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When you think about classic theme park attractions, many are passive experiences. Pirates of the Caribbean, Spaceship Earth, and “it’s a small world” all involve sitting in a vehicle while action happens around you. Interactive experiences have become the norm, and this goes beyond shooting at targets. Whether it’s using wands at Diagon Alley or deciphering clues with your Datapad at Galaxy’s Edge, we participate more directly in the action. What are the next steps for gaming at theme parks, and what do guests want from those visits?
Imagineer Scott Rogers has an extensive background with both video games and theme parks, and he’s my guest on this episode of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. He has worked as a game designer since the mid-’90s and has designed levels, bosses, and stories for numerous games. Scott also is the author of two books on game design, Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design and Swipe This!: The Guide to Great Touchscreen Game Design. This background gives him a different perspective on theme parks and how they function. He joined Walt Disney Imagineering in 2011 and worked on projects like Disney Kudos (a precursor to the Play Disney app) and Legends of Frontierland: Gold Rush.
Beyond his specific projects, Scott and I also talk about his fandom for Disneyland since his was young. He participated in scavenger hunts with friends that turned the park into their playground. Disney has found more structured ways to offer guests a chance to enjoy Disneyland on a similar level. Scott also worked on the VR location-based experience, Terminator Salvation: Fight for the Future, and we discuss where that technology is headed. The pandemic has dramatically altered the landscape, but there is still potential for VR in the future. I really enjoyed covering so many cool and interesting topics with Scott on this episode.
Show Notes: Scott Rogers
Purchase a copy of Scott Rogers’ books Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design and Swipe This!: The Guide to Great Touchscreen Game Design.
Follow Scott Rogers at @mightybedbug on Twitter and Instagram.
Watch the presentation from Scott Rogers, Everything I Learned About Level Design I Learned from Disneyland.
Transcript
Scott Rogers: We would get guests coming in full cowboy regalia and they would have these identities that they were role playing living in this western town. I was lucky enough to go and most of the time I was stuck in Glendale working on these quests. But I got to go a couple of times to play it to kind of see how people used it and what were the landmarks that I could play with and things like that. And I had never remembered. I’ve been going to Disneyland since the early ‘70s and I have never seen Frontierland live up to what it was supposed to be.
Dan Heaton: That is Game Designer and Imagineer Scott Rogers, and you’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 144 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. During the past few decades, going back to even before Buzz Lightyear when you had Sally Dark Rides that involved shooting where interactivity has become really common in theme park attractions beyond Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story Mania, the Scooby Doo attractions, Justice League, there’s a lot of different ways that theme parks are starting to get guests more involved.
I think the most important thing is that guests, we want that we want to be able to use our wands at Diagon Alley or to interact directly with cast members or actors that really sell the story and make it more than just sitting and looking at something happening away from us, like a passive experience. And that’s why I was excited to talk with Scott Rogers. He was a game designer starting in the mid-‘90s around the time when video games were really starting to boom with Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis and computer games and has done that for more than 25 years.
He’s also written two books about game design. He wrote Level Up: The Guide to Great Video Game Design and Swipe This: The Guide to Great Touchscreen Game Design, but he also worked at Disney Imagineering. He joined there in 2011, worked there for four years and worked in a lot of really cool interactive experiences including the Frontierland game that you heard in the intro and we dive into his background and what he did in Imagineering also just how games could work and what are some of the better ways for games to work beyond possibly having interactivity being small world your name coming up or Mickey saying, “Hi Dan”. There’s something a lot more involved in turning the parks almost into our playgrounds and virtual reality, which I know after the pandemic likely things like The Void and others are going to be a little more challenging.
We dig into that too. Really fun conversation. I loved the chance to talk to Scott about his career, which also has included tabletop gaming. He was part of a movie called Game Masters, which documented some figures who created tabletop games. You should check that out. A lot involved with what Scott has done, and this I found to be really interesting to learn about him and how it connected to Disney. And he’s also a huge fan of Disneyland and talks about his fandom going back to a really early age. So let’s do this. Here is Scott Rogers.
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Dan Heaton: I am really impressed by everything you’ve done in the gaming industry, but also at Disney and just excited to talk to you because I mean, obviously there’s a lot of connections between the two industries and especially what you’ve done in both, so it’s really fun to get the chance to dig a bit into what you’ve done,
Scott Rogers: Probably a bit of a change of pace from your normal guests.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I’ve yet to figure out what my normal guest is, but it’s kind of all over the map. But I like having, I haven’t talked to too many people that have done a few people that have done a few things with games, but not as much as you have. So I think this is great to be able to talk about a slightly different career than other people I’ve talked with. But I’d love to go back early on too, before you even got started really working. I mean, how did you really get interested in becoming an artist or even working in the entertainment field?
Scott Rogers: Ever since I was very young, I thought I would be making comic books and I grew up in San Diego, so every year my parents would take me and then eventually when I was old enough to kind of drive or bummer ride or whatever, go to San Diego Comic Con and I would show these are if comic books kind of the superstars of comics, guys like Jack Kirby and Will Eisner and John Romita, and these were guys that I kind of hung out with in my teenage years.
I would sit with them and they would tell me all these horror stories about the comic book industry. And to be honest, I don’t know if they intended to or not, but they kind of scared me off from working in comics because they were like, we don’t get paid very well and they steal our ideas and none of them were happy.
It was very sad, but they were all super talented. It was very cool to do. Sometimes I’m still amazed at the people I used to hang out with, and one of them was Carl Barks, the famous Disney artist, the guy who did the Donald Duck comic strip for many years. He was the guy that I would sit with from time to time and he would educate me on art and he would point me towards things that he thought I should know about. I very distinctly remember him walking me over to another dealer’s booth at Comic-Con and introducing me to Tintin comics, which were the famous comics by the, I think he was Swedish or Norwegian. I forget.
Herge is the artist and author. And so I got a really nice education from these guys, but as I got older, I realized that I was no, I was no Jim Lee, I was no Steve Ditko. I was no, you name your favorite comic book artist. So then Star Wars had come out and I became very interested in film, so I was like, well, maybe I’ll work in film, I’ll do special effects or I’ll storyboard or be a concept artist or something like that. I went to school for art and then about halfway through I ended up getting another degree in filmmaking and fell in love with screenwriting. So by the time I graduated college, I figured I would work somehow in the film industry in some creative capacity.
Dan Heaton: It’s interesting how things kind of shifted and how you were able to go into filmmaking. So what really interested you about becoming a filmmaker versus maybe working in comics or another field?
Scott Rogers: A, it paid better, and B, it helped me. I could get my creative ideas out faster, if that makes any sense. On one hand, the time it would take me to draw a comic book and kind of express an idea and a story was three to four times longer than it would take me to write a screenplay or even grab a camera and some people and shoot something.
