Storytelling Siblings: The Kindred Connection between Games and Theme Parks

[Music] thank you well hi everybody we are the bezark company we're located in Los Angeles and I'm Adam bizarch the company founder I'm Lex Rhodes I'm a creative coordinator and I'm Vaughn Hannon the creative technologist and uh what we are not is we are not a game developer we're actually uh designers and producers of Real World attractions spectacular rides shows and attractions for theme parks museums world's fairs and big immersive experiences and we've done a number of these been involved in a lot of high-end projects around the world for folks like Disney and Universal and for a big Museum experiences or visitor centers like Kennedy Space Center and

Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the reason we're here today is because even though we're in industries that are really very different we keep finding that our world of physical experiences and your world of game design are much more closely related than we might have thought or that you may have realized and that's what we'd like to talk about today the the relationship between gaming design and theme entertainment design because really when it comes right down to it we are all storytelling siblings we're we're related closely we are not identical twins we're fraternal twins there are similarities and differences but that's kind of what we think is interesting to look into today because we think it will be of interest to you guys so let's start off just by talking about what is it what do we say when we meet talk about themed entertainment what is it yeah and theme entertainment is a it's a big category it's not just theme parks it's not just the two big

names that we hear a lot it includes a whole range of immersive destination-based experiences uh it's about Place making it's about transporting the guest it's about Escape uh and those things probably sound a little familiar and uh and as we'll discuss in a little bit there are things that are very themed entertainment and there are things that are very video game and there's this weird land where where things overlap and you end up with things like Escape rooms and arcades with singing mice and pizza um there's uh that said let's talk about where uh video games entertainment have traditionally lived yeah the uh many years ago uh Michael Eisner who was then the head of Disney Drew this famous chart that has been used by entertainment designers for decades ever since he sort of divided the world up into four kinds of entertainment there is entertainment that people uh consume at home by themselves there is an entertainment you consume at home socially in a group and

then out in the real world and in the phys outside your home there are there's entertainment you consume alone at a destination such as taking a walk in the forest and there's uh entertainment that you consume in a group at a destination and video games have always tended to occupy those first two squares because they tend to be based out of the home unless you're at an arcade and more and traditionally theme parks have tended to occupy this sort of bottom right quadrant the experiences that you have to leave your home for but that you typically do with friends and family so we tend to be about making memories with friends and family together today obviously those lines are blurring and that's one of the things we find interesting yeah uh home alone or otherwise uh Our Two Worlds have different strengths and weaknesses and uh of course we all played our strengths as often as we can and we also embrace our limitations uh often we need to get a user from here

to there we know it they know it we put them on a track and wish them luck uh our job then is to surprise them and uh to hit them with all the tricks that we have to to challenge and Delight them and and that's why we uh things are we we want them to be surprising but they are they are inevitable uh and along the inevitable paths among some of the surprises we're going to make promises to the guests and uh storing storytelling and World building is full of surprises and full of promises and uh many of them are small and incidental but some of them are are big and wet and the players have expectations uh as our stories unfold we are obligated to keep our promises if we build a waterfall there best be something behind it by the way that looks like a video game but that's a real world destination that is uh volcano Bay at Universal Studios right and it's really interesting to look at

the histories of both of these different Industries uh a lot of the First theme park designers came from the world of Animation that were very much story first designing media purely in service of story and then you look at video games and you see an industry that arose very largely out of technology and so you guess that theme parks would be designed stories first games would be design Mechanics for systems first but everyone in this room knows that it's not quite so simple you can even just take for example the case of two rides Indiana Jones adventure and Countdown to Extinction for Indy the imaginators got to start with this story this action archeology adventure and r d goes and develops the perfect ride system to tell that story and to hit those emotional goals of you know what is Indiana Jones and so they come up with the enhanced motion Vehicles the emvs and you know put those two together it results in the ride that you know today but for Countdown to Extinction it was the other way around they already had the emvs and were tasked with skinning that ride system with this new dinosaur story and

it results in a much a much different ride these are two industries that have a unique understanding of that interrelation between story and systems and trying to make them play nice together it's a complicated and squiggly thing where every process is going to have different or every project is going to have different priorities and demand a slightly different process so these worlds are pretty similar and we have over the years learned a lot from each other and we've borrowed from each other and we figure it's not stealing if you're related it's it's uh it's learning and so we we're pretty interested in the things we can learn from the world of game design and in some cases already have done to adapt ourselves into game design uh we we kind of use this word immersive differently in our world than in game design uh the game World talks about immersive in terms of getting in that flow state where you're so into the game

