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Theme park attractions largely began as passive experiences where guests observed action from a safe distance. Even a classic like Pirates of the Caribbean largely occurs separate from our experience. This changed with the growing popularity of gaming in the ’90s and beyond. Shooting attractions like Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin evolved into more complex games that used the parks differently. Jonathan Ackley is a key figure in many of those experiences that changed the guest experience. His background at LucasArts as a game designer fit perfectly with this new wave of interactivity.
Jonathan is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his nearly 20 years at Disney and beyond. After six years at LucasArts and several at Lego Mindstorms, he joined Walt Disney Imagineering in 2001. His work on new technologies ultimately led to Kim Possible’s World Showcase Adventure, which effectively used existing pavilions in a new way. Jonathan describes the process of developing this project and its follow-up based on Phineas and Ferb. He also designed the Menehune Adventure Trail, which was put in place along with the construction of Aulani: A Disney Resort & Spa.
Another major attraction created by Jonathan was the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, which opened in 2012. He talks about the development of this ambitious game and its card-based system. Jonathan also designed A Pirates Adventure: Treasure of the Seven Seas, and it helped to enhance what guests could enjoy in Adventureland. We also talk about the Play Disney Parks app and technologies that will change how we visit the parks. Jonathan also recently wrote a book, Off by One: Serious Games, and he talks about that very different undertaking. I really enjoyed the chance to talk with Jonathan about his work on so many cool attractions.
Show Notes: Jonathan Ackley
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Note: Photos in this post were used with the permission of Jonathan Ackley.
Transcript
Jonathan Ackley: My design concept is how do we allow our guests to play with all those cool things in the themed environment in a way that they can’t get hurt, the effects themselves won’t get hurt by people. And so mobile phones were that bridge. Yeah, you couldn’t grab the ship’s wheel, but when you press the button and it spun, you knew you did it. So you had that feeling of, dare I say it, agency without the physical contact.
Dan Heaton: That is Jonathan Ackley who’s here to talk about Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, and a bunch of other cool interactive experiences created for Walt Disney Imagineering. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 164 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. Hope you’re all doing well out there as we roll into late March. Can you believe it? It’s crazy how fast this year is going. I am super excited about this week’s show, talking with Jonathan Ackley. Jonathan has been so closely involved in creating so many of the interactive experiences that we’ve enjoyed at the parks during the past 15 years or so. He started as a game designer at Lucas Arts, working on games like Curse of Monkey Island, so many other cool projects.
So it makes total sense that he ultimately would do similar things, but in a different medium for Walt Disney Imagineering, including the Kim Possible’s World Showcase Adventure and its sequel Agent P, the Menehune Adventure Trail, which I loved when we went to Aulani: A Disney Resort and Spa.
My girls had so much fun with it and Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, which lots of people enjoyed playing with the cards all over the original Florida park plus a Pirate’s Adventure, which I found a lot of fun. When we went through Adventureland, I found myself in strange corners of Adventure land trying to figure out how to make some weird thing happen like cannon fire or the snake do something. It was really fun and beyond that, it was just cool to learn more about Jonathan’s story and to also get his thoughts on where gaming and interactive experiences are going in the parks.
Because we started out with rides like Buzz Lightyear and a lot of similar ones where you’re basically shooting at targets or even Toy Story Mania in the future, and we’ve evolved a bit where you’re using, I wouldn’t even call them scavenger hunts, but you’re exploring lands in a different way and able to interact with parts of the land, not just as a passive observer, but it’s doing something active and that feels like something that’s going to continue to evolve and become more important in the parks as guests don’t just want to, I mean, I love old Epcot Omnimover attractions where you sat and went by scenes still really works for me, but I know a lot of guests want to be more involved in feeling like a character and really getting into the story.
Jonathan has played a huge role in making that happen at the parks, so it was a blast to talk with him and learn more about a lot of things he’s worked on and his philosophy about how gaming kind of fits in theme parks. He also is an author. He recently wrote a book, Off by One: Serious Games, which you can purchase now, and we talk about that and what made him interested in writing a book and the story of that novel that he put together. So there’s a lot to cover here with Jonathan, so let’s get right to it. Here is Jonathan Ackley.
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Dan Heaton: Before you even started working on game design as a career, how did you originally get into games and just being interested in that when you were growing up?
Jonathan Ackley: Well, largely it was because my parents wouldn’t let me have video games. They wouldn’t buy me an Atari 2,600, which all my friends had and other friends had Colecovision. My cousins had Colecovision, which if you’ve ever played a Smurf Adventure on Colecovision, fantastic.
Dan Heaton: Yes, I have.