I like the kind of speediness of it; I also like the team, the camaraderie that a film set has. I like that there are lots of people that you can work with and there was a lot of interesting characters in the film industry, like any industry, but the film industry always seemed to have the nuttiest people working in it. And I worked with a lot of very interesting people and I love that I thought it was really fun, but what I didn’t like about the film industry was how unpredictable it was.
I didn’t like that you had to essentially, you worked really hard, you worked really long hours, and then once it was over, you then had to go find a whole new job and there was very little, unless you hooked in with a production and became kind of a regular, it was hard to get kind of a toll hold into that industry. I did it mostly while I was still going to school, and it was long enough for me to realize that I didn’t like that aspect of the industry.
So as I was graduating, I’m like, what am I going to do that’s consistent that maybe has health insurance or something, or has some sort of future where I’m not constantly going around and kind of begging for work. And through a very interesting confluence of events, I ended up in the video game industry, which was kind of the last place I expected to be.
Dan Heaton: It’s interesting how you kind of went through each segment before. I want to talk about your work in the video game industry, but I’d love to ask a little bit too about another side of your background too, which is I know you’re a big fan of Disneyland and I would love to know a little bit about your history with the parks and going there. I think obviously that played a role in ultimately where you went with your career too.
Scott Rogers: I’m actually a second generation cast member. My father worked in the parks the summers of 1956 and 57. He was an engineer on the train and he was a Jungle Cruise captain. And when we would go to the, we went every year because my dad did love Disneyland, but he’d love it, but he also would, like, once we got there, he mostly would not go on the rides. I think he just liked being there, maybe reliving his glory days or something. But our tradition as a family was to go the River Belle Terrace at the border of New Orleans Square in Adventureland and have the Mickey Mouse pancake breakfast, and then we would go on the Jungle Cruise.
It was always the first ride that we went on because of my father’s past with it. I remember we were there in the mid-‘70s and the ‘80s and that I would turn to my dad and the skipper is cracking all these jokes and I would say, dad, do you remember any jokes from when you were a skipper on the Jungle Cruise? He goes, son, there were no jokes on the Jungle Cruise. He obviously worked on the ride before it became essentially the standup comedy routine. It was meant to be purely educational when he worked on it. So he knew all the facts, kind of the National Geographic version of the ride, but no, he wasn’t there when the jokes became such a big part of the attraction, although I think he would’ve been good at it.
Dan Heaton: It’s funny to see early videos of the Jungle Cruise where again, like you said, they’re taking it so seriously and it’s a lot of it. I mean, they’ve added so many, I mean not even withstanding the recent stuff, but they’ve a lot of scenes over the years, but you have a similar feel there and then, yeah, you just keep waiting for them to make kind of a terrible but funny pun and nothing happens. It’s like it’s so weird to think about just how much it’s changed and continues to change.
Scott Rogers: Oh, the worst is when they go by Schweitzer Falls without hearing the “backside of water” comment, right? It just feels unnatural.
Dan Heaton: Like, oh, there’s a waterfall. Okay, yeah.
Scott Rogers: Famous Schweitzer Falls.
Dan Heaton: So what did you enjoy about going when you went to the parks growing up, what made it something that you became such a fan? Even now?
Scott Rogers: I have a very deep and complicated relationship with Disneyland that has grown over the years, and I think it has, in the end, it has really behooved me to have this kind of multifaceted level experience. So as a young child, I went and enjoyed it. Like any other young child, I loved the Peter Pan ride and I love seeing the characters and was terrified of the Haunted Mansion, all the things that I think a lot of other people experience.
But I also, as a result of being scared of the Haunted Mansion, became obsessed with it. I had a long playing record that I will listen to for a year straight. That was the Ron Howard and I think, not Margot Robbie, that’s Harley Quinn. But anyway, I forget who the actress is, but it’s essentially the story of them going through the Haunted Mansion. And I literally listened to that LP to tatters, and my mother relates the story that I listened to this album for a year.
Then finally the time came for a yearly visit to Disneyland and they took me into the stretching room and the minute the corpse dropped, I just started crying nonstop and they had to drag me out the chicken exit in the hallway and much to the shame of my parents. But what that did was it made this very strong memory, but it also, I saw that there was kind of this backside to the park also that was fascinating. Even though I was four or five years old, it made a big impression on me.
So we would go and we would go over a year, and because I lived in San Diego was relatively close, and we would go for events. For example, I was in Boy Scouts and we went to the Grand Canyon one summer, and then as part of a cultural exchange, we had the kids that lived in the Grand Canyon come to visit us and we took them to Disneyland.
So Disneyland was just kind of part of almost like being a resident of California, a good host, their guests to Disneyland. It was just kind of part and parcel of come out to California and then we’ll take you to Disneyland after high school, which I of course went to Grad Night. Most kids in California do. I went to school in Long Beach, and so that’s a good maybe 20, 25 minutes away from Anaheim. I had a lot of friends that worked at the park.
Again, Jungle Cruise skippers mostly. And I dunno why I never applied for a job though. Maybe I didn’t have a car for a big part of college. This was the day where cast members could let people in, they had their passes and they could kind of comp in friends to come and go to the park. So I got to go quite a lot on my friend’s dime to the park.
When we would get there, we were in college and we were obnoxious and we really treated the park like our personal playground. And I had one friend in particular, a fellow named Kurt Lieber, and sadly he’s no longer with us, but he was the guy who really kind of opened things up about my relationship to Disneyland in that he was a Jungle Cruise skipper, but he also worked, his night job was at a sign shop and he had access to all these laser cutters and engraving tools and things like that. And he engraved these kind of silver dollar sized tokens that he then would hide around Disneyland, and then he would write these very cryptic clues for us, me and a few other friends, and he would comp us into Disneyland and he’d be like, alright, go see how many you can find at these.
He literally hid dozens of these things around the park. And for all I know there’s still some hidden in the park today. So we would go on these scavenger hunts, and this was, remember years before Minnie’s Moonlight Madness and all the other kind of sanctioned things. We were doing this completely on the sly and it was great. And it was the late ‘80s, so I don’t want to say security was lax in those days, but we got away with a lot of things that I’m sure would get us kicked out of the park nowadays.
One of those days we were kind of hanging out and we were looking at guests watching the little sparrows that live in Disneyland. There’s a whole bunch of old birdies that live there. And the family was like, do you think those are robot birds? We’re like, oh, these people are so dumb if they get anything’s a robot.
So my friend, a different friend says, Hey, I got a great idea. Let’s go to the Haunted Mansion and pretend like we’re dead bodies and see if they think we’re robots. And I’m like, that’s a great idea. It wasn’t a great idea, but it was in my mind it was. So we go into the Haunted Mansion and we go down the stretch room and we wait for that little pack of guests to move on to the Doom Buggies. And I sprawl out in the middle of the floor in that hallway, and I look out of the corner of my eye to see where my friend is, and he is beating it towards the Doom Buggies.