that the rest of the world disappears and you sort of lose yourself in the rhythm of the gameplay we literally mean immersion in a physical world right we mean designing spaces and scenery that creates a new space that is all around you and immersing you in it and we talk about good show in terms like good show and bad show as being the things that keep you in that story or break the story for you uh if it's if it's bad show if the if a a trash can looks too modern if you're in a period location those are things you guys deal with as well but we have to deal with it in a physical world and move stuff around until it works um and in our world immersion goes a long ways back you know Disney has been building immersion for decades The Haunted Mansion ride one of our favorite rides was built over 50 years ago and it created it used a vehicle system that very carefully Points each viewer at exactly what the the designers want you to see it functions as a movie camera in

their eyes but you could argue that it was arguably the the very first ever first person first person camera controller as if it was a game uh and in you know in modern gameplay we use sticks to control our body and head motion Disney was doing it with egg-shaped Vehicles 50 years ago and Land Design and level design are very similar in many ways they're all about providing environmental cues that support the story and provide tools for implicit navigation throughout here I pulled up maps of New Orleans square at Disneyland and the Isle of armor from Pokemon sword and shield these make a nice comparison because they're both like relatively self-contained spaces but freely explorable in 3D space so when you make a land or a level for that matter you always start with your main path the purpose of this is to connect the major set pieces of the area it's a relatively quick and expedient

way of getting through the space but it's also highly Scenic since you have a lot of control uh really tight control over the sight lines in this path then of course you have these ancillary detour paths that reward curiosity allow you to investigate fun little nooks and Cubbies just off of the main path these paths let you stray a little bit get a little bit lost but they almost always you can see here they almost always loop back to the familiar to the main path rather than uh you know get you too uncomfortable it's all about striking that perfect amount just the right amount of discomfort so that it feels exciting and adventurous we sometimes talk about the idea of getting safely lost right you want to get just lost enough to get excited but no you can always find your way back and then even in these examples you can see they both have uh fast travel options you've got the Disneyland railroad you've got the train you've got flying options and you have a completely alternative Locomotion options where you can actually take to the Seas across the water and pursue those far off landmarks

there's another intuitive navigation tool that theme park designers specifically have a goofy word for and that's that's weenies a weenie is a large eye-catching set piece something like Sleeping Beauty castle that's visible from a great distance away and it draws people through a space Walt Disney coined the term uh describing how you know you can guide guests through space in the same way that he would lure his pet Poodle from one room to the other with a hot dog so if you've ever thought to yourself wow theme parks seem to have a lot of giant fake mountains in them it's because they're excellent weenies uh they're also really popular in games partially for their use as a navigational tool right but also because that triangular shape is really excellent at concealing far off landmarks and then slowly revealing them as you move around the base of the mountain which is really fun so this kind of connection between Place making and game play goes way way back if you go back as far as the 1893

Chicago World's Fair the world's Colombian Exposition one of the great uh sort of creative events in in American history it was a a world of different places from the from the very elegant to the very sort of folksy but it also included some of the very first carnival games where you could actually step right up and and take your chances and try and win a win a Kewpie doll and over the years theme parks have picked that up more and more our the very first bits of gameplay in theme park design started in then uh arguably in the 90s I guess you could say Disney did a terrific experiment in the 90s of a freestanding game uh location called Disney Quest that was Phil filled with both off the shelf games but also original games that they spent Millions designing and then after building two of them never built

another one but it led to a lot of other development in in the sort of crossing over between game and theme parks so in the theme park world uh Disney installed a a a track of a drive-through Shooting Gallery Disney installed created a an attraction Shooting Gallery Buzz Lightyear's Astro blasters where you fired at little little green men and uh since then others have followed suit the Six Flags parks have their Justice League battle for Metropolis which are very elaborate where there's a combination of live media around you and shooting gallery and just this month at Disney's California Adventure the new Avengers campus has an attraction called web slingers where you can fly with Spider-Man and uh without even any weapon in your hand you can just use your hands to shoot shoot webs at little robots that you're trying to catch this kind of Storytelling has broadened out and gameplay has taken on many

different forms down in theme parks uh what and these are using storytelling techniques from the world of RPGs and tabletop games we're starting to see character based story lines and quests that you can actually play as a guest in the park by interacting either they're with your environment or with live actors who are in character who are there for you to to play with and talk to Evermore Park in Utah is amazing it's essentially an entire theme park that is a big D LARP game where you can take on a character go on quests meet Wizards and have experiences and challenges all day long and come back and they'll remember who you are and you can continue the quest you started the last time these things aren't rides these are real living worlds with and story worlds where guests can have real agency and real input in the world really changed and and really haven't make a difference and some of the very biggest theme parks Disney and Universal are now starting to

include gaming layers that are deeply woven into the the design of the entire land where that actually affects the architecture and the rides and the pieces of the land where you have special apps that you control or a wristband that you can you let you play and interact with the land and and when we're doing that in big theme parks it's hap it has to happen at very high scale because you're handling tens of thousands of people a day through these things so one of the big challenges is trying to figure out how to weave these into rides and live performance and these app layers and these little mini games that we go through and it's not easy so one of the things that we keep asking is how can we make it even better how can we steal more from each other and learn how to improve what we do by studying what you do and vice versa yeah and earlier we alluded to the strengths and weaknesses in uh in both of our Industries themed entertainment and video game design uh you know the big weaknesses for uh in our world happen to