Jonathan Ackley: Fantastic game, but they did not like video games. As a matter of fact, the quote was, video games are from the devil, and I was too young at the time to realize that they were right. So I was going into eighth grade and I wanted to take the advanced science class in my junior high, and I wanted to take it because it had computer programming for one of the modules they were teaching.
And so at this time, computers were super expensive. So there was, in this class, there was a single Apple 2 and that sat at the front of the class with the teacher, and we all had Timex Sinclair’s with membrane keyboards and powerful 2K memory. So I took the class just so I could do this computer thing. These computers were horrible. They had built in basic, but you couldn’t just type in the words.
You actually had to find the print button and press the function key and the print and things. And so after learning how to program on these horrible little machines, I went home and said, mom, mom, can I have a Timex Sinclair? And she went out and she bought me one, but with the 16K expander module, which made it super powerful, but also had the added advantage that when you push down on the membrane keyboard, the memory module would rock and pop out and recycle your entire computer, which was fun. You really couldn’t program more than Hello World with it. Anyway, so it was terrible.
So she took it back that night. I was distraught, how could she take my beloved computer? And she came back with an Atari 400 and my parents didn’t have a ton of money, so they really extended themselves getting me an Atari 400, and it was the best gift ever.
Atari Basic had all and had actual graphics instead of trying to do graphics with the characters and letters that the Sinclair did. I worked on that for, I don’t know, probably until I was a junior in high school. And so they said I could play video games, but they had to be video games that I wrote myself. So maybe this was their plan all along, or maybe it was just they inadvertently found a career for me, but that’s what I did largely through the exclusion of everything else.
I would just come home and I would program in the dark on this computer attached to an old TV set, which very quickly the blue background burned out the blue gun in the tube, and so it had pink faded spots all over it. It was terrible, and it was wonderful at the same time, but I didn’t think I was very good at math.
And so when I went to college, I didn’t want to learn computers because I was convinced I could never be a professional computer programmer because I didn’t like doing math, not realizing the computer does the math for you. So I went to UC Santa Cruz, and I got a theater arts degree that’s useful in film production and came out, got a job doing menial tape transfer at Industrial Light & Magic, and I wasn’t there very long. I got laid off, but I had been working on the movie hook.
So here I was a young man with money burning a hole in my pocket, and I immediately got a girlfriend and I had nothing to do all day, so I would just call her at work. Her boss got really bugged at me calling all the time. She said, well, if you’ve got nothing else to do, come in and I’ll give you something to do.
They were doing an educational prototype for the Richmond School District. And so I came in and initially I was just getting the rights to pictures from image libraries, and soon I was largely programming most of the prototype. And when that project finished, both my girlfriend, now my wife, we got eaten by Lucas Arts because the prototype was written in their scum system. So I was already trained. Then I started on Day of the Tentacle, which was my first shipped professional game, which was fantastic. The amount of talent at Lucas Arts during that time was simply ridiculous. You had Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, Peter Chan and Colette Ma Show, and Steve Purcell and Mike Stemly.
And Vince Lee, who was a development wrecking crew on his own, the only programmer on Rebel Assault and the designer and the project leader. And then there’s my wife Casey, who is a fantastic designer. It was just unbelievable the amount of interactive talent I was surrounded with. So it was just a fantastic place to learn. It was probably 50 people when I joined the company.
Dan Heaton: Lucas Arts seemed to grow a lot, at least in terms of the games. I mean, I remember playing Maniac Mansion when I was a kid on my Commodore 64. And then it seemed like you mentioned some of the Star Wars games took off. So how did it grow after you joined where you ultimately worked on more games like Curse of Monkey Island, and then the company seemed to just keep releasing these games that are still known now?
Jonathan Ackley: Well, largely I think we benefited from neglect. It was a movie company, so you had ILM and you had the movies that Lucasfilm did, and we were just this little company that nobody paid attention to. We were a bunch of nerds compared to the budget of a feature film. Even an expensive video game was kind of a rounding error, so you could do experimental, wacky, artistic stuff. As a matter of fact, when I started, people didn’t want to do Star Wars games.
The feeling around Lucas Arts was, why would I want to make a game based on one of those old movies? And then Vince came out with Rebel Assault, and all of a sudden it’s like, yeah, maybe we should make more Star Wars game. So it was really, really an awesome time. The Adventure Games were sort of at the time, sort of the prestige stuff was creating our own IP, and then the Star Wars projects bankrolled our prestige projects.
So the company grew; Adventure Games didn’t really grow in terms of the target audience, which became an issue as the games got more and more expensive every time we wanted to make a new adventure game, we wanted to set the bar higher, the graphics had to be cooler, we added voice, we added orchestral streaming music and Monkey Island used a proto version of MP3 before MP3 was a thing. So there was all this sort of innovation going into this thing, but the target demographic for adventure games wasn’t growing.
