Disneyland
was designed and constructed as something like a movie brought to
life in three dimensions, so that you could walk through it and
experience it as your own story. The ground at the entrance resembled
a red carpet (at first), emerging from the entry tunnel is like a
curtain lifting and revealing the scene, the Main Street windows
feature “credits,” etc. But while a theme park can include a lot
of movie-like content, visiting one can never really be comparable to
watching a film. The audience of a film is entirely passive; the
story on the screen unfolds as it will no matter how the viewers feel
about it, or even whether they are paying attention. Outside of a few
avant-garde experiments, there is nothing interactive
about a movie.
But theme parks are inherently interactive. Even if you just wander
around and don't actively engage with the attractions, you still
choose where and how you wander, plotting the “story” in the
process.
My
point, I suppose, is that the reason Walt Disney and the Imagineers
thought of the Disneyland concept as a living movie is that video
games hadn't been invented yet.
Exploring even the most cinematic theme park is a lot more like
playing a sandbox-style video game than it is like watching a movie.
Think about it. You start the game/enter the park and get your
overworld map. If you need “quests,” you can talk to an NPC (park
employee) and find out what is available to do (attractions) and the
difficulty of succeeding (wait times). At Disneyland itself, most of
the area themes have ready counterparts in many games, especially
classic platformers—you can visit the jungle level (Adventureland),
the desert level (Frontierland), the outer space level
(Tomorrowland), and the zany level (Mickey's Toontown). Most “levels”
have atmospheric music playing non-stop. There's even a “final
battle” at the end, although in this case, instead of an evil
overlord, you're fighting human foot traffic.
Given
all that, wouldn't it be cool if there were a Disneyland video game?
Well...there have been some. A half-dozen or so—not bad for
something that is usually seen as an adaptation of works of media, rather than a work of media in its own right that can be
adapted. (Although I should note that only one of these games
actually takes place in Disneyland itself. Likewise, only one of them
takes place in Orlando's Magic Kingdom. The rest of the time, the
game's designers meld the two parks together into a genericized
“Magic Kingdom”1
containing salient features of both.) Perhaps the most interesting
thing about them is how different
they all are. To the best of my knowledge, none of them was ever an
overwhelming success...perhaps Disney Interactive is still searching
for the perfect template for the perfect theme park-based game.
That's okay. So am I.