I’m like, oh, that son of a gun, he is set me up here. And as I am trying to decide whether I’m going to bail out or not on this prank, all of a sudden the doors to the next elevator load open up and a whole room full of guests come out and there’s this collective gasp as they see this dead body laying on the ground and they go walking by and they’re like, oh my God, when did they add that?
One of them nudges me with their foot. And then of course somebody told a cast member, because this cast member comes walking up the hallway with this flashlight and waving in and saying, sir, can you please get off the floor? And I jump up and I say, sorry, I tripped. I made my escape at about three miles an hour on the nearest stone buggy. And so that was the kind of things that we got up to at Disneyland when I was in college.
Dan Heaton: That’s a funny story, and I’ve talked to other people who did this in Florida where they would go, there’s these guys who went on Horizons the Epcot attraction and just hung out in there and took pictures on the sofas and stuff and similar air, or they went in the Haunted Mansion and they knew where all the plates were that were the security spot that you just stepped around them. Where now, no way. I mean, none of that could be done now, but part of me is, I mean, not that I want there to be just people running amuck, but there is something fun, especially the scavenger hunt part. I mean, I would love it if you could do things like that now without mean, but they, I’m sure they’re off limits.
Scott Rogers: There are ways to do it now. So if we can flash forward, many years later, when I worked for Imagineering, I was in charge of a project that was known as Kudos, and it eventually became what’s known as Disney Play. But essentially that game, that experience, part of the origins of that, at least in the design that I was creating, was those scavenger hunts, was that idea that there are things hidden around the park, and they might be secret, they might be activated only.
They were Bluetooth enabled, so you had to be in proximity to activate them, things like that. But a lot of that, the spirit of those college years went into the development of those other products because it was such a great experience for me, and I’m like, I want other people to have this. It was just so much fun; it turned Disneyland into my personal playground. It was the first moment where I started to feel ownership over the park because I was using it in a way that other people weren’t.
Dan Heaton: Right. You’re not using it as just, oh, I’m going to go on vacation and go on the things I like once and see them again in a year or two. This is like, yeah, it’s like a local park that you’re going to, I mean, I’m thinking local park like kids on a jungle gym or whatever, but this is on another level.
Scott Rogers: Yeah, it was our playground.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, exactly. But that’s interesting about Kudos just to get back to that because yeah, now, I mean with what they did with Galaxy’s Edge, with the phones and with so much with decoding things and whatever, and I still feel like there’s more they could do there absolutely. Than they do. We’re a little bit, do I want to spend that much time on my phone. But the, I think the idea is really cool. It’s just a matter of, and you probably ran into this a bit when you were working on Kudos. It’s like how do you scale that to so many people being in the park and them all being able to have that kind of fun experience you had?
Scott Rogers: Well, I mean, I don’t honestly know why Kudos was canceled. It got picked back up. I think Play kind of picked things back up again about two years later after it was canceled, two or three years. The irony is I would actually, if we had spoken a couple of weeks from now, I would have the answers to these things because I’m actually interviewing the fellow who was the design lead on that project that kind of took over for what I had worked on. So I’m going to ask him all those questions because I don’t know, I want to know what happened.
It’s kind of a big gap in my knowledge about life of that product. But yeah, you’re right, that idea of going around and using your phone to talk to the world and interact in some way is very exciting and very cool. Although, to be honest, and it’s been years since I worked on that project, part of me wishes that Kudos or Play, actually, I wish that they had a device of its own kind of the way that the Harry Potter Wands at Universal work, because I think that a phone, even though it’s this amazing device, it has ceased to become magical for us.
So Disney being very big on creating magic and that I admire and respected the desire to turn the phone into a storytelling device. That was a big part of our goal with the project, was to get people to, rather than play Angry Birds or watch a YouTube video while they’re waiting in line, to instead engage in a Disney story or a Disney activity on their phone. So that I thought was a worthwhile goal, but in retrospect, I almost wish it was a different device that the guest would put all their focus into.
It was almost like it was an alien thing in a way. It would’ve been perfect for Galaxy’s Edge if you add one of those, some sort of weird Jedi communication device or something like that. And I feel that it being on your phone is still a bit of a detraction. You could still get a phone call, you could still, the internet is still there, you’re still getting notifications from your kids or whatever. So it breaks that illusion that you don’t, that’s not a problem when you have that magic wand or if you’ve done the, what is it, Magic Quest, have you ever done the dinosaur wand or also they have kind of a wand type thing.
Dan Heaton: I don’t think I have, but I understand what you’re saying. Yeah, I get what you’re saying. I think you made a great point because I was in Galaxy’s Edge, I was in line for the Millennium Falcon Smugglers Run and did a few, oh, there’s some trivia questions or things you have to look for. It wasn’t trivia things you have to look for. But again, then it’s like, oh, I wonder what my email is, or I wonder what this is. And it’s not the same. It’s a nice time distraction and I’m not denigrating anything they did.
They put a lot of effort into that. But I agree with you that especially you can’t do it everywhere, but the wand is a perfect example, but things that people have a really strong connection to Harry Potter, like Star Wars and that people buy so much merchandise. I mean, not just think of it financially that also that’s something people are going to take home or Disneyland they’re going to bring back a lot of times because locals or whatever, it’s a cool idea. I feel like we’re just giving out great ideas for free here, but I’m thought, I’m sure they’ve thought through all of it in some reason, decided the phone made more sense.
Scott Rogers: Again, I think it was that desire because when I was working there, the old guard was very angry about cell phones, and there had even been people saying, oh, we should have just banned cell phone use at Disneyland. They were literally talking about things as severe as that. And our attitude, because we were younger, kind of a younger crowd, we were like, no, the genie’s out of the bottle. You can’t put it back in. But what we can do is kind of do this judo flip and make it work with us rather than against us. That was the goal of Kudos and what play and a few other projects that I worked on as well. This idea that, alright, this device is actually improving the experience, deepening the experience rather than competing with the experience.
Dan Heaton: Well, I mean, I think that flows well into one of the other projects you worked on, which was the Legends of Frontier Land Gold Rush, and I never experienced it. So again, I’m going mostly by descriptions and everything, but I’m just so interested in that because I love the idea of cast members and guests. They do this thing, they do it at Knots with the Ghost town, they’ve had that too, where
Scott Rogers: That’s where they got the idea from is the creative lead from Disney went over to Knots and started it over there.