Meanwhile, 3D games were kicking butt. Lucas Arts also had some amazing talent making notes. He had Ray Greco and Justin Chin and Rob Hubner of descent fame, all working on things like Dark Forces and Jedi Knight, and I sort of knew the game was up for Adventure Games when after we’d shipped Curse of Monkey Island, I went into the programmers office, they were running around in this 3D shooter. I’m like, that is interesting. What is it? And he’s like, oh, it’s this new game.
He climbed on board this gondola, and the gondola started moving. I’m like, oh, that’s a neat feature. You ride a gondola. And then the credits started to roll in front of the gondola while you were running around interactively. And I realized, oh, oh crap. Storytelling has come to 3D. I kind of think this might be the end for a little paper dolls walking around in a cardboard box games. And that game was Half Life.
Dan Heaton: Oh, wow. Yeah.
Jonathan Ackley: And that was sort of the, yeah, yeah. I think technology is going to move forward. So should I?
Dan Heaton: So you ultimately ended up moving from the gaming world into games for Walt Disney Imagineering, and I mean a bit later from Curse of Monkey Island. But I’m curious about what made you decide to start looking possibly in that direction or ultimately to where you would still be doing gaming, but in a very different medium?
Jonathan Ackley: Well, that was actually where I wanted to go right out of college. It was the first place I sent my resume was Imagineering, as a matter, I think I might’ve even dropped it off at the lobby. I was sleeping on a friend’s couch in Silver Lake here in Los Angeles, and I got a postcard back from them. We got it. We’ll call you if your skills meet our needs. They never called after Lucas Arts.
My wife and I had been doing game consulting, and we decided to start a family, and we figured, well, if we’re going to have a family, we can’t have two freelancers in the family. So I took a job at Lego Mindstorms and was there for about a year and a half, and I love that company. Lego is a fantastic company. It’s a family company. They believe in the product.
I mean, Lego’s just damn cool. This was the toy robots division, which was even cooler. So I had hopes that I was going to start designing robot toys for kids, and that was very exciting. But every once in a while, I would go on the Imagineering or the Disney website, and I would just send my resume just like, well, maybe they’ll call me back this time. I sent my resume in through the HTML form on the webpage in 2000, whatever, and they called me back, but I wasn’t planning on moving.
We decorated the baby’s room, but I wanted to go down and I wanted to interview with ’em and to see what it was like, but wasn’t planning on moving down there. The day they called me back and offered me the job, we were all called into the office for an all hands meeting at Lego and told they were shutting down our office.
Dan Heaton: Oh, wow.
Jonathan Ackley: I think the universe is trying to tell me something. So we packed up with a newborn and moved down to Los Angeles, which is a lot of fun leaving your support system and relocating 800 miles away or however much it is.
Dan Heaton: You mentioned wanting to work for Imagineering. Did you have a lot of history with Disney or Disneyland and going there, or what kind of drove that interest?
Jonathan Ackley: Everybody kind of loves Disney, especially in the ‘70s. We didn’t have a lot of money, so we might’ve gone two or three times in my entire life. There’s a picture of me at three being absolutely terrified by Winnie the Pooh. It was the huge Winnie the Pooh, and he had the honeypot on his head and then the be sticking out of it, it was just enormous in there.
I was looking up at it, just scared witless, but we loved it, particularly Pirates of the Caribbean and Haunted Mansion, which I think is everybody’s vote for the greatest dark ride of all time. And at one point I was saying to Casey, my wife, someday I’m going to work for Disney. I’m going to live in Pirates of the Caribbean. I’ve been there after hours. Now you don’t really want to live in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Dan Heaton: I’ve heard it’s kind of frightening in there after hours.
Jonathan Ackley: I’ll tell everybody that you don’t want to live inside that, but we would go and loved it. It was aspirational for my family to go. My home park was Marriott’s Great America, which I think opened in 1976. And at that time it was a real theme park. I think it is much less a theme park now, but it was heavily themed. And so you no longer have NASCAR Days of Thunder simulator next to the Tidal Wave roller coaster in Yankee Harbor. But back then the theming was just top notch and gorgeous.
So I always wanted to work in themed entertainment and do that kind of storytelling. I think if you work in video games or anything digital, there’s a certain romance to atoms that you don’t get from electrons. So you’re just like, well, I can do anything I want in this box, but boy, I wonder what you could do out in the real world. And I was lucky enough to find out. So it was very, very cool to get that chance.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. So you ended up joining, I believe the R&D department in the early 2000s. What were some of the projects you kind of got started on when you joined Disney?
Jonathan Ackley: I was brought in on the enhanced television team, so there wasn’t really this thing called broadband that went to people’s homes. There was this horrible thing called dial up that made awful noises at you when you tried to log in. So it was still early days, and the idea was two screen content. So Monday Night Football would be going on and you would guess what the next play was and who was going to get the ball and how far they were going to go with it.
