It's no surprise Disney is modeling the creation of its urban and suburban DisneyQuest gaming centers on the resounding (and regurgitating) success of its current parks. This time, though, instead of rides cleverly designed to herd visitors along, users will be given a much larger share of control, and kiddies will get a bit of soft-core violence in battling Disneyfied villains.
With the word "cyber" as omnipresent as Mickey himself, the 100,000-square-foot interactive centers, scheduled for Orlando, Florida, by 1998 and downtown Chicago in summer '99, are a radical departure for the family-entertainment company, pushing competition, technology, and even hand-to-hand combat to the forefront. The centers, designed for a 2- to 3-hour sojourn, are built around four areas: the VR-intensive Explore Zone, the gaming area Score Zone, the "imagineering studio" Creative Zone, and Replay Zone, which features classic rides (like bumper cars).
Conjoining the high-tech and the visceral, the purpose of the project announced this week is to "give guests the ability to control the experience," says Joe DiNunzio, executive producer of DisneyQuest. Case in point is Cyberspace Mountain, which lets users design their own roller coaster and then test it out in a 360-degree pitch-and-roll simulator. Another game even cribs concepts direct from the Net, as in a Doom-like game pitting users against each other on a local area network.
But while the nature of the rides smacks of digital zeitgeist, the DisneyQuest parks are a kind of nostalgia, DiNunzio says. "Forty or 50 years ago, people in bumper cars were in fact interactive experience," he says. "We're trying to capture the spirit of an older age."
Just like any software company, DisneyQuest has built its business model around planned obsolescence. While other Disneyland rides are overhauled every 20 years, three quarters of the games will be replaced or undergo software and hardware changes within 18 months, says DiNunzio.
With nerf cannons and animated broadswords, the DisneyQuest games present an unusual embrace of face-off violence by the family-oriented company. In the ScoreZone VR game Ride the Comix, players slash at "vamped up" Disney villains Captain Hook and Ursula, which have been redrawn with significant muscle tone.
But you won't see gushing blood. Says DiNunzio: "As a company, we've never shied away from physical conflict, but we have from gratuitous violence."
The DisneyQuest centers may prove to be only loss leaders for Disney's other parks, says Eric Cohen, spokesman for XS New York, the massive interactive arcade on 42nd Street in New York.
"They're getting on the trend that [urban gaming centers] XS or GameWorks started," Cohen says. "They'll open huge spaces, and on an individual basis they won't make money. But if they ... take 3 percent [of the people who attend] and send them to Disneyland, it was a worthwhile effort.
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
