Amusement parks in Orange County and companies based here that operate parks elsewhere are adding immersive, interactive and gaming attractions to tap trends toward more personalized customer experiences.
Offerings range from relatively simple coin-operated arcade games to full-scale “dark rides”—traditional indoor, tracked-vehicle journeys through various scenes.
An example of hitting all three elements of the trend came this month at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, where the Voyage to the Iron Reef ride opened.
Knott’s said it’s a way to keep up with the demand for the immersive, interactive and gaming attractions (see sidebar, page 112) in Southern California’s crowded landscape of entertainment options.
“People don’t wake up saying, ‘I want to go here or there,’ ” said General Manager Raffi Kaprelyan, the top executive at the park. “They wake up saying, ‘I want to have fun.’”
“We’re using new technology to tell the same stories” people know, Kaprelyan said.
Knott’s isn’t alone.
Disneyland Resort in Anaheim has several experience-based attractions, and Burbank-based owner Walt Disney Co. has an entire unit designing new ones—its famed “imagineers.”
Great Wolf Lodge Southern California in Garden Grove, scheduled to open early next year, plans two interactive game adventures similar to attractions at its Madison, Wis.-based parent company’s 12 other resorts.
Kraken
Knott’s is part of a chain of parks run by Sandusky, Ohio-based Cedar Fair Entertainment Co.
Iron Reef is the second such ride in Cedar Fair’s system after a similar one built at a park in Canada.
Montreal-based Triotech Amusement Inc. designed both rides.
“Knott’s is doing next-generation work,” said Triotech Chief Executive and President Ernest Yale.
The Iron Reef ride includes 10 large, curved screens and 44 high-definition projectors.
“It’s like in cinemas, with a video game engine [and layers of interaction], so the more you play, the more you see,” Yale said.
The story has riders battling the Queen of the Kraken, who leads an army of mechanical sea creatures, including a giant mechanical octopus, who eat metal—namely old Knott’s rides. “Easter eggs”—hidden items in games to be seen by observant players—include images of those rides from the park’s past. Players earn points good for bragging rights.
The new ride dovetails with renovations of various attractions at Knott’s over the past several years.
Matthew Ouimet, who became chief executive in 2012 after a career that included a stint as president of Disneyland Resort, has spearheaded the updates, Kaprelyan said.
Wolf
Great Wolf Lodge Southern California plans two interactive gaming attractions and an immersive theater experience when it opens next year, said spokeswoman Susan Storey.
Most guests at the company’s 12 resorts around the U.S. are families with children ages 2 to 14, Storey said.
“If you’re coming to Great Wolf Lodge, you have kids,” she said.
For children ages 5 to 9, resorts have Clubhouse Crew, which involves stuffed animals of the company’s themed characters—two wolves, two raccoons, a bear and a squirrel—embedded with microchips. Families buy the animals, then walk around the resort stopping at six stations to complete tasks.
Older kids play MagiQuest, which also involves a trek like a scavenger hunt around the resort. Players compete with friends and family to complete various tasks. The game involves different stories, video screens, and a “quest” to become a “master magi,” Storey said.
“It’s live action and interactive, with critical thinking, reading, and time-based challenges,” she said. “It’s definitely a trend in family travel.”
Great Wolf launched a second series of adventures called ShadowQuest to keep kids playing. Storey said Garden Grove will be the first property in the company to have the latest version, called Rise of the Totem Masters.
She said a single property’s cost to install the games can hit $1 million.
The company has sold 1.6 million wands systemwide. They now cost about $20 each. Activation is $14. The wand is active for the length of stay but is kept by the child and can be reactivated with stored information intact at any resort.
Storey said the 603-room resort, which is nearing completion in Garden Grove, also plans to have an immersive movie experience, “Howly Wood” XD Theater, made by Triotech.
Avatar
Disneyland Resort was among the first parks to add experience-based attractions, including gaming entry Toy Story Midway Mania and the immersive Soarin’ Over California.
Being first means the rides are older—7 and 14 years old, respectively.
Disneyland representatives declined comment for this article, but this month the park reopened Soarin’ with a new screen and projection system, and Toy Story is likely to be complemented at some point at the park by a new interactive attraction.
Comments by Disney Imagineering’s Chief Creative Officer Bruce Vaughn in the May 2015 FunWorld magazine suggest the likelihood of such changes.
Vaughn told the trade magazine by Alexandria, Va.-based International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions that Disney sees shifts “from a more passive audience [among guests] to an active one” and that “these behaviors … play well in our designs.”
A Disney attraction based on the film “Avatar” for Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., is expected to include different experiences based on the time of day a patron visits.
Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger told Variety magazine in December that the company plans additional attractions based on the “Star Wars” movies.
Beyond
Aliso Viejo-based Apex Parks Group and Newport Beach-based Palace Entertainment Inc.—each of which runs chains of smaller amusement parks in California and nationwide—are carrying the trend to their parks.
Apex has16 parks in four states, including Boomers locations in Irvine and Fountain Valley.
The Irvine Boomers location includes Lazer Frenzy, a maze made up of intersecting laser beams, and a horror-themed “shooter”game called Dark Escape, sold by Bandai Namco Amusement America Inc. in Chicago.
“In the old days, you go to an arcade, you play, you go home,” said Senior Vice President of Operations Gregg Borman. “Today you have to be able to brag about it.”
He said Apex is looking at adding a Triotech XD Theater this year.
Palace runs 22 parks that include a Boomers in Vista and Castle Park in Riverside.
Spokesperson Michele Wischmeyer said Palace is adding an immersive theater at its Kennywood theme park in Pittsburgh that’s being built by Toronto-based SimEx-Iwerks, which also supplies the short films to show in it.
Palace and Apex have also used a coin-operated, media-based simulator ride called Typhoon, also from Triotech.
“Going to a park is no longer just a passive experience,” Wischmeyer said.
Costs
Costs for such attractions can range from about $20,000 for a simple product like Typhoon to six figures for theater installations of about 12 to 100 seats, to $1 million or so for Great Wolf’s MagiQuest or several millions of dollars for an immersive, interactive, gaming dark ride.
Knott’s wouldn’t say how much it spent on Iron Reef, but reports have placed costs for the similar ride in Canada at about $10 million.
That’s the range of the price of admission to trends in amusement parks and gaming, the latter of which now has virtual reality products from companies such as NextVR Inc. in Laguna Beach and was in large part born in Orange County.
“We had arcades, then the home consoles caught up, and now it’s back to how can we get people out of the home,” said Brian Fargo, who founded Interplay Inc. in 1983 and is chief executive of Newport Beach-based gaming company InXile Inc.
“It’s an amusement park, so they need to be accessible,” he said, but to capture new players, the attraction also “has to be unique and different.”