Dan Heaton: Hey, that’s how it works now. But I’d love to hear that because I think things like that, even more than phones, I think that is, you see it a lot with traveling exhibits that are immersive theater that propped up a lot, not as much for the last year. And I just think there’s really cool ways that the untapped potential to do things like that in the parks,
Scott Rogers: If you are a theme park regular, I was, there are once in a blue moon, there are experiences that you, all of a sudden it changes the way that you look at the theme park and it makes you realize that it’s this, again, it’s this playground rather than just a place to go watch things and buy things and eat things. Actually, the origin of Legend of Frontierland I think is fun and fascinating because it really started, so kind of the creative mastermind of it is an Imagineer named Corey Rouse, and he’s the guy who’s responsible for the lightsaber experience and the Cantina in Galaxy’s Edge. The Legends of Frontierland started with a conversation that when we found out that Disney had bought LucasFilm & Arts and all the subsidiaries, we were like, yay, we can now let’s start making Star Wars stuff.
The number one thing that everybody was saying is, we have to make the Cantina, we have to make the Star Wars Cantina. They’re like, where would we put it? Well, maybe we’ll put it where the Starcade was, or maybe we’ll put it where the guts of the, now I’m blanking on what the name of the tower is, but what used to house the rocket jets and all that. So we weren’t thinking new land, we were just thinking we now have access to Star Wars everything. What can we make?
There was this huge flurry of creativity and excitement in Imagineering where everybody was kind of dreaming up their dream Star Wars experiences. Corey gravitated towards the Cantina and we were talking and he said, how are we going to do the Cantina? I’m a very big Star Wars fan, and I was like, well, this is what I would do.
I even brought in action figures into work and showed him the layout of the cantina and said, there should be aliens that you interact with and maybe you can play cards with them and maybe you have a drink and you listen to the band and all this stuff. Corey had already, I’m not taking credit for this idea at all, it was definitely Corey and his team, but I was kind of brought in to chat about this in a few meetings. And so they were like, all right, well, we have a couple of options.
We could either build a replica of the Cantina, which I think they actually did at some point, and tested it out and kind of see how big does this place need to be and what needs to be in it. I think it was going to be really expensive to do it at the level that they needed to do it. So they said, Cory very smartly said, Star Wars is just a Western, so let’s just take over Frontierland. Or originally it was just the, what’s his name used to do his shows for a billion years.
Anyway, the Golden Horseshoe Revue. So we’d go into the Golden Horseshoe and essentially do all the things that you could do in the Star Wars Cantina, but do it in the Golden Horseshoe. So this we’re essentially repurposing. You could play cards and you could talk to the locals and you could get a drink and you could hang out and be a tough gun slinger or something like that. We wanted to feed into all that fantasy.
While I was at Disney, I ended up missing about eight months of work because I got cancer, and so I had to leave and go on medical leave and get chemotherapy. So when I left was kind of at the start of all these talks. Now, by the time I got back, guess what was going in full swing was Corey and his team had figured out how to turn Frontierland to do this test.
But of course, in true Imagineering style, it grew and grew and grew into this huge experience that took up the entire land. And it ended up involving, there was kind of a land grab game that was involved, like a territory control game. There were card games that you could play; there were kind of magic potions that you could buy from a snake oil salesman that gave you abilities that you could use during the game.
There was a jail where you could draw a picture of your friend and then they would throw ’em in jail and it was like a photo. It was great. There were so many, and there were quests that as you would come into Frontierland, a cast member would come up and go, Hey, howdy there partner. Are you a Frontierland citizen? Are you a Rainbow Ridge citizen? And usually people are like, what?
They didn’t know what to make of it. So they’d say, well, welcome to Rainbow Ridge. They would give you a bandana and they’re like, all right, you’re now on the Rainbow Ridge team, and here’s a quest. Go to the office and turn this in for a couple of coins and then you’ll get your next mission. So my job when I got back was to write missions for the guests to run around and do things.
These were missions, go to the petting farm and go pet a goat or try to steal a bandana from an opposing team player or lock somebody up in jail or go visit the wooden Indian in Main Street or things like that. So kind of fun ways to keep people occupied throughout the day. Well, the thing that was really interesting about Legends of Frontierland was it caught on, it became very popular with the pass holders within maybe a week or two of it debuting.
And it ran over the summer. I think it ran for two or three months, maybe. It wasn’t very long, but long enough to kind of build a following. We would get guests coming in full cowboy regalia, and they would have these identities that they had created. They were roleplaying living in this western town. And I was lucky enough to go, and most of the time I was stuck in Glendale working on these quests.
But I got to go a couple of times to play it to kind of see how people used it and what were the landmarks that I could play with and things like that. I had never remember, I’ve been going to Disneyland since the early seventies, and I have never seen Frontierland live up to what it was supposed to be. You see movies of what it was like in the ‘50s, and that’s what it was like during that summer.
It was bustling, it was full of life, it was full of characters, and it was wonderful. It was amazing. And it was like, who knew who that this old horse had it in it? It was so much fun and such amazing thing to see. Then of course, when the time came to kind of evaluate it, and I think most people, at least in Imagineering, considered it a success.
Once again, I wasn’t in the meeting. I don’t know really the reason was whether it was financial or something else, but the rumor that I had heard was that the head of Disneyland at the time was like, I don’t want people roleplaying in the park. We have cast members. They’re the ones that are characters, any of this. We don’t want people to blur the lines of reality and fiction that were providing. We’re providing the fiction, not them. So they shut it down. That was the end of that.
Dan Heaton: So interesting because I understand the logic, but then there’s part of me that’s just like, there’s so much potential. I know, like I mentioned earlier, with the amount of people that visit the park, it’s got to be a challenge to try and if you were doing something like that, but there’s just so much that could be done, especially in California because there’s so many locals. But I know that that’s the great part of it, like you mentioned, but probably also a bit of the challenge, but I love the idea of, like you said, with Frontierland, yeah, you would see the old footage and they’re staging these big gunfights and stuntmen falling off roofs and stuff, and yes, and I don’t know if they can really do that.
That was for TV if they could do it all the time. But I still love that idea. I wish they even did more of that. I mean, you’re seeing it now with Avengers Campus that at least with the opening, they’re doing some things like that, but can they keep things like that up all the time where there’s so much going on? That’s the challenge.
Scott Rogers: Yeah, up until that point, really, the only other time I had seen a land utilized in an interesting way was like, oh, man, I think it was like 19. No, it must’ve been the early 2000s. There was a summer of Indiana Jones in Adventureland and three times daily, Indiana Jones would get into this fight with some sort of thug, not a Nazi, not a thug, but some other bag person, bad archeologist or something.
And they would run across the balconies in Adventureland, and I don’t think anybody swung on any, or maybe they might’ve ziplined or something, but they kind of just ran all over. Then they ended up in Aladdin’s Oasis or what used to be Aladdin Oasis, and they had a show, a little stage show that they did as kind of the topper to the experience. But again, it was kind of a similar thing.
It was like you’ve got all this highly themed environment. You’ve got, essentially you’ve got a movie set, but you’re not using, there’s no actors on it now. There’s cast members and cast members, God bless ’em, they are wonderful. Often one or two will kind of bubble up as this personality. In California, there is a fellow named Maynard that is kind of infamous. He kind of started as I think a Haunted Mansion cast member, and then eventually ended up, I think in the Tiki Room.