There were leaderboards and there were trivia, and I wrote a little kick the football mini game, and it was all pushed down synchronized to the broadcast. And I guess it was relatively popular, but the idea of research and development is you want to come up with the idea and productize it. So I think my major contribution to that project was getting it to the point where we could hand it off and kind of get out of that business and give it to ABC or ESPN so they could run their own. So that was my first project. And after that, my boss just came to me one day and he had a phone, and it was the Nextel I80, I think maybe the I88. It was this candy bar phone with a gray screen on it; it is like, this is a new phone.
It runs Java. You should do something with it. It’s surprising how much of research and development is I got this thing, what can we do with this thing? So I wrote an enhanced TV client for it and did some mini games. It was really fun, but we didn’t really do anything with it. There was no real market for phone apps at the time. It was just kind of interesting. But I got kind of really into this phone. It was cool. I couldn’t figure out why.
It was the first phone that had true Internet protocol, so you could reach it from the internet, it could reach back out of the Internet. So I just started having fun writing fun apps to do on the thing GPS tracking. I thought, well, I’ll do this interactive map. Maybe it could lead you through a theme park it. The phone was, it was too slow. If it was faster, it could work. I wonder if someday people use phones to find their way from place to place.
So it was really fun, and I just kind of dove into mobile and then broadband applications and then what can we do with new packaged media, Blu-Ray. It was sort of as new technologies arise, how can we look at it and abuse it for the fun and enjoyment of our guests? And it was just that sort of fun playing around with mobile phones that led to the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure, which was just done as a play test initially. It wasn’t really intended to be an attraction.
It was just like, well, we’ll do this prototype and we will make the company smarter about things you could do with a mobile phone and it’ll be cool. Literally, my boss came to me one day and just said, used to make adventure games. I’m like, yeah. I was like, you should do one for World Showcase. Then we did the play test and it received such positive response that all of a sudden I was a theme park producer.
Dan Heaton: Wow. It’s interesting how that happens, but I’m curious too for that game. I mean, when you actually start really working on it and you have these existing structures in World Showcase, most are from, were built in the early eighties for 1982, and you’re adding new effects. I mean, I’m not curious about it individually; I just am curious for you, what’s it like to have to go into something that is so set in stone and kind of almost rethink it for a game?
Jonathan Ackley: Well, let’s see. I mean, you don’t worry so much about the infrastructure. What is amazing about working in a theme park that’s been around so long as you see the history and you appreciate what the Imagineers who came before you did with the stone knives and bearskins, you find little bits of technology, little pieces of computer that were assembled in the 1970s because there weren’t general purpose computers like we have today. They had to go out and make or glue circuit boards together, and then they would etch a little thing that said Property of WED Enterprises, and they would bolt that thing on. And it was amazing.
I kind of think that we as humans were smarter before computers showed up. When I see the incredible things that the Imagineers did before microcomputers, if you’ve seen how The American Adventure, that thing is astonishing everything they do. And during the time they engineered it, and it was just some people with slide rules and pencils and engineering genius. That’s kind of the fun thing we bring in our modern technology. So it’s not like we’re trying to glue our stuff to those ancient systems, but you really appreciate what they were able to do with the technology of their time.
Dan Heaton: Definitely. Yeah, I mean, the people I’ve talked or what I’ve learned about some of the early Epcot pavilions, American Adventure is a great example where with, I forget they call it the War Wagon. They call it the War Wagon, which is one of the craziest things that I could think of from, and they built it in, like you said, 1980. So you’re adding games to the park at a time when it wasn’t like, now there are many, it’s very common. But what was the interest, or was that a time when there was really a push to add more games to the parks in general, or was this still kind of on the front end of the interest from the company or even the theme parks?
Jonathan Ackley: It wasn’t really a focus because the parks were not really broken. So it wasn’t like people were looking at the parks and saying, my gosh, if only this were interactive. I think one of the challenges was to put something together that wasn’t the greatest fears of the Imagineers, which would be, yeah, I’m coming in and I’m installing Pacman machines throughout World Showcase, which might have been how some people thought about what we were going to do.
And then they were pleasantly surprised when they saw what we were doing was fitting the theming and fitting the story and blending in as best it could. So that experience was designed actually based around a frustration of mine, which is that theme parks are filled with super cool props and you can’t play with any of ’em, and there are good reasons you can’t play with any of ’em.
You go in as a big ship’s wheel, what do you want to do? You want to grab that wheel and you want to spin that sucker as fast as you can. But you do that and it goes clunk because it’s been bolted. So you can’t do that. The reason is because some kid’s going to stick his head through the spoke and then another kid’s going to spin the wheel. Secondly, if you let people touch and move things, they’re going to break it.
