What if you could take Walt Disney World – with all its magic, thrills, and adventure – and pack it up into a box? What if you could take that box anywhere? What if you could experience those unique attractions in Chicago? Or Philadelphia? Or Atlanta? Or Seattle?
What if you could visit Walt Disney World without actually having to visit Walt Disney World?
That was the dream of DisneyQuest.
DisneyQuest was unlike anything that had been built before. It housed dozens of virtual reality games, a restaurant, retro arcade games and more – all under one roof. In many ways, it represented the future of the theme park – localized and individualized. Over time, however, that futuristic vision grew obsolete.
And now, 18 years after the indoor theme park first opened in Orlando, it’s shutting its doors for good. With it, one of the last vestiges of the famed Disney Decade will disappear from Walt Disney World property.
So, let’s take a moment and look back at the beginning: How did it come to be in the first place? What was it like? Where did it go wrong?
Buckle up, because the story of DisneyQuest, really, is the story of the 21st century.
The beginning of an idea
Image: WillMcC, Wikimedia (license)
Despite all the pomp and circumstance, DisneyQuest really draws its roots from the video arcades of the 1980s. The so-called golden age of video games lasted from roughly the late-1970s to the mid-1980s, and saw countless arcades open in every city across the country. Gamers flocked to these arcades in droves, enjoying the newest video games while competing with friends and socializing after school. It was the time before the internet and before the popularization of the personal computer, and so this type of entertainment took a strong hold among young people of the era.
With the advent of home gaming consoles in the late-1980s, the appeal of the arcade began to diminish. Smaller mom-and-pop arcades were forced to shutter their doors as gamers increasingly stayed home to enjoy their own Nintendos and Segas, while the ones that stayed in business coalesced into larger conglomerates. By the late-1990s, only a few traditional arcades remained, and the market was mostly dominated by large-scale, redemption game-heavy chains such as Dave and Busters, Jillian’s, and Gameworks. But, despite the industry wide decline, these businesses carved out a niche for themselves and were doing very well.
Image: Disney
At some point, Disney noticed this, and a bell went off in the mind of one of its executives: This is how we spread our footprint beyond Orlando and Anaheim.
And so, the idea was hatched. Disney would form a company called “Disney Regional Entertainment” whose job was simple: Take our theme park experiences and morph them into an arcade-style attraction that could exist permanently in cities around the globe. These were the days before the internet, and so rather than expecting guests would automatically come to you, Disney realized they needed to try to go to the guests wherever they were.
Art Levitt, then the president of Disney Regional Entertainment, described the plan thusly: “This is a way to get Disney into your back yard.”
Drawing inspiration from the chain arcades of the mid ’90s, Disney sought to create a more simplistic theme park experience. Rather than featuring full-blown theme park attractions, these regional mini-parks would focus on smaller-scale games and virtual reality experiences. And, instead of asking guests to pay a sizable general admission fee, the regional locations would charge per-ride or per-game.
The goal was to mimic the theme park experience, but to do so using the conventions of an arcade. Guests were expected to stay only a few hours instead of all day. The attractions would rotate in and out far more regularly than at the theme parks, with several being added each quarter. The lines and crowds would be dramatically less than at the parks, because the focus was on smaller, more personal activities. Essentially, Disney wanted to have it both ways: They wanted the exploratory fun of the theme parks combined with the short-term simplicity of an arcade. Eventually, all of these ideas coalesced into something called DisneyQuest.
DisneyQuest is born
Image: Dave Pape, Wikimedia (license)
Looking to give the project every chance of success, Disney Regional Entertainment selected Downtown Disney as the first location, hoping the brand loyalty Disney enjoyed in Central Florida would help prop it up in its early years. That, plus a captive audience of resort guests at Walt Disney World would, presumably, make it a popular destination.
In June of 1998, the Disney Company opened the first DisneyQuest at the newly christened Downtown Disney. This was a very, very big deal – not just for the company, but for Disney fans as well. If DisneyQuest were to succeed, it would mean that every city in America might get its own mini-Disney park. And, if that happened, it would mean that those of us who love the mouse would never be too far from our favorite things.