People would go to the park to see Maynard or they’re like, oh, is Maynard working today? We want to make sure that, because he was kind of nutty and he would overact, and I remember and being in the haunted mansion one time, and the lights go out in the stretching room and all of a sudden this little flashlight comes on and these two little monster finger puppets are putting on this little show that Maynard is doing.
But again, I heard that management got mad because they’re like, look, Maynard isn’t the show. The show is the Haunted Mansion. It’s this distraction. And I get it. People are coming to Disneyland to see these attractions, and they’re paying a lot of money and spending a lot of time. But ironically, the thing that whenever we would talk about what was the thing that people love the most about Disneyland, it was always overwhelmingly their interaction with cast members. It was always like, so-and-so was so kind to me, or they gave me a free ice cream, or they helped me find my lost kid, or they, whatever, whether it was helpful or just friendly or even funny, Hey, while I was waiting in line, this cast member asked us a bunch of Disney trivia questions, and it made the time go by faster.
So as Imagineers, we were always like, how can we leverage this great thing that we have these very enthusiastic, very charming, very fun-loving employees to be even more of part of the show. But in the end, because there were these equity players, these paid performers, the musicians and the actors that are playing like Jack Sparrow or the musicians in Frontierland or whatever, I think that there was kind of this gulf between these two ranks of cast members and never the twain should meet. So it was always kind of a bummer because we’re like, yeah, we want the cast members to be more involved, but then the management or the unions or whatever would be like, nah, that’s not the way it works.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s a tricky balance for them, but also I’m sure being a cast member and being so into it. Then I don’t know, there’s a lot of things in there that we could dig into. I want to make sure we circle back a bit and talk about a lot of the things we just talked about with Disney do connect to gaming and to interactivity. We haven’t really talked at all about you going into the gaming industry. So I know you mentioned it earlier, but I would love to know just how you ended up working in the gaming industry in the 1990s and how that went for you. I know you’ve worked at a lot of companies on a lot of big games, and I’m just curious to hear a bit about that.
Scott Rogers: I always joke and say that I was like Lana Turner. I was discovered in a coffee shop. What happened was I had very briefly worked in the animation industry. The animation industry has a tradition of laying everybody off at Christmas. So I was unemployed, and a friend of mine from school came in and said, Hey, Scott, do you know how to draw? And I was drawing in my sketchbook at the time. I said, yes. And he said, do you know how to draw on a computer? I said, well, it depends. I grew up with Macintosh’s and I know how to use Photoshop and things like that.
He said, well, I’m working for this video game company and we’re looking for artists, and if you know how to draw art, you can come in and interview for this job. Actually, what he did do is he let me, the programs that the company used were ones I wasn’t familiar with, and he let me essentially crash at his place for two weeks and learn how to use the programs and create a portfolio for the interview, which was very, very kind of him. So I went in with this portfolio and I showed him my work, and I didn’t end up working for that company, but I did end up using that portfolio to get a job with another company.
I worked for probably about two or three years as an artist, and this was during the time of the Super Nintendo and the Genesis, and I was creating what essentially 16-bit art and drawing images back then is you do it pixel by pixel essentially. So it was less like a drawing with a pencil, and it was more like laying bathroom tile. I found that it wasn’t as exciting or artistically gratifying as I thought it would be. And one day I was laying bathroom tile and I heard other employees in another cubicle kind of yucking it up, and I poked my head up and these guys were talking about movies and games, and they were having a good old time, and I’m like, those guys are having way more fun making games than I am.
They were all the game designers. And so I marched over to where they were at and I said, you know what? I think I’m better suited to be a game designer than I am an artist. How do I become a game designer? And one of the fellows, a fellow named Bill Anderson, he said, all right, I’ll cut you a deal if you do. Essentially if I did his homework for him, which was to draw level maps and storyboard gameplay and things like that, all things that he said he would teach me how to do if he was essentially, I’ll teach you how to make games if you do this stuff for me. I’m like, great, that sounds like a good deal to me.
I mentored under him for probably about six or eight months or so. So eventually that company folded, and I was at this pivot point in my career where I could have kept continuing as an artist or I could have tried to get a job as a game designer. I said, you know what? I really like game design more. Everything that I had kind of studied, the comic books and the movies and the screenwriting and all that. I grew up playing a lot of arcade games and playing board games and role-playing games and all that fun stuff. I felt like that I had really been training myself to be a game designer without realizing it. So I kind of took the plunge and ended up getting a job as an official game designer, and I was off, my career was off.
Dan Heaton: When you’re working as a game designer, especially the time you were doing it, I mean, what was that environment like? Because I’ve never worked for any company like that or been in that, but I know that a lot of creative fields, there is a lot of pressure and stress and everything. I mean, what was that like for you?
Scott Rogers: Video games is hard. It’s making a movie that then the viewer can mess with. So imagine making a movie and then allowing the person watching it make whatever or within reason, choices that affect the game. You have to take all of that into account and still try to make a compelling experience and still get them to play the game that you want them to play without them feeling like you are directly guiding what they’re doing. So it’s very much an art. There’s a lot of psychology involved.
There’s a lot of things like knowing how architecture works and affordances work and how you have to know kind of theater design, how lighting and color and shape, and there’s a lot of design and there’s a lot of ergonomics and all these huge laundry list of skills that go into being a good game designer. But also you also have to make sure that what you’re making is fun, and fun is a very slippery thing to grab.
Everybody’s got an opinion on what is fun, and my idea of fun is probably very different than what yours is, so you have to account for that. But what it was like to work on the games in the nineties was the nineties was when the industry was starting to grow up and become formalized. So because the closest analogy to game production is film production, the industry started to structure itself like film production, and so things became very segmented and rarefied. If you were a game designer, you didn’t program, you didn’t create art, you made gameplay, you worked on gameplay, you built levels, you put in the elements and the coins and monsters and you adjusted the parameters that allowed these things to operate. It’s essentially, it’s called scripting.
So you would script these interactions and things like camera moves. So I had to know how cameras work, which I fortunately I already knew from film school, and you need to be able to tell a story with cinematics, so you would have the things in the game move around, but then also you had to work with the people making the cinematics because at that time, people were making these full rendered very expensive, millions of dollars short animated movies that most people would just skip through.
When I was working in games was right when people were like, you’re a game designer, you do game design stuff, that’s really it. But the irony was that because of my film background, films are unionized and people kind of do one role. So I was used to that mindset, but I also had worked on a lot of low budget films and I knew that the best way those got made was everybody just kind of chipped in and did everything, which is the way that early video games work.