be some of the best strengths in the Video Game World uh we you know we have a bunch of people together so we can do big spectacles and uh multi-sensory uh experiences and they're highly social because everybody's in the same space um but it's really hard to do those individualized experiences uh maintain persistence and progression and guest agency when you have to worry about things like Adam was saying throughput and getting you know a million people through through a space in an hour um and because that's what that's what it boils down to in these these physical spaces is throughput throughput throughput like how how do we get all these people through and how do we get as many people into the experience as possible um so how do you uh you know is it possible to to individualize those experiences uh there's there's been attempts with VR and those those offer very real headaches and also very operational headaches and they they actually don't individualize that experience they

experience all that much everybody's kind of doing the same thing uh in a VR coaster for example for example you're all having the same experience it might feel like it's individual to you but everybody's experiencing the exact same thing uh the uh one of the best examples that uh that I think provided individualization was uh Alien Encounter in Disney World uh in the Magic Kingdom where you were in a theater uh around theater and if you haven't been on it and alien shows up gets loose and then everybody has the experience of the salience running around and it feels like it's right behind you it's of course right behind everybody you're all having that same experience again but it feels very individual and and extra terrifying uh so you know in that case it was put everybody in the dark and Joshi's audio and then and shake their seats a little bit and then you can uh you can have that experience but it's a it's a big challenge to uh to

individualize an experience in a place like a theme park or other destination and I don't think we have a perfectly solved yet uh you know I think there's room for doing some more uh exploring guest versus guest type of experiences where you know things can be truly random even in video game things aren't true you know you have a very similar experience oh I did this I did this I won this Quest I already know this person and I fought this boss um oversimplified but this is kind of the same thing right we've like oh yeah I did that and this is how it went for me um so things get truly random when you get into MMOs and you get other humans involved and now you're like oh this last night this crazy thing happened because so and so did this to me and uh or challenged me to something and uh now you have all these new experiences that pop up that not everybody can have and then it's truly individual and uh I think we can get there [Laughter] and then you've got other challenges like uh like persistence like in a video

game you literally have a save file your progress is saved your individual impact on the world whether you're building things or destroying things that data gets stored and it carries over to the next time you visit that world but in a park it's really hard to feel like you have an impact or a mark on that world whether it's just in terms of story or literal environment because it has to be scrubbed clean for the next guest everyone is expecting the same experience and so uh it's really hard to figure out where opportunities to to give guests that feeling of persistence Knott's Berry Farm has a seasonal immersive experience called Ghost Town alive where one of the really cool things that they do is they print an hourly newspaper oh yeah so as guests you know they go on adventures they have escapades throughout the area those are recorded um you know whether good or bad whether you're a hero or a bandit those are going to get recorded in the newspaper and that's kind of at least over the course of a day maybe we could go for a longer time period in future experiences but over the course of that day you do see your impact on the world and it's

it's physically recorded in that space which is good to see your name in the paper and take that home with you yeah and it's a great souvenir too yeah and along those lines with persistence uh it's kind of the same thing as how do you track progression for for individuals in in a park experience or in a location-based experience um it's a lot of times you know folks who want to say that they want a gamifying experience and I think a lot of us are like oh you know another Shooting Gallery right another Shooting Gallery uh and you know they they uh they want all of the things from the the video game world but they uh then they realize how tricky that is and all those challenges that we that we're talking about and then like oh never mind let's just make a shooting like um so uh progression is is also part of individualization where you you want to be able to track your your score you want to be able to track your your progress through whatever experiences you're having in the park and

um it's uh it's starting to happen uh you know it happened a little bit when Disney did virtual Magic Kingdom uh that opened in 2005 uh it was an online online thing feels like a million years ago but you could go to the parks and and actually uh fulfill quests that you would then give you digital Goods in the virtual Magic Kingdom so uh you had a little bit of of it was a little bit of individual individualization a little bit of progression uh and you you could go back and do another Quest and get more stuff and then those things were those digital goods were only available to people who had done the things in the park so you couldn't get them any other way which is great uh Super Nintendo World just opened in uh Universal in Osaka and they built a a secret game that you can only get to if you complete if you find five Keys throughout the rest of the world and they have it's a watch based or watch like wristband wristband thing uh that keeps track of your progression so you know who got the five keys and you have you have to unlock the cue to this

attraction by tapping your wrist and then you can play the game that nobody else can play unless they've completed things so there's a little bit a little bit happening there uh being able to track your progress and do things and and then uh Disney again also did uh of course with Galaxy's Edge uh you can use the app to sort of uh start creating a little bit of a character for yourself and tracking your progress as a character and choose choose a side uh or be a scoundrel which is the most fun and uh and you know they've integrated that into the land really nicely so that there's multiple things to do uh the attractions also tie into the into the game into the app so this stuff is starting to happen it just it's but it's still a challenge it's still tricky to uh provide this on the scale necessary for a park yeah so I think one of the questions that we struggle with in the theme park world is we always want everybody to have a great time games are all about failing your

