The 2019 hazard analysis made operator intervention the entire safety plan. The operators never built one.
Case Account The Collins arbitration: how a signed waiver became a $15.6 million award →The Wipeout is still running.
Despite everything above, Wipeout attractions remain in operation at trampoline parks, and people are still being hurt on them.
Our firm is continuing to investigate Wipeout injury claims, including injuries to children. If you or someone in your family was hurt on this attraction, the documented history above is the starting point of your case, and we already have it. What disappears quickly is the evidence specific to your injury: the surveillance video, the staffing records, the inspection logs. Contact us immediately so preservation demands go out while that evidence still exists.