There’s once again, a lot of parallels between film industry and video games. And so partially because I am just fascinated with all aspects of it, I tried to do as many things as I could. Now, I was not a programmer to this day, I’m still not much of a programmer at all, but I can script, which is kind of like programming because of my art background.
I would storyboard gameplay and I would storyboard the cut scenes and I would write the scripts and I would draw maps for the levels, and I would work with the artists to build those maps, and then I would place the different encounters and the treasures and things like that and set up the traps. I worked on a lot of action games where it was little guys with swords fighting monsters. And so it was fun. I would get the makeup little worlds, and I got the makeup, the characters that lived in them, and I got to help work with the musicians and the CG animators to create the stories that went with them.
It was very, very gratifying as a creative endeavor, even when I was working on characters and IP that wasn’t my own, I was guess smart enough to find a way to make it my own and have fun with it. It was great; it was hard and it was long hours, and we were probably underpaid and we were treated poorly at times, but we still had a good time. We were young and we didn’t know any better.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I think that’s pretty common across a lot of industries. So not that, I mean, that’s a good thing, but it sounds like you were able to find what worked for you doing it. And ultimately, I’m jumping way ahead, but you ended up writing first a book Level Up, which is a guide to video game design. So we could talk about how we got there, but I’m curious for you, as your career evolved, what led you to then write a book and several books about video game design?
Scott Rogers: Well, interestingly enough, the same event that led me to write a book was the same event that got me a job at Disney Imagineering. There are several conventions during the year for the game industry, but there’s one big one for kind of the developers, and that’s a show called The Game Developers Conference, and it’s in San Francisco and it’s been going on for a long time. It’s a really great show for game industry people, particularly. It’s a place where people give lectures and they talk about theories and their ideas, or they might do postmortems on their games and talk about, oh, my game ended up making millions of dollars because of X, Y, and Z, and it’s a place to network and all that.
I had been attending that show for many years and getting a lot out of it initially, but by the, I think I might’ve been six or seven years into it when I kind of felt like I had heard a lot of the same things over and over again, and I wasn’t getting a lot of new information, but I knew that there were things that, topics that weren’t being covered that I had a lot of experience in.
I was with a friend of mine and I said, I feel bad because my work has sent me to this show and they’re paying for my hotel and my food, and I feel like that they’re not getting their money’s worth because I’m not coming away with any additional knowledge or inspiration or anything like that. And I said, I think it’s time for me to kind of give back. And so I applied.
They have the talks you have to apply for. And so I first did a talk on doing boss fights. I had done a lot of boss fights in games. So that talk was, I gave that in, I think it was like 91 or somewhere around there. That’s like before I even started in games. It was in 2008, and it was very well received. People, they lost their minds over, they loved it, and they’re like, please come back and do another talk.
So I said, well, what am I going to do a talk about now? I said, well, I’m going to talk about two things I love. I’m going to talk about Level Design, Disneyland. And so I gave a talk the next year called “Everything I Know About Level Design, I Learned from Disneyland”. To say that it was a success is an understatement. They were turning people away at the door; place was packed. You can watch it online. There’s several versions of it you can watch online, but if you’re at all interested in game design and Disneyland, I highly recommend you listen to it.
What happened was in the audience was a couple of people. One was a writer named Cory Doctorow, who was a big Disneyland fan and a fellow Haunted Mansion fan. And he wrote a very glowing writeup about the talk. He literally transcribed the talk and put it on a website, which that was kind of the Reddit of its day that got the attention of a fellow named Chris Webb, who was an editor at a publisher named Wiley and Sons.
He called me up out of the blue, maybe a month or so after, or maybe it might have even been a few weeks after the show, and he said, Hey, I heard about your talk and it sounded fantastic. Do you think you could turn it into a book? And I said, well, no, it’s not long enough.
But I do think I could write a book on game design because at the time, I was working for a publisher and I was flying all over the world meeting game developers, and I was mentoring them and helping them create better games, and they were always asking me the same questions over and over again. I would threaten them jokingly and say, one of you says, I’m just going to write a book and give it and just say, read my book, and then you can ask me questions, right?
Because tired of answering the same questions. And so I had already written actually an outline of that book. So I said, well, the Wiley and Sons are famous for writing the For Dummies series. And so I said, well, what do you want Game Design for Dummies? And Chris said, no, I want the Scott Rogers book of game design. That kind of changed my life in a way because I was able to write Level Up, which has been now, it’s been in publication for over 10 years, and it’s pretty highly rated on Amazon.
And I get messages maybe once a month from, it doesn’t skew young, but it seems to be very appealing to middle-aged middle school kids. So I’m always getting letters from mothers who say, my kid hates reading. He never read a book in his life, but he got your book and he read it cover to cover.
Or I get messages from now, I get messages from people who say, I read your book when I was a kid, and now I am pursuing a career in game design, or I am working in games partially because of your book, so it might be the best thing I’ve ever done other than having my own children. But a lot of people have enjoyed it and benefited from it and be that as it may, I can authoritatively say that it is the best video game design book you will ever read with a chili recipe in it. So if you like chili, you should pick up Level Up. Plus it has lots of funny pictures and some jokes sold, stuff like that.
Dan Heaton: So you mentioned that it helped you get a job at Disneyland. How did that come together?
Scott Rogers: The talk is what got me the job at Disneyland. So in the audience besides Cory, were a group of Imagineers, and they came up to me after the show and they said, hi, we’re Disney Imagineers, and we’re here at this show because we saw somebody was talking about Disneyland, and we had to know who the hell this person was because we knew that you aren’t associated with the Disney Corporation.
At first I thought they were going to slam an injunction on me or something like that, but actually what they ended up doing was they said, can you please come to Glendale and deliver this talk because I think that the people at Disney Imagineering need to hear this? I was like, awesome. I would love to. It’s always been my dream to go visit Imagineering. Just to wind the clock back for a second, when I was very, very, very young, maybe seven or eight, I was like, wow, it’d be awesome to work as a Disney imagineer.
But all the books that I write about it, I kind of consumed everything I could find about Walt Disney as a kid. It always sounded like you either had to be an architect or an engineer or a roboticist or something like that, or a very, very talented artist animator to work for Imagineering. So as I grew older, I’m like, well, I’m not the greatest artist. I’m not an engineer. I’m bad with math.
So I kind of wrote off Imagineering as a career path that just wasn’t for me. I ended up giving this talk actually twice. They invited me back so other people could hear it. At the end of the second presentation, one of the fellows introduced himself and he said, I would like to, have you ever thought about working here? And I’m like, yeah, I would love to. And he was like, all right, I’ll talk to you.