way to success so just like real life right so is it do you think it's possible for us to get to a place where there can be failure in a theme park or is that going to make little kids cry and parents unhappy yeah it's a really interesting question because failure can play so many different roles in games um there's you know using failure as uh Stakes when you play a game when you're engaging with a game you're kind of investing time and energy in the name advancement and progress and failure kind of reclaims some of that progress and resets you a little bit the if you want to call it the threat of failure kind of adds a lot of tension and suspense to a gameplay experience there's also failure as approving grounds the idea that the harder something is to achieve the better it's going to feel when you ultimately do win after all those different attempts there's a failure is comedy failure can actually be really funny especially if you can create an environment where guests are players they aren't shamed

for messing up but they're actually applauded if you can reinforce that failure can be really funny and on top of all that failure can just be narratively interesting if you make sure that you provide interesting narrative content whether someone succeeds or fails you know there's just as much uh story to find at either end and that's just a that's just branching narrative and those are just two different interesting options that people can pursue and obviously some of these different uses of failure are more applicable to a Parks environment than others really it comes down to a problem of crowds and a problem of lines because when you don't have that instant reset uh it makes it harder for it to be fun to kind of re-tackle that challenge after after suffering a failure yeah and failure is part of one of the other big challenges that we have which is guest agency giving giving guests true choices and true freedoms to do things that and that affect their experiences and and also affect the other things we've been talking about uh

persistence and progression um so you know giving users a choice makes a great experience but we're limited by annoying things like physics and how much we can do curse utilize it right right uh so we haven't found our way around that yet uh we're working on it um you know our best efforts so far kind of the illusion of agency not not real guest agency or not real player agency like you would have in a game um uh the like the ones in Diagon Alley uh you you feel like you the individual are having this experience and you're you I'm sorry the wizard you the wizard are having this experience and causing uh something to happen but uh it's you and the 20 Wizards waiting in line behind you watching the other wizard do work magic and then you wait for your turn to do the exact same thing exactly right yes and then so that kind of takes the a little bit of the magic out of it and uh you know they it's it it's you choosing to affect the environment but it's a very prefab uh version of guest agency right and what

in a single player game environment would be like a delightful little surprise that you stumble upon is now it's not much different than a carnival game that you wait in line for right exactly so we can go on about this stuff all day but the other thing that we really wanted to cover with you guys is the is the connections the professional connections between our world that there's an awful lot of crossover between our business and the game design business we hired game designers all the time to be part of our design teams because we feel as Lex said that if you know how to design a game level you pretty much know how to design a land in a theme park with a few adjustments so it's really worth knowing about it so let's talk a little bit about professional opportunities the game designers can find in our world of physical experiences yeah my my first job before working at the bizarre company was actually in the games industry and the day-to-day skills that you find yourself using in either industry in either job are remarkably similar uh

things from working with custom story technology creating responsive and interactive worlds communicating with sometimes huge multi-disciplinary teams understand and in guest flow as it pertains to emergent and environmental storytelling just creating a backdrop for people to make their own characters and make their own stories and obviously it varies depending on your discipline but yet your skills are more transferable than you might think as a game designer who might be interested in the world of themed entertainment and to be honest a lot of modern media based theme park rides are they're they're using the game engines that you're familiar with they're using Unity they're using it unreal and in addition a lot now have app layers companion apps that we're talking about where um yeah they just they need game developers it's it's the craft you already know just in a theme park environment and one of the things that you may not know if you haven't really looked into this industry is it's more than just the

mouse right it's more than just Disney Disney was certainly created the themed entertainment industry as we know it then Along Came Universal over the years and other large companies have done it but what people don't necessarily realize is that that has led to a broad expansion of sort of immersive theme park like experiences in other places around the world so we've worked on things for Epcot Big Fireworks shows for Epcot but we've also worked on uh space shuttle Atlantis at Kennedy Space Center we've been able to create immersive Halloween parties for the White House we've worked with helping theme parks in Asia and the Middle East expanding their ideas we've worked with the Lego theme parks who are learning to tell the story of how to make a plastic brick into something fun that you want to hang out with and play all day and experience so there are a lot of these different opportunities growing

and not just opportunities but companies right yeah there's there's a lot of folks involved uh it's you know as we said it it's it's more than theme parks uh and it's more than the the two big names that everything said when you think of theme parks and as with any creative Endeavor uh there are multiple parties who are all working together to make everything happen designers technicians programmers artists writers and uh yes even managers are needed for to make these things happen somebody has to organize the whole thing uh there's there's so many different little uh little and big companies uh involved in the many of the attractions that you've been on uh and or shows that you've seen or museums that you visited that you don't you know you may not necessarily think about who who did all the things and who thought about how it all came together and there are also a couple of uh large uh professional trade organizations for our industry there's the I double APA which holds a huge