So it becomes a nightmare. And so my design concept is how do we allow our guests to play with all those cool things in the themed environment in a way that they can’t get hurt, the effects themselves won’t get hurt by people. So mobile phones were that bridge. Yeah, you couldn’t grab the ship’s wheel, but when you press the button and it spun, you knew you did it. So you had that feeling of, dare I say it, agency without the physical contact. That feeling of control over the theme park environment is really what makes those experiences powerful. And what makes it fun.
Dan Heaton: Impossible, like you said, very successful. And then I’m jumping ahead a bit, but I feel like it makes sense to mention it here is that then it was upgraded where I have more familiarity with Phineas and Ferb because my daughters love that show and we played the game. How did that come together and why was that such a good fit? Because it’s such a fun TV show and it really fit well in World Showcase.
Jonathan Ackley: What are we going to do today? Let’s go to a theme park. I mean, I think the very first Kim or I’m sorry Phineas and Ferb and for an episode was they were building a roller coaster. That license fits really well because those kids can do anything and for any reason. So if you’re trying to justify why this crazy stuff is happening around, it’s really easy to do it different. Doofenshmirtz has built a crazy machine. The kids have built a crazy machine. There’s a mystery that Perry the Platypus is trying to solve. All three of those things come together and in a way that makes sense for an adventure that’s about finding crazy hidden contraptions around the world. We worked with the creators.
Dan and Swampy are just spectacular and fun people as were the creators of Kim Possible, is just really fun using those characters or rather partnering with them to have those characters go on these great adventures. But really they’re the secondary characters. The main character is the guest, and the characters are really there just to give flavor and humor and tell you to do this ridiculous thing and give you a totally implausible explanation for why you need to do this thing, but you do it because that’s the excuse you need to have fun and play as in that world. So I think great characters are key to why the Agent P World Showcase Adventure worked so well when we relaunched it.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, because I think about when my daughters were that age, we’ve never spent so much time just in one World Showcase pavilion in these corners. I think at the time it was Norway at the time before Frozen or anything, and we’re backed by the waterfall and there’s all kinds of crazy areas. That’s something that I would not have probably done, especially if we would’ve gone to the attraction or shop, but we’re not going to spend an hour in the same area in a completely different way.
Jonathan Ackley: The play test actually had some features that I’m sort of sorry now that I took out. There were these things called bonus missions, which really were ridiculous. It was basically it just said, I can’t tell you why, but you need to go to the tea shop and look at this map on the wall and tell me what’s right next to Birmingham. Then you would go there and you would answer a multiple choice question. And if you got it right, you’d say, yeah, thanks for no reason whatsoever. It was hugely popular, but I kind of dropped it out in adapting the thing, but it was pointless interactivity because there was no real story behind it other than I need you to tell me this thing. And people loved it.
The reason they loved it I think is the Imagineers, especially in World Showcase, put so much awesome detail that pointing it out to the players got them to appreciate all the detail. It was just like, we just walked through the pavilion and that’s cool, that’s cool, that’s cool. Let’s just get the guests to look at it. We got feedback saying, I’d been through World Showcase where annual pass holders, I’ve been there hundreds of times, I never looked at this thing. Thank you for showing me this thing because it’s really cool.
Dan Heaton: That really stands out to me about all the different games that have been done, but especially that one because World Showcase is like there’s a lot to cover in the mile circle around, especially if you’re only there for a day or two. So to be able to do that is super cool. And on a similar note, the Menehune Adventure Trail to Aulani, we were lucky enough to go there a few years ago in 2019, and pretty much played every single version of that game. The indoor, the outdoor again, just had a blast. It felt, I feel like it was so epic, some of the effects. I was like, whoa, I did not expect that whale to do that or something. So I’d love to know a bit about how that came together because that’s a really cool part of that resort.
Jonathan Ackley: Well, you mentioned earlier about trying to fit one of these things in an existing facility. The advantage that the Menehune Adventure had was that it was conceived and executed by the creative team that was building the resort. So we were able to integrate those little bits of magic in a way that wasn’t bolted on after the fact. We knew that it was going to have all these awesome rock sculptures in the shape of animals hidden throughout the resort. So, hey, why don’t we make one of those a whale and have the guest be able to trigger the whale to shoot up the blowhole? Or some of the more kind of dramatic and exciting locations are inside the Caldera.
When it gets all hot and the lava starts flowing, which by the way is not something that will happen on that island. Those volcanoes are very, very extinct. So don’t worry if it appears that it’s going to erupt the producer for that resort, Jeanette Lomboy, we were actually partners on Kim Possible. I sort of brought the gaming side, and she was a more experienced theme park producer, so it was a great pairing on my first project. So she had a total understanding of the interactivity and what the goal was.
