As anticipation builds for theme park diehards, Universal Studios Orlando plays its usual game of secrecy. Amidst their cycle of drumming up anticipation for their coming attractions, Universal reveals as little information about Epic Universe as they can without shaking our building curiosity.
Only three clues have been passed onto fans since its announcement four years ago: the park’s logo, an image of birds-eye-view concept art, and a map of the resort showing where Universal’s third gate is under construction.
Fans have concluded from only this handful of concept art images that a Donkey Kong Country expansion is coming to Epic Universe. It serves as an expansion to the success of Super Nintendo World, which opened at Universal Studios Hollywood and Japan. It will feature an E-Ticket mine cart coaster attraction. Guests will enter the jungles of Donkey Kong Country and partake in the sidescrolling hijinks of its namesake gorilla. This is a reverse ”Virtual Jungle Cruise” from Disney Quest, the virtual environment forays into a physical space.
Universal Studios finds video games artistically and financially viable properties to recreate in their theme parks– a step away from their founding ethos of “Ride the Movies.” Universal took a gamble by creating Super Nintendo World in the first place; rather than develop attractions solely based on their original filmography and licensed IPs, Universal expanded its horizons in determining Nintendo’s viability as a theme park brand. So, we take this opportunity to explore why video games themed attractions work as well as those that ‘ride the movies’…
The Cultural Legitimacy of Video Games
Inserting the Super Mario franchise into a theme park setting is a justifiable progression of narrative storytelling. Movies, theme parks, and video games base their contents and symbology on similar guiding principles. Guests, audience members, and players wish to immerse themselves in a crafted environment where an entertaining (but predetermined) narrative unfolds. How users participate in these mediums varies, but their narratives, meanings, and tactics tend to reflect or mimic each other.
Academic sources have noted the similarities between various forms of narrative entertainment progress, and theme parks and video games are no exception to their theories. According to author Margaret J. King’s THE THEME PARK: Aspects of Experience in a Four-Dimensional Landscape, theme “… are the multi-dimensional descendant of the epic, book, play, and film; four-dimensional stories in which the ‘guests’ – in theme park parlance – can immerse themselves… Like the camera lens, they position the visitor to follow a series of vignettes advancing the narrative.” King may as well describe video games with these exact descriptions– here, too, is a descendant of these forms of storytelling where the user enters circumstances that advance a given narrative.
Making the Virtual a Reality
Each of these mediums carries its own set of freedoms and limitations, and they must adjust its scope to be entertaining; movies sacrifice immersion for improved narrative control, and theme parks sacrifice detailed narratives for improved immersion. Video games exist between these notions, allowing both circumstances to a limited degree.
In The Interactive Theater of Video Games, Authors Daniel and Sidney Homan explain the limits of a medium’s powers when reimagined as a vessel that changes how its interacts with its audience. They write, “Nothing in the theater can replace a good production of Hamlet or Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Experiments with more interactive theater that offer an emotional or intellectual involvement beyond that of the spectator who remains in the house reaction is limited to applause, may remain just that— experiments.”
As such, translating a virtual environment designed for a game into a physical environment confined by building codes presents a challenge for park builders. King notes Disneyland’s representations of imagination and how they juxtapose the realities of how they can exist; “The walk-through castles, frontier forts, and other exotic but familiar environments, populated by cartoon characters the size of forklifts, are simulations and symbols, not historic or scientific models.”
To convert the space, scale, and characters of a game that wasn’t imagined to reflect limited budgets, architectural challenges, and a world without talking animals is a daring task that only Universal Studios has executed successfully thus far.
So, let’s take a look at the history of video game attractions and Video Games as a progression of narrative technology…
The History of Video Game Attractions
Epic Universe’s Donkey Kong Country expansion is not the first video game entry into the world of theme parks but perhaps is an indicator of the medium’s maturity. Some attempts were made in the past, most of which appealed to children alone; 1983 saw the opening of Pac-Man Land at Six Flags Over Texas, a kiddie zone with a puppet show that lasted a mere two years before a Looney Tunes overlay.
Thorpe Park opened their Angry Birds Land in 2014 with two overlaid carnival attractions, a 4-D theatre, and nowhere near the level of detail and budget seen in Universal’s Super Nintendo World locations. As such, Super Nintendo World was the first all-in effort to turn a gaming environment into a physical one. These games no longer confine players confined to bits and blips, but immensely detailed, fully-realized environments that force many to reconsider the medium as a source of brain rot.
Video Games as a Progression of Narrative Technology
Noting how film overtook theater in comparing video games to overtaking film, Daniel and Sidney Homan note, “Everything changes, or– to be more charitable– evolves. Silent movies, then “Talkies,” then color films challenged the primacy of the theater… And it may be that the video games, as it makes that long trajectory from shooter games to an art form, will, we think, become… the most popular expression of the theater’s evolution.” As the COVID-19 pandemic decimated theater and theme park attendance, the video game industry became a larger industry than both films and themed attractions.
While movie and park attendance has regained traction, the gaming industry remains as formidable as ever. Universal Studios’ partnership with Nintendo in developing and expanding their lineup of Super Nintendo World locations implies the synergistic power of their combination.
The continuance of the Super Nintendo World canon with Donkey Kong Country confirms the medium’s maturity as artistically substantial for parkgoers and not just as a kiddie zone or sideshow roundabout. In short, Donkey Kong Country may as well stand as the second entry in a continuing slew of video game-themed attractions.
Do you think video games attractions work as well as ‘riding the movies’? Let us know your thoughts by leaving us a comment below or on our Facebook page.