After being promised a technologically advanced theme park experience, Disney fans were eagerly awaiting the unveiling of Walt Disney Imagineering’s newest work. And so, with great anticipation, DisneyQuest opened and guests finally got to see what exactly was waiting inside.
It’s hard to imagine now, but when DisneyQuest first opened, it felt impossible. The attractions and games available ranged from the simple-but-fun to the amazingly-immersive-and-mind-blowing. Some of the things you could do simply didn’t seem possible – and, considering it was the late-1990s, they had really only recently become possible.
Here’s how Bruce Pecho described his first visit while covering an early press preview for the Chicago Tribune:
“You’ve furiously paddled a four-person raft down raging rapids, dodging ravenous dinosaurs. You’ve navigated the erratic flight of Aladdin’s magic carpet to save the Genie from Jafar. You’ve zapped bloodthirsty aliens in an attempt to rescue stranded U.S. space colonists. And it’s not even lunchtime yet. You’ve found major excitement. You’re on a quest. A DisneyQuest.”
That sense of wonder was what Disney captured with its interactive theme park. We had not yet become jaded about technology – complaining about the slow speeds of our magical internet-connected portable telephones – and instead, were awed by the experiences created for us. Guests didn’t complain about graphics and processing so much as they cooed about immersion and the gentle learning curve. As far as Florida was concerned, DisneyQuest was a rousing success – a perfect way to spend a night during a vacation at Walt Disney World. It was the theme park experience, updated for the 21st century, and formed into an easily digestible chunk.
OK, but what could you actually do there?
Image: Disney
After you purchased your admission, you entered the windowless structure on the ground level and waited for an elevator to arrive. This elevator was no regular elevator, however – it was called a “cybrolator” and featured a short video presentation by the Genie from Aladdin. When you finally reached your destination, the doors opened and revealed the Futureport – a kind of waypoint for you to begin your navigation of DisneyQuest.
It divided up into four zones: Explore, Create, Replay, and Score. Each zone had its own aesthetic and style, but all of them contained a multitude of games and attractions that ranged from the basic to the elaborate. They were spread out among several floors and thousands of square feet of space – and, when you reached this point, you faced your toughest decision: Where to go first.
Explore Zone could be reached either by walking down a flight of stairs, or by taking a large two-story slide down to the Zone’s main area. The area featured a virtual sequel to the Jungle Cruise, where guests travelled to the past and paddled a boat through a river filled with dinosaurs. It also included a virtual reality experience called “Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride,” featuring a fully-immersive VR helmet, as well as a game called “Treasure of the Incas,” where guests piloted small remote control trucks through a maze in search of treasure. The last major Explore Zone attraction, a Hercules-themed attraction that used 3D projections to charge guests with capturing lightning bolts in an attempt to rescue Mt. Olympus from the evil Hades, was ultimately replaced by a Pirates of the Caribbean experience that put guests in command of a pirate ship sailing the south seas. Unfortunately, that was the only headliner attraction installed in DisneyQuest after its opening.
Create Zone was arguably the park’s most innovative land. It included several attractions designed to bring out the inner artist in every guest.“Sid’s Create-a-Toy” had guests meld together discarded pieces of older toys to create new playthings much like the character Sid from Toy Story (You could even buy these toys to take home when you were finished). There were the Living Easels and Magic Mirror, which used cameras, computers, and touchscreens to allow you to manipulate drawings and photos with your hands (similar to an iPhone app). The Animation Academy gave guests the opportunity to learn to draw Disney characters using a computerized desk which helped guide the drawings along the way. And then, of course, there was CyberSpace Mountain – the simulator that let guests design their own roller coaster and ride it.
Replay Zone and Score Zone were basically just arcades, with Replay Zone featuring classic cabinet games and Score Zone featuring more modern ones.
