Sentimental Paleontology: Legends of Frontierland

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Disneyland is primarily a locals' park. Management may not like it—they might prefer a scenario where they can keep selling the same old thing to a new batch of rubes every week instead of constantly racking their brains trying to keep an experienced and therefore discerning crowd entertained—but it is what it is. If you ask me, it's for the best. Without the need to impress repeat visitors, would we have gotten the Indiana Jones Adventure with its three potential “treasures” and unpredictable vehicle motion? Without those picky Annual Passholders making up such a large percentage of the crowd, would there be any incentive to keep changing up the parades, fireworks, and live entertainment? If the average guest didn't know where the good off-property restaurants were, would Management bother to ensure quality food options inside the park(s)?

And sometimes, that drive to keep the locals enthralled produces results that are just plain...well, enthralling. Pure magic. In the summer of 2014, they achieved just that, and in perhaps the unlikeliest of ways, with a temporary attraction called Legends of Frontierland.

It's hard to put a name to just what Legends even was. The simplest term to apply—the one the park and most of the participants used—was “game.” And that's not wrong—it was certainly a game—but where things get muddy is when you try to pin down what kind of game it was.

On the surface, Legends of Frontierland was...let's call it “live-action team Risk.” The base mechanic was a land rush—you signed up, chose one of two teams and got your color-coded nametag, and then ran around doing odd jobs (assigned primarily at the Telegraph Office) in order to earn enough “bits” to buy a parcel of land for your team, which would be labeled on a map near the Frontierland entrance so players could keep track of progress over the course of the day. At six p.m., the game concluded for the day in a ceremony at the Golden Horseshoe, and the team with the most parcels of land was declared the winner, huzzah! Er...yee-haw!

There was a little more to it than that, of course. You could—for example—attempt a shortcut to riches by gambling on a card game in the Golden Horseshoe. You could target fellow players with hand-drawn Wanted posters, or bring in the bounties on existing posters, consigning the player so targeted to cool their heels in the Jail for a few minutes (provided, that is, you won the “fight” as simulated by Rock-Paper-Scissors). If you had a few real dollars to spend, you could visit L.B.'s elixir wagon, buy a cup of Charm, Luck, or Knowledge, and reap the benefits when the Cast Members running the whole enterprise noticed the label on your drink. Do you see it yet? No? That's okay. These are, after all, just minor complications to the basic land rush premise that resets each day.

But...what if you came back the next day? Wouldn't that be pointless, since the game resets? But you see, I did a tricky thing with language just then. The map reset each day. But the game—the real game—decidedly did not. Because the real game was not about buying land for your team at all.

It was about creating and portraying a character and interacting with other characters—some of them players like yourself, others Cast Members putting on the performance of their careers over the course of several weeks. And what you accomplished on that end? Stayed. If you made a good showing of yourself, the Cast Members and other recurring players would remember you. You would become part of the game's world—a living world, not only changing day to day but potentially changing in response to what you did. That goes way, way beyond live-action team Risk. Once you got beyond that superficial premise, Legends of Frontierland proved to be...a roleplaying game, and a really intricate one at that. Quite possibly the world's first massively multi-player offline roleplaying game.

What might be the best part was that they didn't tell you any of this when you signed up. You had to discover it for yourself. Maybe you'd be chatting with the Cast Members...you know what, I'm just going to call them the NPCs, because that's what they were...maybe you'd be chatting with the NPCs and pick up on hints to their unique backstories, giving you the clue that there was more to this town than first met the eye. Maybe you'd bag your first parcel of land, think, Now what?, and start to consider what you might actually do if you were a landowner in an Old West town. Maybe you'd do a stint in the Jail early on, get a giddy thrill out of the notion of being an outlaw, and decide to let that flavor your play style for the rest of the day and see where it took you. If, as the movie title says, there are a million ways to die in the West, then there are at least two million ways to live there, and any of them could be the doorway by which a player found their way into the deeper, more creative experience hiding behind the land map.

You can see how this favored Annual Passholders, since few others would have the luxury of coming back day after day, to watch the game develop and contribute to that development. The land rush premise was accessible to just about anyone, and the inclusion of “just about anyone” kept things busy enough to remain interesting (and probably ensured that the suits would allow it to continue for the planned span of time), but the real rewards had to be earned. You had to be both willing and able to put in the time and effort required to engage with the game on that deeper level.

I don't know if I can even convey to my own satisfaction, let alone that of my readers, how significant this was. I keep saying that Disneyland is at its best when it draws you into the worlds and stories it presents as a participant, but the vast majority of the time, your participation can only be passive. On the rare occasions when it is (or seems) active, it's usually pre-scripted (e.g. the Haunted Mansion's séance) and always inconsequential—forget lasting until the end of the day, even the best “interactive” ride resets as soon as you step out of the vehicle. For just one summer, however, Disneyland managed to present something truly meaningful, something we could create for ourselves as we went along and explore in the process of creating it, something we could take home at the end of the day and still have in the morning, ready to pick up where we left off. With Legends of Frontierland, Disneyland transcended its very existence as a theme park to become...something else. Something that doesn't even have a name yet, because so far the experiment has not been repeated.

So far. I'm going to come back to that point later.

Want to know one of the strange things about my position on Legends? I have this strong a response to it...from playing it once. Well, once-and-a-half. I tried it out briefly on one occasion, and quickly realized that there was potential greatness there but also that I wasn't prepared to drop the rest of Disneyland on the spur of the moment to get involved on the level the game clearly deserved. So I came back another day—which happened to be the planned last day (they wound up deciding to extend it by a few weeks pretty much at the last minute) of the game—with the intent to spend the entire day at it. In the meantime, I did some prep.