conference every year in Orlando of course we're worth 30 to 50 000 professionals come together you can learn a lot about our industry and that that big conference and they have other ones around the world and the themed entertainment Association the tea is designed literally for companies like us who are the creators and designers of theme parks and it involves career advice and workshops and behind the scenes tours and a lot of professional networking so it's a great way if you're interested in learning about this business you can and and I think our takeaway here is that this business this world of immersive experiences is something that game designers are would be well advised pay attention to for a couple of reasons one is uh you may find that this is a nice little side hustle for you that if you're a professional game designer you may find yourself tagged as we sometimes do being brought in to help design a level or or add to the gameplay in an attraction or otherwise advise or help out with an

attraction you also may find it's a it's an industry that you really want to stay in because it's a really fun interesting industry full of curious Renaissance people who know about everything from animatronics to Magic to architecture to graphics and people who come into this world often find they don't want to leave but another reason you you would be well advised to start learning about our world is because you as a game designer may find someday that your game is being adapted into a theme park attraction or experience and when that happens you'll want to know some of the rules of the road so that you can help the people adapting your attraction make it the best it can be so this is what we wanted to you to understand and that as storytelling siblings you should know about us this could be a fun little side hustle for you you might end up with a whole career in a a in theme parks or you might end up licensing your game to an attraction

and we think it's well worth looking into but that's not the end of our of our presentation today uh this is our false ending like any good ride or any good game we have a surprise ending the boss level and let's take you there right now and here we are our surprise is we are going to undertake a little demonstration of how we work on these sort of things by by uh putting together a sort of a sample brainstorming session or a charrette as we love to call it in the theme park business uh where we will demonstrate how we sort of work with a game developer to sort of tease out the very first ideas about how to create an attraction based on the great gaming IP and we're also being joined by our senior creative director baz hey who is the only person who's actually at our office today and uh and we have brought with us we're very

excited to welcome a special guest from one of our very favorite game companies who we've worked with in the past from Ubisoft please welcome our pal matild Preston hi everyone thanks for having me excited so do you want to say a little bit High about what your role is at Ubisoft sure my pleasure um so I have been with Ubisoft for the last six years I different roles and right now my responsibility is to help you self-grow and the world of location-based entertainment or themed entertainment so essentially theme parks family entertainment centers other types of attractions and experiences so it's about finding the right partners for Ubisoft to lean on in the physical world so feedback operators developers owners and the right creative Partners as well which these are Adam and the team you know we've worked we've done some work together in the past in our um you know good friends and and I think

uh you know good creative uh collaboration and and so that's um that's kind of how we bring our Brands to the world of theme parks and you know entertainment uh before we start this is a disclaimer for all game designers and fans out there we are not designing a real Ubisoft ride we're going to design a pretend one today so today we're going to do a a zoom charette brainstorm and we've brought our handy dandy white board we will talk about a couple of different things today we will talk about you know sort of the the type of Attraction we want to create we'll work with Matilda and picking what uh IP game we want to go with and then try to figure out some ideas about how to get it there our hypothetical theme park developer will say has told us that they're developing a big major new theme park on the scale let's say it's on the really big scale like a Disney or a universal type Park very big high budget

big spectacular thing so anything goes they're open to any idea since you are the uh the IP holder today we're going to let you pick which one do you think we should make our game or make our ride around today we're talking you know big ambitious uh project Universal or Disney scale um I would love to go with Assassin's Creed um we love it plus I think I had Assassin's Creed in the in the betting pool so that I win what is the heart and soul of Assassin's Creed so tell us what you know about the property that you think is just important for us to understand about the game and then we'll talk about how it can be physicalized sure I think if you don't mind I'd love to share you know a few visuals a few slides yeah so you know as I was saying it's it's not only in one of UB self's most popular IPS so it's very commercially it has a lot of success but it's also an incredibly Rich uh creative universe and

one that for me is is perfectly fit for the themed entertainment industry um you know at its core Assassin's Creed is about um immersing people in history and giving them the tools to create their own Epic Adventures within it so it's has a very strong sense of place you're experiencing all those um you know incredibly historically accurate past environments to explore the city to create your own story in an epic adventure and I think that is a very something that translates very nicely um so very quickly going back to some of the key story pillars Assassin's Creed is about an ancient war that two factions have been fighting over centuries and centuries and on the one hand you've got the tempers that are a monastic turned military order return and corporate giant that are essentially convinced that order and control is to be valued over freedom of you know the