They did have a few unique attractions, however: Replay Zone had Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blaster, a bumper cars-hybrid that had guests drive small pods around an enclosed area while shooting rubber balls at one another.
Score Zone had a few more headliners: Mighty Ducks Pinball Slam was a massive, computerized version of pinball that had guests compete using large joystick-like platforms to control their pinball through the digital pinball machine, which was projected onto a large screen for all to see.
Ride the Comix used virtual reality headsets and a lightsaber-style controller to transport you inside an enormous comic book fight.
And, last, but not least, Invasion! An Extra Terrorestrial Alien Encounter put you and up to three teammates in command of one space ship with the goal of rescuing a pack of your fellow astronauts from an alien invasion.
There were other minor attractions spread through the building, including a restaurant and some smaller-scale games, but on the whole, that lineup of attractions did not change from the day DisneyQuest opened until its closure in 2017.
DisneyQuest opens (and then closes) in Chicago
Image: Disney
With the DisneyQuest in Florida appearing to be a rousing success, Disney Regional Entertainment set its sights on proving that the concept could work outside the Disney bubble. And so, to do this, they went about as far away from that bubble as they could: Chicago.
Located in the midwest, far from the comforts of Orlando and Anaheim, Chicago seemed to be the best place to test this site-specific experience. Presumably, Chicagoans had some connection to Disney and would likely be thrilled to have a park to call their own – one which they could visit without traveling the thousands of miles to either coast.
Disney chose a location right in the middle of Downtown Chicago, just steps off its famed Magnificent Mile. Not only would it draw in the locals with its exotic Disney branding, but it would be the perfect spot for tourists to spend an afternoon while visiting the Windy City.
The Chicago DisneyQuest opened in 1999, and featured a near-identical experience to the Florida version – it, too, had the four zones, as well as the marquee attractions like CyberSpace Mountain. Unlike in Florida, the Chicago location used a single pricing structure, charging guests $34 for entry. But, eventually, they lowered that to $26.
Why? Well, because DisneyQuest was failing.
After just two years of operation, Disney announced that it would shutter the Chicago location. Furthermore, they said the DisneyQuest experiment was, essentially, dead – no more locations would be built anywhere else in the U.S. The Florida outpost would remain, but that would be it for DisneyQuest expansion.
The closure actually caught a lot of people off-guard, particularly when Disney refused to claim they actually took a financial loss on the project. Then-Disney spokeswoman Leslie Ferraro made sure to note that the venture was not losing money in her statement about the Chicago closure, and instead pinned the blame on a strategic shift:
“Disney is always looking for opportunities for growth, and we feel proud that we did a very good job at DisneyQuest, and people loved it, but it was a test.” Essentially, Ferraro said, the project was successful, just not successful enough.
However, if you peel the onion back, the real reasons for the closure start to become clearer.
“At Disney, everything is not just the gold standard, it’s the platinum standard. We’re not willing to do something if it’s not the best,” Ferraro told the Chicago Tribune in 2001. “The technology there was absolutely cutting edge, with a stream of new attractions, and that doesn’t come inexpensively. That’s not to say someone who isn’t Disney couldn’t do it in a different way.”
Reading between the lines, it’s easy to see what the real problem was: Disney wanted to keep rotating in the new attractions, but in order to do that, they had to charge high prices – higher prices than the Chicago locals were willing to pay. When the tourist market never materialized, the cash flow wasn’t enough to justify the installation of new attractions. And, rather than leaving the enterprise to slowly grow stale, Disney opted to shutter the location once and for all.
Yet, despite closing the Chicago location for that seemingly noble reason, Disney opted to leave the Florida DisneyQuest open for another 14 years without adding a notable attraction to it. And, coincidentally, it suffered that fate – slowly growing stale until, eventually, the decision was made to close it too in 2017.
