The park opened to the public on May 3, 1975, with a daily admission price of $7.50 and a dollar for parking. Fifteen attractions greeted the first crowds: the Rebel Yell wooden coaster (since renamed Racer 75), the Galaxie steel coaster, the junior wooden Scooby-Doo coaster, a log flume, a steam train, and a cable-car sky ride that ran from Old Virginia to The Happy Land of Hanna-Barbera. The Lion Country Safari, a drive-through animal zoo featuring 230 species, had been previewed the year before. The park was designed as a sister to Kings Island in Ohio, sharing themes and architecture, and was built by the same Cincinnati-based parent company that owned the Cincinnati Reds. Its tract spread across 280 acres of formerly rural Hanover County, transforming the Doswell crossroads almost overnight.

Kings Dominion earned a reputation as "the launched coaster capital of the world," and the history runs through the 1977 King Kobra, a Schwarzkopf shuttle loop with a 50-ton counterweight drop, all the way to Intimidator 305. King Kobra rattled riders for nine seasons before being shipped to Maryland, then England, then Brazil, where it still operates as Katapul. The Outer Limits: Flight of Fear arrived in 1996 as the park's first LIM-launched coaster, hurling riders from zero to 54 mph in semi-darkness through an indoor spaghetti bowl of inversions. Volcano: The Blast Coaster followed in 1998, the world's first LIM-launched inverted coaster, blasting riders out of the artificial Lost World mountain in spectacular fashion. Hypersonic XLC, introduced in 2001, fired riders from 0 to 80 mph in 1.5 seconds up an 87-degree incline. It broke down constantly. The whole ride lasted about 25 seconds.

In 2010, Kings Dominion opened Intimidator 305, a 305-foot Intamin giga coaster themed to NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt. Its cable lift hill, 85-degree first drop, and 90 mph top speed made it the park's largest-ever capital investment when it was announced in August 2009. The drop is so steep and the G-forces so intense that early riders reported greying out before reaching the bottom; the trains were modified before the ride truly settled in. Standing next to Intimidator 305 with the wind tossing the trees, listening to the rumble of the trains and the screams that follow them down, is what amusement parks at their most uncut are supposed to feel like. In 2025, the ride was renamed Pantherian as a former Volcano site nearby was reborn as Rapterra, a launched wing coaster.

For decades, the park shaped Virginia's calendar. Kings Dominion and other entertainment businesses lobbied the state to make it illegal for public schools to start before Labor Day. Their reasoning was practical and self-interested: families wouldn't spend August dollars at the park if students were in class, and teenagers wouldn't be available as a cheap summer workforce. The law passed and stuck. Virginia parents and teachers called it the "Kings Dominion Law," and it remained in force until 2019, when the General Assembly finally repealed it. For 44 years, an amusement park in Hanover County effectively wrote a chapter of state education policy.

The park has changed hands several times. Taft Broadcasting opened it; American Financial Group bought it through KECO in 1987. Paramount Parks took over in 1993, renamed it Paramount's Kings Dominion, and themed new attractions to Days of Thunder, Wayne's World, Tomb Raider, and The Italian Job. CBS Corporation, having absorbed Paramount through Viacom, decided amusement parks didn't fit its strategy and sold its theme park portfolio to Cedar Fair in June 2006. On July 1, 2024, Cedar Fair and Six Flags merged, and Kings Dominion is now part of the combined Six Flags Entertainment Corporation. Through it all, two sections have kept their original names: International Street, with that one-third Eiffel Tower and its 320-foot fountain pool, and Old Virginia, set in a pine-shaded recreation of the Blue Ridge.