individuals and on the other hand you've got the Assassins that are a rebel faction A brotherhood to think that progress is brought about by a free will so those two factions have been fighting over centuries and the Templars in present day so the corporate giant uh that now the Templars have taken the form of which is a company called Sturgill Industries created a machine called the Animus and the Animus is has the power to read people's genetic memory by reading a block sample and displaying moments of Life of their ancestors in present day in real life um and so they created that technology because they were looking for an ancient artifact called the apple of Eden that had the power of imposing their vision of control in order on the world and so they're looking in present day um for the descendant of the person who hid that Apple of Eden uh centuries and centuries ago so it is thanks to that machine the Animus that we are traveling

from present to past um which also I think is something interesting for us to keep in mind could the Animus be some sort of portal you know what does it look like in real life how do we transition from present day theme park wherever we are to you know the past Assassin's Creed world it is thanks to the Animus again that we have been exploring all those key moments in history you know going from Italy during the Renaissance to um 18th century Caribbean and the Golden Age of piracy to the French Revolution in Paris to ancient Egypt and now more recently Britain during the Vikings Invasion so really what is key to the brand is being able to explore all those key moments in human history and you know we could build around a new one that hasn't been explored yet and the game set something that that we can do for our attraction you mean exactly yeah and that could be also something very interesting than Gamers who have been immersed in this or

that world at home are going to get to experience something new in the themed entertainment World um now there are a few things a few key words that I think reflect very well with the essence of the Brenda is that I think I'd like us to use as guidelines today or guiding principles [Music] um uh and the number one thing is that it's a brand that's cunning meaning it's physically but also very um intellectually stimulating becoming a master assassin is about you know mastering the art of uh concealing your intentions of deciphering clues of uh you know being fast and precise in movement in action it's just Majestic so there's there's something very elegant and very uh and very cunning within the brand that you know we should keep in mind that's beautiful it's a brand that's epic um Assassin's Creed is about you know allowing people to live Adventures that are larger than life meaning iconic characters and and being a part of you

know those big events and turning points in history and it's you know whatever experience we're going to design it has to have that epicness to it uh it's a brand that's very much about exploration you know we're giving you those open World Past environments for you to explore horizontally and vertically uh whether it's buildings or here it's a it's a cliff or you know a boat mat Assassin's Creed is about exploring what's around you um looking at what's around you and and then just getting the chance to go through a window or jump from balcony to another parkouring across cities have different points of views on the world that we're giving you um to experience so that's escapism and exploration are very also very key to the brand and in the environments that we're creating with this brand are incredibly historically accurate and authentic it's an entertainment experience but it's also an educational experience in the end um we've had teachers telling their you know kids in high school to play

Assassin's Creed just to get immersed in Paris during the French Revolution it's we really spend a lot a lot of time and effort trying to recreate the most accurate and historically accurate um uh cities in the world and whatever we design if we use a character for mystery or refer to an event that really happened we have to make sure that we you know we do that in a very authentic way with this brand we're essentially filling the blanks of human history you know taking what is known and creating around building around it building a story sorry around it and then um and then finally one of the last attributes you know last but not least it's some brand that's about belonging to a fraternal Clan and fighting for the greater good so it's a brand that's very idealist that's very optimistic so it has a very positive impact on whoever is is playing the game and I also think that that's something we should um aim for as a takeaway for anyone who's

going through the Assassin's Creed experience in a theme park in an introduction one of the things we've been doing while you were talking we've started capturing some of these the key words as you're going just to get the stuff that gets us excited oh who wrote that verticality equals Freedom that's right you really do get to Fly Like an Eagle right let's push over here a little bit and we can talk some more about what are some of the things that that make the game fun what are the what are the pieces of gameplay that like you would really feel like you have to experience for it to in the real world for it to feel like it's a like it's a really an Assassin's Creed experience you know to me what makes it really really perfect for seeing entertainment and for Designing what we want to design today is is really the exploration aspect you know when we do um studies of what people like to do within the game explore the open world is you know

always com comes back as you know first or second um motivator then they're of course the leap of faith uh the leap of faith is really a really one of them um that's sort of the emotional high point of the game that that's that's the payoff and that's something we can't really really do in real life so how you know is there a way that we could translate this in the physical world in the theme park experience well why not that you know here are the main things that you do in the game that you love right you run roof you run across rooftops you're leaping our core style you're getting through that incredible leap where you fall 500 feet into it exactly placed Hayes deck right the uh and um the I mean you could do it as a coaster you know as a as a coaster ride coasters are interesting uh because they're super thrilling they have real genuine physical Thrills you're actually being curled around at high speed the the sort

of downside to a a coaster is it's got a big vehicle and a big track and you see where you're going there's no surprises in a coaster because the track is showing you exactly where you're about to go so you can have amazing drops but it's sort of hard to bury the track in the in historic revolutionary France so we could you certainly could do it but I wonder if there's other ways we can get there one of our rules in these brainstorms is there's no bad ideas so if you guys like a coaster let's just throw out different possibilities but I but it seems like there may be other interesting sort of more theatrical ways to give you that real sense of stopping com of dropping and climbing and leaping and traveling and it's also not physically engaged in the same way so is there you know is there something in between also coasters tend to be big group experiences because you've got 20 or 30 people on a coaster I wonder if we