Why DisneyQuest was doomed to fail
But all of this is secondary. Yes, I have a lot of great memories of DisneyQuest, and I’m sure many of you do too. However, the fun was never going to last – DisneyQuest was always going to fail. It was a strategic mistake from the very outset for one very simple reason: It was based on wowing you with technology, and that’s just not a sustainable business plan in the modern age.
The thing you have to understand about the 1990s is that computational technology was still very much in its infancy as a point of public consciousness. Many still lived in a decidedly 20th century mindset – essentially, “this new technology is amazing now, and therefore, it will always be amazing.” Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Technology is constantly superseded by newer, more amazing inventions. And, in fact, the rate at which that happens increases every year.
Think about it like this: Remember when the first iPhone was announced? Remember how cool it was? Remember how it changed pretty much everything we knew about portable electronics? Well, here’s the thing: While it was amazing, nowadays, it’s laughably quaint. It couldn’t download apps. It couldn’t send picture messages. It couldn’t even copy and paste. What seemed amazing and futuristic less than 10 years ago now seems as adorable and anachronistic as a cassette tape. And now, we experience that cycle even quicker: Every time you buy a new iPhone, you’re amazed at all the new things it can do, but when the newer one comes out one and a half years later, it’s hard not to look at the current model and feel a bit disappointed. That trajectory gives experiences which are based solely on technology an incredibly short shelf-life.
Image: Disney
Disney’s plan to launch regional theme park experiences was, at its heart, intelligent. They attempted to piggy-back on the Six Flags model and capture the local audiences, believing they could dominate not only the destination vacation market, but also the growing “staycation” market. That made sense on paper – however, they hitched that plan to a strategy based largely on cutting-edge technology rather than story, and they did so at precisely the moment that technology picked up its developmental pace dramatically.
The games that seemed so futuristic and thrilling when DisneyQuest first opened quickly felt stale and obsolete. Wearing dorky VR helmets seemed like the most amazing thing in 1998, but in a post-Oculus Rift world, it all feels a bit hokey. But rather than refreshing or replacing these attractions on a quarterly basis, as promised, the marginal success of the properties forced Disney to opt to let them stay. This effect compounded over time – Disney didn’t want to invest in a property that didn’t excite guests, while guests weren’t excited by a property that didn’t feel fresh – and DisneyQuest eventually felt like an early ’00s throwback rather than an actual innovative theme park.
Slowly, attendance fell off as fewer and fewer people were amazed by the technology present at DisneyQuest. Those who still visited did so because they enjoyed the basic games, or had fond memories of enjoying the attractions when they were younger. That wasn’t a particularly sustainable audience: DisneyQuest’s operating costs far exceeded those of the regional arcade chains, but their profits didn’t.
On the whole, the electricity and joy that permeated every inch of DisneyQuest at its launch had long since dissipated by the early-2010s. In its place was left stale air, dated aesthetics, and the faint voice of the late Robin Williams guiding you through its darkened halls. And yet, despite the clear failure of DisneyQuest as a business strategy, Disney seems poised to repeat its mistakes again.
How Disney is making the DisneyQuest mistake again
Image: Disney
So, then, what’s the moral of the story? How could Disney learn from its failings in DisneyQuest to build a stronger product with the rest of its parks? What are the lessons worth learning? Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as though the executives in charge of the company ever asked themselves these questions.
By now, Disney executives should realize how fickle technology is. In the time since DisneyQuest opened, the primary home video media has shifted from VHS to DVD to online streaming. Phones have gone from homes, to cars, to pockets. The internet went from being a new way to send mail to an ever-present body of infinite information. That’s a lot of change in not a lot of time.
The lesson of DisneyQuest, then, is that building a theme park experience around technology, rather than story or personal interaction, is setting that theme park up for staleness and, eventually, obsolescence. Technology changes quickly, and if you’re married to older technology while the newer stuff passes you by, that dampens the entire enterprise.
But, for some reason, Disney executives have opted to spend billions of dollars connecting the Walt Disney World resort to a single piece of technology: an RFID sensor system called MyMagic+.
