Beyond the Fairground: How Immersive Storytelling is Transforming the Traditional Theme Park Model
Theme parks have existed for hundreds of years. The first known park of it’s kind was Bakken, in Copenhagen Denmark, founded in 1583. From that evolved things more familiar to us, with traveling festivals and spectacles such as fairs and more. This fair ground model of placing attractions around like islands in a sea of crowds, hasn’t changed or evolved, nor has the experiential relationship with guests. Even the most advanced, well funded parks such as Disney and Universal still largely follow this model. Attractions are mostly one-trick ponies, made for mass appeal, reliant on your relationship to an IP or nostalgia to want to go back and experience the same thing again.
However, guests are seeking more. They want agency to forge their own paths, immersion to become part of the story (not just an audience member to it), connection that they can share, repeatability to have a reason to come back, and more so than anything else they want meaning giving them something deeper than thrills. Some modern parks have the ability to grant part of these things in limited spoon-fed ways, but lack the commitment to deliver all of it in a complete package.
This is the dynamic we’re seeking to change at Wildcraft Group. Mixtape Studios isn’t reliant on attractions you have to stand in line for, or an app which makes you employed as your family’s designated vacation coordinator. We're redesigning the park experience from scratch from the perspective of truly immersive storytelling. Our aim is to truly fulfill giving guests agency, immersion, connection, repeatability and meaning in an experience which not only evolves, but is impacted by guests. We’re inspired by likes of Legends of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dungeons & Dragons, Sleep No More, It Takes Two, Myst, and even Animal Crossing—All of which empower participants to explore, shape, and influence their own unique journeys through immersive storytelling, interactivity, and player-driven experiences
So how does this change how we design things? Well for starters, we’re borrowing the best ingredients from themed entertainment, immersive storytelling, video games, film/tv, and a few special ingredients of our own to marry this all together. How you as a guest flow through Mixtape Studios is driven by equal parts wanderlust, questing and storytelling. Our attractions themselves are being designed to be modular, adaptable, multi-use and to deliver variations to help ensure you’ll never do the same thing twice. At every other park, there exist massive swaths of blank space as you transition from attraction to attraction, land to land. We view these transitional spaces as a canvas to introduce interactivity at every corner, meaning there’s no shortage of things to engage with. Furthermore the systems we’re developing work in tandem together as one ecosystem rather than separate attractions, allowing guest actions to have a butterfly effect on not only their own experiences, but even the park as a whole.
These are only some examples of the efforts we’re undergoing to deepen our relationship with our future guests. We look forward to sharing more as we continue to develop this amazing project!
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