can make this feel like a smaller experience where it's just one person at a time or just a couple of people at it at a time we are running into our uh two of our big challenges right which is guest agency and individualization so uh yeah this is going to get interesting to see how we can make this work uh especially adapting a game IP that's already interactive and already satisfies that promise you know you just don't want to in adapting it to a real world experience the last thing you want to do is have it fall short of something that you can already have at home the leap of faith and parkouring both are iconic if we don't incorporate those in some way we're not delivering on guest expectations you can look at say what Shanghai did Shanghai Disney did with their challenge Trail oh that is cool does anybody have some

pictures of that Lex can you find that yeah I actually have one over on the other side of the Whiteboard I'll grab all right hang on bring it over let's talk about that for a second because that is one of the one of the most engaging experiences we've seen in a while basically like a a rock climbing course but done in a Disney way so it's it's safe it it ensures success but it gives people it doesn't really fake the uh the process of like scaling a mountain it just does it in a nice protected and you know borderline organized way there's still there's still Choice involved that you can like switch from a an easy track to a difficult track at certain checkpoints um there it is that's a nice picture of it so you certainly could start with something like that you could start with a city and let people climb over it in this harnessed way but sort of find ways maybe even to go inside and outside of buildings or climb over stuff

um yeah that would be that would be really fun and what I like about it too is it's it can become sort of systemic it's not a linear experience you can depending on the challenges you can choose the heart path the meeting path the easy path and then this way the experience that you're going to live through it is never going to be the same uh you know there's a replayability um repeatability with that idea that I like very much that's very uh you know it's it's pretty interesting uh so that's certainly one way we could come at it it's it's uh it's weird it's elaborate but it's low-tech it's not super high tech there's no that particular version is outdoors there's no film or Media or special effects involved what you see is what you get right you're actually climbing real rocks and things we might be able to take that to another level we might be able to go into indoor spaces where there's lighting and special effects so you could have uh more

you you could add uh people coming at you Warriors coming at you in projection around you and so on to make it more theatrical and dynamic we could we could try some of that but maybe uh it could be so fun to have um to have live performers in full costume as these characters like trained stunt performers that you can do little time trials and challenges against where either they're teaching you how to do it or yeah you're challenging them to you know see who can get to the end faster and by the way we're breaking about 50 theme park rules right now but I really like it so like you almost never see live performers in an attraction because they're considered too expensive honestly but I don't think that's necessarily true I think we could find ways to work within that that you can if you can make an experience that really is powerful that really has some great live performance we can we can do some pretty great stuff with media where you know you've got a doorway and there's a

you know a a Templar on the other side of the doorway and they can be pretty believable looking this one is wearing a very attractive dress I see but they can be you know you're you can be on one side of it on your challenge Trail and these Templars and and threats can be appearing in I'm trying this really well can be appearing you know in in Portals or windows that let us see people just outside who are coming after us we can do a lot of stuff with um with dimensional uh uh projection on on trans screen or Pepper's ghost that makes it look like they're really in the space with you so that when we do need a real live person it's almost indistinguishable from the ones who are part of the media and you can really mix it up and really interesting there's the thing we're always saying uh is you know you want to design things that are fun to play but also fun to watch and so if you have if you're able to incorporate them in a way that kind of creates a show not only for the people you know

going through the attraction but also for people down below on the path who are watching this unfold so this actually gives me an idea that I think our creative technologist is going to hate me for um but I think it's worth mentioning so you know Assassin's Creed is about being slow when you have to but being like magically Swift and agile when you need to and then I think about some of the stuff I've seen at iapa the past couple years where uh some people are incorporating electric motors into these Sleds on zip lines and trails where you can actually power people along a path that's super interesting so you're thinking if if if we motorize this or put or power up or power this could you power a portion of it have part of it be open to your under your own Steam and other parts of it where the the ride kind of or the the

motor kind of takes over this is the point where Vaughn usually tells me I'm nuts so no I think I think it's good it's not me you have to worry about it's the lawyers uh what is it it becomes uh kind of like an e-bike right where you have more of a powered assist than something that's fully fully powered so it may be that you you can keep using your own Locomotion but you get to go a little faster because there is an electric motor that's kind of assisting you in um super interesting and I'd love to be able to do your leap of faith where when you finally get to that that can be uh that can be media so you could do a combination of real scenery that you're running over you know as you as you sort of go up the the hill you're you your feet may actually be touching the the scenery as you go over it or just above it as you're sort of floating over the rooftops and climbing higher and higher until you get to a big jump and then