So probably a year went by and I got a phone call and name was Steve Tatham, and he had been at working for the park for 25 years by the time I met him. But he was like, Hey Scott, I’ve got this project I think you’d be perfect for. Would you like to come in and talk about it? And I said, well, Steve, I know enough about Disney and how their hiring structure works, and would I be hired as a cast member or a contractor, essentially? Would I be a green card or a blue card? And he said, oh, well, you’d be a contractor. I’m like, well, Steve, I live 15 minutes from my job. I have health insurance. I see my kids at night. Why would I take a contracting job? And I said, call me back when this is a cast member position.
And he said, okay. So then another six months went by and he said, I think I figured out how to make you a cast member. Why don’t you come on down? And I was just, by sheer coincidence, I had taken a day off and my kids were at being watched in daycare or at school or something. So I had just enough time to drive down to Glendale, talk to a couple of people, and then go back up so I could pick up my kids. And so I went down there and I talked to several people. One of the fellows, the guy who was running the department was talking about, I said, well, what are you guys working on?
And he mentioned what he was talking about. The group that he was associated with was a group called WD Pro. And these were the guys that did the website and they did games for websites and things like that. But as he was describing what they were going to be working on, I said, that doesn’t sound like WD Pro stuff. That sounds like Imagineering stuff. It was like the cat swallowed the canary. He didn’t say anything. Disney is famous about being very oblique at times when you’re talking to them. And there was one other fellow, a guy named Chad Jones, who’s now a very dear friend of mine.
I interviewed with him and he did this one thing where he said, look, I can’t tell you anything about what we’re working on. He says, but I can tell you if you come and work for us, you’ll be able to do this. And he pulled out his phone and he showed me a picture of him with his arm around the gal Red in Pirates of the Caribbean. And I saw that and I said, I’m in.
If I can do that, then I want to do that. That’s great. So I ended up negotiating for the job. We were talking about trying to fix pay and benefits and all that. And about halfway through the negotiation process, I get a phone call and they said, Scott, we have good news and bad news. I’m like, okay, give me the bad news. And he said, well, the bad news is the job that you applied for doesn’t really exist anymore. I’m like, okay, well what does that mean? And he said, well, we found a way to transform that job into another position that you can still get hired, but there’s kind of a fundamental change about it.
I said, alright, what’s that change? He said, well, you’d no longer be working for WD Pro, you’d be working for Disney Imagineering. I’m like, what’s the problem? There’s nothing bad about that. Of course, I want to be an Imagineer because ultimately that’s for many years Disney has a game division, but they also had a bad habit of laying everybody off. I kind of vowed to myself that as much as I love Disney, I would never work for them unless I was a cast member and B, if it was for Imagineering. And so here I am with this great opportunity. So I took the job and started my career in Imagineering.
Dan Heaton: Well, excellent. And I know we’ve covered some of the projects you worked on already, but I’d just love to know kind of in general, going into a place where you’re such a big fan of Disneyland, but obviously Imagineering it’s a business. It’s Disney’s a company, so what’s that kind of being a fan of something, but then also it being a job rather than just a fun passion thing?
Scott Rogers: It depends on who you’re talking to. I met some employees that it was not necessarily desirable to let people know you were a big fan. They thought that it would color your judgment and it would make you resistant to the idea of change or innovation. And I understand that. I totally get that, but I disagree with the mentality that you don’t want fans working for you.
Unfortunately, even from before I started, they knew I was a fan because I had done this talk and I had a lot of passion for it, and there were certain people that it made it difficult to work with. I don’t want to say hide your love under a blanket or anything like that, but if you want to get a job in anything that you’re a fan of, you got to downplay it because unfortunately people might use it against you.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean it’s not a surprise just given, like I mentioned, there’s so much business considerations and then there’s so many different types of people working there. I’m sure that everybody has kind of their own approach. I wanted to ask you too, before we finish too, about the VR project. You worked on Terminator Salvation: Fight for the Future, partially because I find it really interesting project, but also I’m curious, given we’d seen the Void where they have their locations with Disney and other areas, and just, I’m wondering just from that experience, what that was like, but also what do you think is the potential for that type of technology, notwithstanding COVID, can it really become even bigger than just a few places here and there?
Scott Rogers: First of all, working for Spaces might’ve been one of my favorite jobs ever, and I saw a lot of amazing things. When I worked at WDI, I worked in the R&D department, I used to see the black arts every day. I would purposely park in the furthest spot in the parking lot so I could walk through the show building and see everything that everybody was working on to get to my office. And so working at Spaces, spaces was kind of this really eclectic mix of video game industry people, Imagineers and folks that came from the movie special effects and computer graphics world.
So it was kind of this really great brew of all these really highly creative, talented people. And what we were making was essentially competition for the void, which was essentially location-based entertainment with VR. So you would put on a VR helmet and you had a computer that was strapped to your back. And in our experience, we gave you kind of a big gun that had different actuators in it, so it would rattle and make you feel like you’re blasting away at stuff. Then we would walk you into a 3D map, a virtual environment that was mapped to a real environment.
If you’ve done The Void like the Ghostbusters or the Star Wars or any of their other experiences, it pretty much was that. But ours was Terminator themed. We also had some extra things that I think made ours a little more special, and that was we had a motion platform that simulated you flying on an airplane that was getting attacked by the bad guys, and then you would land and then you would walk off onto this rooftop and we had physical props that you could pick up and carry around and then plug them into things and interact.
So it wasn’t just like pull a lover or press a button. You literally would pick up this power cell and you would look at it and it was crackling with electricity and then you could plug it into this network node and then all of a sudden things would light up and the weapon systems would activate and all this cool stuff. Meanwhile, you’re blasting away at Terminator robots that are trying to kill you. And it was spectacular. It was amazing to build. The technology was amazing.
There were also lots of other demos that we built. Still, one of the best things I’ve ever seen in VR was something that we did as a demo. We never actually turned it into a commercial product, but the two biggest problems with location-based experiences, and keep in mind, I firmly believe that that could have been the future of themed entertainment, but there were two things against it. One was it had a very low churn rate, so the amount of people you could bring through an experience. We were bringing in I think three to four people at a time, and they were maybe doing a 12 to 15 minute experience. So the THRC on that is terrible.
Compared to people eaters like the Haunted Mansion and Pirates and things like that. It’s just it’s not financially viable. The other thing about it was cleanliness was a huge concern even before covid, because you are sharing equipment, you are sharing headsets, you were sharing backpacks and straps, and we also had hand mounted and foot mounted sensors, so you could actually tell where your hands and feet were in space. So as you look down at yourself or at your friends, we had mapped Terminator robots onto your body. The story was that you were kind of beaming your consciousness into a robot body and so you could infiltrate the base.
So all those things had to be cleaned and between every churn of guest, and it just was very time consuming and very maintenance consuming, and we were constantly trying to figure out better ways to do it, but at the time it just didn’t exist, even though we were making really great strides on the interaction and the technology and the gameplay, these very basic human aspects were getting in the way, the user issues.