And so I think largely she wanted to be able to do that sort of interactive storytelling and brought me into design. It’s all about telling the story of that place and of the guests who were visiting. So we were able to do a lot because we looked at the stories that were already being told in that backyard area or in the lobby area and saying, well, how can we take that and make it interactive?
Dan Heaton: Well, I want to shift gears a bit to the Magic Kingdom with several games you did there, the big one being Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, which opened in 2012 and to me was really a big change for The Magic Kingdom. I’d love to know from you your work on creating it and then kind of the goals of putting that into the original Florida park.
Jonathan Ackley: So Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, it’s probably the project I’m proudest of because the most unusual in terms of what it does and how it plays. And it was another, I think one of those projects where my boss came to me and he said, Hey, we’ve got this IP. Maybe you should do something with it. I think I was, we didn’t wind up using that IP, but my initial reaction was, I don’t want to do that. On the other hand, he was my boss, so I thought, well, maybe I should think about it.
And so I started looking at different gameplay styles and interfaces that I could adapt to the physical theme park world Agent P; it’s very much Lucas Art’s adventure game translated for a physical world. Well, okay, what else could we do other than an adventure game? And I looked at this RPG and it was an electronic RPG, but the interface was a card interface.
You picked cards electronically and played it against bad guys, and that determined how you did in this video game. I thought, well, that would be cool if we could just have a Magic the Gathering style trading cards or Pokemon trading cards and you could just hold them out and those would cast spells. That’s a pretty cool mechanic. We could do a whole role playing game based on that. I wonder if we could do that, because at the time, that was hard to do.
Nowadays everybody’s phone has the capability of doing similar things, but in 2008 or whenever I had this idea, it was magic. So I turned to a friend of mine at Research and Development who I had actually brought in a fellow named Chris Purvis who was a programmer on Curse of Monkey Island. He was now at R&D. I’m like, Hey, Chris, I got this crazy idea.
Would there be a way that our guests could hold out spell cards and we could magically know what they were holding out and we could cast spells on bad guys? He was like, well, let me make some calls. So he was launched into sort of a research project to see how we could cast spells using playing cards. And then I partnered with some other fellows on how we could make villains appear out of nothing. So then there was an entire other sort of r and d project separate from how do we cast spells using playing cards?
We did a whole bunch of mockups until we convinced ourselves that it was possible. Then we had to determine whether or not that worked with human beings because there are actually three different parts to a technology project, entertainment project that I think you need to do simultaneously, which is the interface, the story and the technology all have to match.
So you could get two of those things, but if you don’t get the third, then it doesn’t work. So we had technology or magic rather that could tell when you were casting a spell card, we had an overall idea for a story which matched that spell casting idea, but would the interface work with human beings? Because if it’s one way you can really get yourself in trouble, it’s convincing yourself that you’re going to teach a human being to do something, a new behavior. I’ve been making video games for 30 years. I’ve never taught a human being a new behavior. You’re just sort of playing psychologist, and what’s a human behavior that people enjoy doing that I can leverage?
So then we tried it with people and sometimes it worked better than other times. And so we kept iterating until our guests could cast magic spells, and then we were able to move forward and productize that. But there was some terrifying nights during that project when you’re wondering, do you wonder if this is going to work when you open it up to all the guests and all the different people and all the different play styles. Then it was very gratifying when it opened. There were half hour lines at each of the portals, which was great for us and not so great for the operator, but we were very happy about that.
Dan Heaton: An interesting part, which of this game is the cards. Because it seemed to me that people would be interested then in trading and in some of the other aspects beyond the game. Did you anticipate that the cards would become souvenirs and be something that people really enjoyed beyond what they did with the game?
Jonathan Ackley: Yes, and I won’t say that because I’m very farsighted. I just looked around and saw how popular cards and card trading were. So as long as we made sure that the spell cards were of high value and high quality with beautiful character art doing interesting things on it, we knew that they would be collectible and we wanted this attraction to be valuable to our guests. Playing the game is one value, that Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom brought. The collecting of the cards brings its own value. So I think the attraction works on several levels, both the collecting and the gameplay.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I agree. I think it really worked well. And another attraction at the Magic Kingdom, the Pirates Adventure, Treasure of the Seven Seas. What I really enjoyed about that too was you get this map, so it’s even a little different to me than just Agent P’s or something, or with the phone again, though found myself going in all these crazy parts of Adventureland. So I know this is the next step in terms of that type of game, but I’m curious for you what stood out from this experience or from creating another thing people could do in the Magic Kingdom.