maybe that can that motorized winch like actually to send you that drop you down into this space into a big I'm thinking back to you know the notion of verticality and how important the accuracy of the historic cities are so before you go off the leap of faith you really kind of have to give people that like perfect Vista from the highest point so you're going to want to be able to do some kind of a projection psych you're going to want to be able to do something like this do you think you're right that that that moment of pause before the leap is so important to kind of convey it's that bird like you know moment of being perched and then yep and the camera before you go for it yeah if you're just running and you don't have to pause it won't feel it won't feel quite right since we're motorizing this right you want to be able to like get people to jump and then hold that hold that moment like right before the the drop gets

severe vertigo is really actually one of the easier Sensations to simulate with with media like this so that could be really effective and the challenge will be to do this in a very seamless way um Hardware wise is the harness enough does do we need to like Orient people's bodies in a sense um that they they're actually looking up and then falling down how you know how can we how can we make that work so I've been getting super excited about the moments of looking down at rooftops and down it drops below you but you're right at some point you need to look up at a tower and you don't want to have uh the the track the overhead track in your view this is the the most far out uh flavor of theme park design where we're designing a brand new prototype ride system normally you got to be one of the big boys to do this but this is our made-up ride we can do anything we

want so in this in this system we're talking about maybe some kind of a system where you've got a track you've got a motorized thing maybe there's uh you know sort of a rotating arm so you can look with the track or you can look away from it so you can look up you can look down and it can be running at very controlled motor speeds or it can release its grip on the track and and descend at gravity speed so you can get some real sense of acceleration that if it if and there's a number of ride systems that sort of get you close is that a bungee setup you're drawing there well I'm just wondering if there were two if there were two lines so there's two tracks so you don't have the problem of the center track being right above you we could we could keep the tracks further apart and that would let you look up and out and give you the vistas it would give you stability right and give you actually more stability the program the the tracks further apart or together which actually causes that sense of rotation and and just speed up

speed up one piece and slowly yeah you could also get you could also get uh some up and down by just moving the tracks closer together right and I was actually just thinking about like the how would you handle doing the drop you can have the the sleds from the support tracks um cross over into the next Zone lock that off and then drop the entire assembly down to recreate the uh uh the leap of faith right to do the actual fall right so this way you would keep the whole first section of what we were talking about the agency the the walking and requiring yourself until you get to the point where you know you're being motorized um leap of faces being motorized I like that idea I think that's very cool would you uh would you have to end up with a leap of faith or what about you know how would it work for the chickens out there who don't want to do it is there another track you want to have branches that respect

people's level of Engagement you want to you want to give people the opportunity to push into uncomfortable spaces but not force them into them and you always want to give them an off-ramp so I'm always seeing like a chicken a chicken track that people can always find their way to get back to uh an excellent story reason to give people a way out as well right they could just they could opt to follow somebody through the city at the street level instead of going up up the rooftop right and that would be perfectly plausible without feeling like you're chickening out we don't want to ever like make you feel like you're you're uh you've done something terrible and or or you're not worthy of the the big experience do you how do you feel about introducing this as an element of reward in a theme park could the leap of faith be a reward or would that be would that create you know too many people be disappointed that they don't get access to it traditionally in theme parks it's been it's all about throughput and trying to get as many people as possible to have the

experience as you can can we find ways to make it personal and exclusive and have a own you know some some aspirational something that only a few people earn that's a really interesting possibility what do you guys think about that so the important bit is to make sure uh Hey everybody knows that that it can be done that it is a reward and I it's and it's not terribly hard to achieve well it sounds like we've got just a staggering amount of fun stuff to begin with and this is by the way exactly how a first brainstorm goes we don't necessarily have all of our problems out but we've got a lot of great ideas that we can dig into and boil down whatever what's what were our favorite things that you heard today Matilda you just shout them out and we'll shout out to anything uh I love the idea that we're taking you know a format of an attraction that is existing and then enhancing it into something that is more groundbreaking I like the idea that we're exploring verticality because this

is key to Assassin's Creed I like the idea that we're you know creating a version of a right that is not necessarily linear unlike that as physically engaging essentially it's putting you in the shoes of what an assassin would do and if that's not what you want to feel like in the real world for an attraction based on Assassin's Creed then I don't know what is so I think just in this process we automatically gravitated towards what's most important for us in making this ride which is to capture the physical sensation of of being free and flying through these worlds and the ability to soar like an ego end and eventually to deliver the leap of faith which is undoubtedly How It's gotta it's got you have to end that has to be the payoff right but yeah thank you so much I I you know I think we've done a great job of capturing the essence of the Brandon and creating something that is new and that's that's really exciting for us as a company so so thanks again for uh to our team here at bizarre to Lex Lavon and baz on our

brainstorming team to matild from Ubisoft and to all of you for sitting in and joining us this is our version of Storytelling siblings how we love the connection between world of games and the world of live attractions and we hope you'll all come fight with us in this world sometime thanks all [Music] thank you