There are a million reasons guests don’t like MyMagic+, and there are just as many reasons it’s helped make Disney vacations easier. However, in hitching itself to this bit of technology, Disney may have made a sizable miscalculation.
For MyMagic+ to work, Disney presupposes two things: The first is that guests will have smartphones with them in order to make their reservations for dining and FastPass+. The second is that those guests would willingly wear a MagicBand for the duration of their trip.
However, as technology continues to grow, we see that those two goals actually are incompatible. As more and more guests bring their smartphones to the parks, the need for MagicBands actually declines – the phone itself has much of the same functionality and can actually be used in place of the bands. This is actually an issue the company ran into in building Shanghai Disneyland, which will not use the MagicBand system precisely because of the large proportion of guests with smartphones. Additionally, the number of guests willing to wear a MagicBand may decline slowly over time. Yes, it seems cool now – “You mean all I have to do is walk around with this thing on my wrist and it does everything for me?” – but with the advent of wearable computers like the Pebble Watch and the Apple Watch, among others, MagicBands may soon feel like something extraneous or even annoying.
Consider this: Guests wearing Apple Watches likely wouldn’t want to take them off when touring the parks. Plus, these watches already let you pay for a great many things out in the real world using Apple Pay, and so not only will the novelty of using a wristband to pay not seem so amazing, but in fact, it would be an annoying extra step that many watch wearers would circumvent, using their watches to pay instead. And, further down the line, if such wearable computers catch on at an even higher rate, the relative simplicity of the MagicBands will frustrate users used to a richer technological experience on their wrist. If the answer to guests is simply to wear both, that’s likely not a very satisfying answer in the Florida humidity.
And so, here we see the towering shadow of DisneyQuest come into sharp relief. What sets Disney apart from its competitors isn’t its use of technology, and it never has been. Yes, Walt was always on the cutting-edge of attraction and industrial design, but it was always used in service of story and efficiency. Now, that’s not the case – there’s an awful lot of technology being used simply for technology’s sake. With DisneyQuest, we saw how that kind of design could disconnect guests from the theme park experience, promising them an innovative experience, but instead disappointing them with dated infrastructure. MyMagic+ makes a similar promise – “We’re going to use technology to make your vacation simpler” – but if it fails to live up to that promise, either by not working or by falling into relative obsolescence, it will also leave guests feeling disappointed.
Disney should know by now: You don’t build something that relies solely on technology to be successful. Instead, you build things that rely on story and on people. The reason guests still love attractions like the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean isn’t because of the mechanisms that operate the ride behind the scenes, but rather, how those mechanisms are used to tell a compelling story. They aren’t returning to Walt Disney World year in and year out because they were amazed by MagicBands or RFID technology. Instead, they come back to relive those memories they shared with loved ones, or because the cast members made them feel so welcome, they knew they had to return. That’s always the danger of technology – it has an alluring coldness to it. Unfortunately, that coldness is the antithesis of what Disney does well.
DisneyQuest’s legacy
Image: Disney
And yet, for all its faults, a great many of us out there will miss the place when it’s gone. While it’s hard to link together technology and nostalgia, it exists in that way for many of young adults who fondly remember the silly arcade-style experiences from when they were kids. Even if they didn’t go every year, or even every two, it was nice to know it was still there – like an old game console you just can’t bring yourself to sell or give away.
So now, DisneyQuest is closing. In 2017, it will shutter its doors for good, and that will officially be the end of the Disney Regional Entertainment experiment. It will be replaced, ironically, by another entity which enjoyed its greatest success in the 1990s: the NBA. Who knows what the new NBA experience will be like, or if it will live up to the fascinating trajectory of the building’s previous tenant. What we do know is this: At long last, after 18 years in operation, DisneyQuest is finally getting its long-hoped for renovation. Unfortunately, that renovation will see it turn into something completely different. But you know what? 18 years was a pretty good run. That’s longer than Michael Jordan spent in the NBA – so I guess DisneyQuest will always have the upper hand there.