Jonathan Ackley: When designing for Pirates, I tend to just think of what are all the cool things I want to do and how can I justify doing those cool things? And in that way, game design can be pretty easy. You just brainstorm in this theme, I’m a spy. What do I want to do as a spy? Or I’m a sorcerer. What do I want to do? I want to cast spells. We can’t have people swinging from yard arms.
We can’t have people sword fighting. So what are the cool things that you could do as a pirate, like lighting a fuse of gunpowder and having it blow up? Yeah, we can simulate that. That’s pretty awesome. Or what if some bad guys have blow guns and they’re going to try and zap you? Well, we can have blow guns pop out of a bush and fire darts at you.
Sure, we could do that. You just love Adventureland, right? That’s one of those iconic places. As a kid, that’s one of those, when Walt did his TV show on the runup to Disneyland, you wanted to see the stories from Adventureland because they were just so darn cool. So being able to install themed elements in Adventureland is like that’s your kid’s dream come true. So now there’s a 13-foot high giant idle in the middle of Adventureland, and most people don’t even know it’s interactive. They just think that’s amazing new theming, but that’s only the top layer.
Then underneath that, there’s magic that happens with that, which is even more powerful because it’s the guests causing that magic to happen.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I agree. There were things that I totally came to life and I went, wow, I don’t think I’ve noticed that. Which is a good sign because then it’s like you mentioned, it’s functioning on multiple levels as good theming and as the game, which is I’m sure based on what you’ve said is what you’re looking for with a lot of these projects we’ve talked about.
Jonathan Ackley: Yeah, it’s like what would be a cool thing to do? Well, I want to shoot a deck gun into the water and I want to have, the cannonball will make a splash, or I want to blow the lock off that chest, and I want to curse a human being terribly so to become an undead skeleton that rises out of the water, it’s a little grim, but it’s fun.
Dan Heaton: I want to do all those things, so that’s good. So also too, speaking of things that are interactive, I know you were also involved as a show writer for the interactive queue at the Haunted Mansion, which speaking of something that can really just sidetrack getting through the line for my daughters because they enjoy it. That’s another, I feel like a fun way to bring an attraction to life. So I’m curious for you about working on that and the goals to expand on, like you mentioned earlier, such a classic attraction.
Jonathan Ackley: It was fun. I’d love to do more with Haunted Mansion or with Pirates of the Caribbean. They’re just my favorite rides ever, and I know I’m not alone in saying that. I’ll tell one story of what happens when you put a Disney nerd in a room with a Disney legend. I was part of a program early on in Imagineering where it was called Designer Enrichment, and they exposed us to a lot of new things, and there was an event where we got to meet some of the historic Imagineers, and I got seated next to X Atencio, who’s along with Marc Davis are like, oh my gosh, and I’m terrible in front of my heroes, just the worst.
And someone at the table said, oh, Mr. Atencio, what rides did you work on? Of course, I blurted out, you made, I want to mention Pirates of the Caribbean, like the best theme park rides ever. And yeah, X never made eye contact with me for the rest of the meal. But those rides are, I think probably 90% of Imagineers want to be Imagineers.
Dan Heaton: Yes, I’ve talked to a lot of people and the Disneyland Pirates and Haunted Mansion are referenced about 90%. When people talk about the attractions that inspired them, we get a little bit of Epcot, but it’s mostly those two. Well, I want to ask you about one more big project you worked on, which you referenced earlier about phones and how they’ve evolved. That leads well into talking about the play Disney Parks app, which still now is playing a big role in things like Galaxy’s Edge and with some of the really recent attractions, just when you’re looking to find a way again to have people playing in the parks, how tricky is that or what’s it like trying to kind of connect the phone and the game to these existing physical places in such cool areas on their own?
Jonathan Ackley: Well, theme parks are tricky because although they seem solid, like they’ve been there 50 years or they’ve been there 75 years, every day they change and every day they’re new. I have huge respect for anyone who works in a theme park because they see stuff. There’s millions of people who go to these parks every year and weird stuff happens every day and they have to be on their toes and new rides open and new attractions open and special events and different people come. So it is a moving target because a theme park is a living, evolving thing.
When you are creating something that’s going to install in that park, you have to be aware that it needs to be flexible and it has to work for the park. It’s not just an expression of your ego, no, I want this thing and I’m going to put it in and it’s going to work the way I want it to work because it can’t work that way. So when you are designing for a theme park, there’s a partnership that needs to go on with the people who run the park just as there’s a partnership with the guests who come to the park who are going to play your games. Everything that I’ve done has been informed by people who are smarter or more experienced than I am.
So you can come in with this. I’ve got this genius idea. We’re going to add interactive skydiving with guests throwing off the top of the castle, and then someone from operations will say, Jonathan, that’s really the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard, and I’m not even going to explain to you why. You just need to respect the fact that they really do know better than you. And so it is always a partnership. It is always a collaboration to get these things in and work.