And by “prep,” I obviously mean that I bought a cowboy hat. A cheap felt one from Party City, which I embellished with a few feathers to make it unique:

It's not as trivial as it might seem. During that initial test romp, one of the things that clued me in as to Legends's vast potential was that I kept getting the urge to greet people by tugging on the brim of my hat, which I wasn't wearing. The game made it feel perfectly natural to just slide into the role of a frontier citizen. I am normally very introverted and it takes a lot to get me to talk to strangers...unless I am roleplaying, making me effectively someone else, someone who is likely more outgoing. Legends brought me into that headspace without any real effort on my part.

It may have helped that the day I played had been going to be* the last day of the game before they changed their minds and extended it. The last day of any ongoing thing tends to be a big deal, and this was no exception: the Cast Members all played their roles to the hilt and were extra-engaged with anyone making the effort, including Yours Truly. Once I got my parcel of land, I decided I would set myself up as the town inventor** and have my workshop there, and things just snowballed from there—I devised a fanciful plan for converting the town to electricity generated by petting cats, found fellow players to “invest” in my plan, and basically went nuts with this character I created on the fly. I wound up achieving the coveted title of Legend of Frontierland all in one go—again, last day, so they were being generous with the certificates—and overall, I had such a great time that I consider it one of the best Disneyland trips of my life.

Name redacted to protect my identity.

And because they got it wrong. Dangit.

By all accounts, Legends was a rousing success. The friend who introduced me to it still talks about the people he met and bonded with over the course of that summer. So why hasn't it been brought back?

The cynic in me says it's because it was too difficult to monetize. Interestingly enough, Disneyland hosted a second game that summer, The Adventureland Trading Company, which was pay-to-play. For five dollars (or seven-fifty in a few cases), you would be given a simple “quest,” and upon completing it would receive a “juju,” a souvenir charm specific to said quest. There were nine quests in all, none of them requiring more than about twenty minutes of your time to complete. I didn't bother with that one—it struck me as no more rewarding than simply purchasing souvenirs, with the added headache of being made to jump through hoops in order to get them. But a lot of people went for it, and Disneyland turned a healthy profit as a result.

This would not have worked for Legends, however. It worked for Trading Company because the quests were self-contained...and effectively single-player, in that even if no one else in the whole park was interested, you could still plunk down your five bucks, do the scavenger hunt, and collect your juju. Legends, due to its ongoing storyline, absolutely required a large number of players who could keep coming back day after day, and making them pay each time would have killed it. (All this is explained in more detail in this blog post by superior blogger David Daut.) Part of me wonders if Management decided not to bring it back because it didn't inherently rake in massive profits.

But on the other hand, Trading Company has not been revived either. Moreover, a rumor that surfaced last year suggests that Legends never came back because it was never meant to be a regular feature. It was more of a test run for the basic concept of a themed roleplaying experience, a more polished version of which will be introduced...

...in Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge.

This rumor is not 100% confirmed, but it seems extremely plausible. One of the things people love about Star Wars is its detailed setting, which invites you to imagine yourself a part of it. We already know that Galaxy's Edge will represent a remote outpost planet—the science-fiction equivalent of a frontier town. And factions competing over resources in such a place? That premise is baked right into Star Wars. If they do launch a Legends-like game when the new land opens...it's going to be an enormous hit.

That said, I would hope the factions in question wouldn't just be the Empire/First Order/Dark Side versus the Rebellion/Resistance/Light Side. The main reason is that I'm pretty sure the bad guys would always win, because of age demographics. In a straightforward good vs. evil scenario, kids usually identify with the good guys. Six-year-olds might find Darth Vader impressive, but hardly any of them want to be Darth Vader.*** They want to be Luke and Leia and Han (and Rey and Finn and Poe and Rose), the heroes who beat the villains and save the day. Teens and adults, on the other hand, are more likely to see themselves as potential villains—ironically or whatever—and far, far better at separating themselves from a role they happen to be playing. It's a rare young child who can commit to acting bad without worrying that it means they are bad, but teens and adults do it all the time. So you'd end up with a Dark Side composed almost entirely of teens and adults, and a Light Side skewing much younger. The Dark Side would have an insurmountable skill advantage in playing any sort of game, much less one that relies so heavily on emotional investment.

This didn't happen much in Legends—there was a sense in which the Frontierlanders were the “good guys” and the Rainbow Ridgers were the “bad guys,” but it was basically flavor text. The Ridgers had a pretty sympathetic backstory, their “villainy” mostly boiled down to a reputation for rowdiness, and you could make any sort of character you wanted for either side without raising any eyebrows. The classic Star Wars clash, though, is utterly black-and-white. You've got the heroes on one side, and the Space Nazis on the other. No one should really want to identify with the latter, even for a game.

So that's one reason I hope they wouldn't go with the obvious factions. Another is that it would make things far more interesting if there were more than two factions. The players could experiment with coalitions (and betrayals!) and especially if the factions were made up just for the game rather than imported from the film franchise, simply defining what each group was about could be part of play.

At this point I'm just spinning my wheels in a slippery mud puddle of speculation, so I'll close thusly: Legends of Frontierland was a phenomenon. We could be on the cusp of an entirely new genre of themed entertainment here. Whether they bring it back as-is, as part of Galaxy's Edge, or in another context, Disney had better not let this one get away.

* Paging Dr. Dan Streetmentioner...

** Because I am a nerd.

*** And no one wants to be Kylo Ren.