But then of course, COVID came along and just decimated the business. The void is gone, spaces is gone. Anybody who tried to do this was put out of business because of COVID, and it’s a damn shame because it is really amazing. I did a lot of the different experiences because I wanted to know what other people were doing, and they were all amazing and they were all really great, and they made you really feel like you were in this other world.
The only other equivalent I’ve ever seen of that is of course being at a Disneyland park or something like that, but Disneyland requires so much money and so much steel and so many people to make it happen compared to something that you have a team of 15 to 30 people that you can virtually. We could make anything. We could make our own Disneyland, and it was very exciting.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s really too bad and you bring up a good point that even that COVID, it would take years for even new vendors to crop up. It’s not going to happen soon. And like you said, it’s going to be different because the clean those, that’s a great example. And yeah, 15, 20 people, however many per hour is just, it’s not enough, not tenable, but it’s still really interesting to me and I still feel like there’s potential. It’s probably got delayed pretty far down the road though, I would think.
Scott Rogers: Yeah, maybe. I mean, who knows? The thing is this technology comes in cycles. The thing that a lot of people forget is this isn’t the first time VR. It’s not like VR is a new thing. VR has been around since the late ‘80s as a commercial product, but it went dormant for about 15-20 years and then it came back again. And then I think we’re kind of in a place, I don’t know how popular home VR is right now. I don’t think it’s that popular. So think that it might go dormant again for another 10-15 years. But I still believe that the future of VR is location based where it’s a destination rather than something that you live with at home.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I agree. Because I think even personally, I don’t have VR at home, but it’s the idea of you’re just, I mean, it can be impressive, but you’re still kind of just sitting in your house by yourself or something. It’s like, I don’t know if that’s the same.
Scott Rogers: And the great thing about The Void and the great thing about Spaces was there was a social component to it. And that I think is really the key. I mean, that’s what makes Disneyland so great is you go with your family, you go with your friends and you experience things together and you can talk about them and you can years later remember those memories and say, Hey, remember that time we went on the Jungle Cruise and Dad said that funny thing or whatever. That’s one of the great strengths of theme parks and themed entertainment is that social aspect.
Dan Heaton: Definitely. Well, I have one last kind of big question, and that’s seen, we’ve talked about, there have been examples with theme parks where gaming or interactivity, I mean there’s the simplest form is just you shoot a target and get points, and then there’s obviously more complicated things with phones and other devices. But I mean, what are some ways there could be things that have already been done or just things that you thought would be interesting that you think that gaming could work really well in a theme park or has worked really well? That would be something exciting because I do think that given the popularity of video games and of theme parks, there’s a lot of crossover there.
Scott Rogers: An imagineer that I am a very big fan of as a fellow named Jonathan Ackley, who was kind of the mastermind behind a lot of the experiences that you find in World Showcase in Epcot. So he did the Agent P and he did Kim Impossible, and he did the Pirates Adventure and he did the thing at Aulani. I think there’s one of those as well.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s great.
Scott Rogers: Yeah. And he was also one of the masterminds of the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, which another experience that I’m very sad I’ll never get to experience at a Disney Park, but I think that his team’s strategy really was the best way to go because it was this experience that you could do that deepened your Disney experience. And for those who aren’t familiar with these, these are little adventures that you’d get a flip phone or you might get a magic card or some sort of, I think, what’s the thing in the pirate adventure? It’s like some sort of compass or something like that.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s like a map.
Scott Rogers: Right, and you go around and I mean, for those of you that know video game terms, they’re essentially fetch quest. You’re going from place to place. But when you get to that place and you kind of do the very simple action that the game asks you to do, usually it has something to do with put something next to something else. So very, very simple that anybody can do. Then you would get some sort of fun reaction usually through an audio animatronic or sound or effects or whatever.
They were really charming, but what was really great was they were hidden. And so they could occur in a place that as if you were a guest, you could have passed by a dozen times and never realized that there was something there. They were so beautifully hidden and so seamlessly integrated into the world that it created this what we would say in Imagineering delight and surprise, we always want to create delight and surprise, and that’s what these experiences did.
They created these little moments that were unique to you. Only you and your party experienced them, but it wasn’t so personalized that it was like, “Hey, Dan, thanks for coming by”, which is that idea is always floating around all Imagine it’s been floating around Imagineering forever, but I think it’s the wrong way to go. I don’t think that people want to be called out specifically, but I think that they want to have these experiences that are shared that then they later can go, hey, remember that time we went on that Pirate Adventure and we saw that cannon shoot and it blew a hole in the wall, and that was really cool. Nobody else saw that but us.
That creates this intimacy with the park. That very much reminds me of my scavenger hunt days. And I think that that’s the key. I think you’re thinking big. You’re creating this big world with these big attractions that are big draws that will get people to come and check out the spectacle. But then once they’ve seen the spectacle, what now, and that’s what these experiences did, was they created these smaller, more intimate moments that really stood out in people’s minds. And I’m sure that if you talk to people that have played these experiences, I’m sure that they’ll just think of them very fondly.
Dan Heaton: Oh yeah. I mean, I haven’t done all of them, but the ones we’ve done, Aulani is really cool. We were lucky enough to go out there and do that, and my girls still talk about it, and I think that’s a great answer. And I think, like you said, Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom seems to be done, and a lot of it seems to be done, but there’s still a lot of potential to do some sort of scavenger hunt or even just like you said, an individual experience. Yeah, it doesn’t do that much for me when I see my name show up on Small World at the end. “Thank you, Dan.”
But those kinds of things that, like you said, like we’ve talked about the whole time, the experiences that people have in the parks that stick with you aren’t always just the biggest rides. They can be a lot of different things, so it’s great. Well, this has been great, Scott. I’ve enjoyed it. I know that you’ve written multiple books, you’re doing a lot of things. So if anyone wants to learn more about your books or connect with you online or anything, where should they go?
Scott Rogers: Well, there’s a lot of places you can find me if you just Google “Scott Rogers Game Designer”, but nowadays my answer is read my book and watch my movie. So we’ve already talked about the book, which is Level Up: The Guide to Great Video Game Design, which you can buy an Amazon or anywhere books are sold. But I also had the honor of being in a film about board game designers called Game Master, and that’s on Amazon Prime and lots of other streaming services.
So if you want to learn about what it’s like to be a board game designer and the film focuses on five really talented game designers, I would check that out because they did a great job and it’s a lot of fun. Otherwise, if you want to just say hi, you can reach out to me at @MightyBedbug on Twitter or on Instagram. Those are probably the best places to find me.
Dan Heaton: Excellent. Well, I’ve not seen that movie and I meant to ask you about that, so I’m excited to check it out because we haven’t even gotten into all of your work on for game design, and there’s just so much. I feel like we barely scratched the surface, but it was awesome to talk with you. Thanks so much, Scott.
Scott Rogers: It was really great. Dan, thank you very much for having me on.
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