And as the park changes, sometimes you need to update what you’ve created because it’s different all the time. So when you start designing things, you need to talk to everybody who’s going to touch it or be affected by it, understand their point of view, understand their goals, and try and make it match with what they need to do just to operate a theme park every day. I have just been fortunate like crazy to be working with the greatest park operators in the world at Disneyland, the Magic Kingdom, the people at Tokyo Disney Sea are just astonishing what they can do. So I’ve just been super fortunate throughout my career to have been partnered with a lot of people who’ve prevented me from making really terrible mistakes.
Dan Heaton: I also wanted to ask you too, speaking of something else you’re doing, is that, like I mentioned, you recently published a book and have been an author for a little while, your book Off by One: Serious Games. So I’m curious for you, what got you interested in becoming an author? And then to learn a little bit about this book.
Jonathan Ackley: I have wanted to write a novel for a very, very long time, but in case you don’t know, making video games and paper attractions is a time intensive activity. So I think it was back in 1995, I read an article just in the newspaper that they had detected seismic waves in the heart of Russia. And the theory was that they were taking the old USSR nuclear arsenal and they were taking them down into these deep mines and they were detonating these nuclear bombs underground and reading the seismic waves to find mineral resources, particularly diamonds.
So I thought, well, boy, that would be really fun, dramatic sort of idea around which to base a book. And suddenly, I guess it was two years ago, well maybe it was a year ago, suddenly I found myself with time to explore that, and I wasn’t making video games, which can leave you brain dead at the end of the day.
So I would just sit down and I would spend three or four hours working on this book and they say, write what? I made the character a very flawed video game designer, and I just poured all of my flaws into this main character, and I finished the first draft of the book and I showed it to people, and everyone hated the main character. He was so unappealing like, well, maybe I should make this character a little less like myself and move some of his negative attributes into other characters. So I got a lot of feedback. I learned that writing a novel is very different than writing a short story.
I had the first draft of the novel in about a month and a half, and then it took many months after that before it was a good novel. And I love the fact that I’ve had the opportunity to do that, to write that book because so often you’re adapting other people’s stories, whether it’s Disney stories or Disney Channel stories. These are characters that come from you and your experience, and then you add nuclear explosions. So what could be more fun?
Dan Heaton: It sounds good to me. No, I’m definitely interested in it, and I think it sounds like a great premise for a book. And I’m not talking about the lead character as you. I just mean the story sounds interesting, but I only have one more question for you, which is you’ve worked in various different elements of gaming, theme parks, video games, looking ahead to the future, what are you excited about? Whether it’s a new technology or some new type of gaming that you find really interesting that might be coming either now or in the future?
Jonathan Ackley: So there’s much talk of the metaverse, right? But I think if anybody really, really knows what the metaverse is going to be or if they tell you that they know what the metaverse is going to be, I don’t think they really know because it starts with a bunch of ideas and bits of hardware lying around and you glue it together and do a lot of experimentation, and then it will evolve into something different than you originally believed in. Then that will also become greater than what you hoped it would be.
It’ll go in an entirely different direction, and it will change society in a way that you did not expect it to change society. I’m particularly excited about the idea of blending the virtual and physical outside of the world of deemed entertainment. How can we have characters and the power to control our environment and the power to express ourselves through technology in our environment?
How can we create a fantasy world that is our own world? And that is intriguing to me, although as a technologist, I’m also a little afraid of that idea because with great power comes great responsibility or so I’ve been told. So I am very interested in how do we project digital storytelling out into the physical world? And I think people have ideas about it, but I think it will be many years before we realize how that really will look, act and work. But I also sort of have faith that the world will be changed because of it. So that is what interests me about the future.
Dan Heaton: Well, that’s great. I mean, yeah, I’m curious to see where a lot of the digital virtual, everything you just said, much smarter than I tried to summarize works, and it’s going to be interesting, and I hope it goes for a positive direction. Well, Jonathan, this has been great. I want to make sure and mention too, if listeners want to pick up a copy of your book or learn more about what you do or even if you’re out on social media at all, I’d love to have you let us know where they can learn more.
Jonathan Ackley: Well, they can get the book in either Kindle format or paperback from Amazon dot com. It’s off by one Sirius Games, and I have just launched a Twitter account really in the last two weeks at Ley sub score, Jonathan. So I’m trying out this new social media thing that all the kids are doing these days. So I’ll be hash tagging with the tubes and everything.
Dan Heaton: That sounds good. Well, Jonathan, thanks so much. This has been great. I really appreciate you coming and talking to me on a podcast.
Jonathan Ackley: Thank you very much for having me.
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