There are people who review theme park rides. Did you know this? I didn’t, until a recent trip to Universal Studios.
Here are some general things I learned on this trip:
— Rides are getting more narrative than I remember from childhood; though possibly I just don’t remember very well. I suppose I recall the Pinocchio and Peter Pan rides at Disneyland as trying to tell or at least illustrate a story, with ride events corresponding to the major parts of the movies, but others were simply about immersing the rider in a certain kind of environment. All the Universal Studios rides tried to present a cohesive story, even if it was a very short one.
— Spitting water at the audience in judicious quantities is the cutting edge of awesome. Bonus points if it’s because someone in the story just sneezed.
— Blowing air on the back of the neck is also big.
Three particular cases of story-ride:
The Revenge of the Mummy ride bills itself as a “psychological thrill ride”. This appears to be a reference to the fact that there are creepy dark effects, fog, fire, flashes of light, and so on; nonetheless, the ride does involve classic roller-coaster components, with sudden drops and stops, launches, and sharp turns.
The premise, if we can call it that, is that the rider has attracted the attention of the mummy, and is now cursed. Our soul has been taken. The most audible and most oft-repeated dialogue is about how the mummy now possesses our souls and we will never, ever escape from this environment (dark, insect-filled, with flames and scary faces and strobes and so on).
It’s really a very short ride, though, so — despite the impressive effects — it’s a little strange to be told “YOUR SOUL IS MINE FOREVER, MWAHAHAHAHA”… and then mere seconds later bucketed back out to the disembarkation pier.
As I was sitting there waiting to be unloaded from my car, I realized the ride was missing a trick. There would be a very effective metatheatrical way of making the rider *genuinely* nervous at this point: to approach the disembarkation pier, stop for a bit as though we were going to get out, without loosening the safety bars… and then abruptly start again without ever letting that happen. Make the rider think he was now stuck. *That* would have been cool.
The Simpsons ride is a motion-simulator ride, with a car that doesn’t move on tracks, but jiggles and shakes and has screens surrounding the riders so that it looks as though we’re flying through the air.
There is a story that begins with some preview footage in the waiting areas and then plays out during the course of the ride itself. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a ride with so much dialogue, as the villains and the main Simpsons characters are all present in the environment of the story being told.
I think another reason I found this so effective is that I find the projected cartoony surroundings more coherent than a real-world environment containing animatronic effects that are obviously fake. Does anyone in any sense believe in the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park ride? On the Simpsons ride, everything is animated, but it’s all equally animated, so the immersion is greater.
Shrek 4D is set in a big theater — though a theater with seats that can move both horizontally and vertically, plus air and water effects. 3D polarized glasses are required.
To my mind, Shrek is considerably less successful than the Simpsons ride, though the story is longer and the 3D glasses reasonably effective.
The problem is the inconsistency with which the special effects are employed. Simpsons has a coherent and thoroughly second-person narrative story-line: your car full of passengers has gotten dragged into an absurd Simpsonian disaster at an amusement park. (There’s lots of meta-comedy about what a ripoff amusement parks are, which suits the Simpsons well.)
In the Shrek ride, the audience doesn’t represent any of the main characters, but is just along as a third-party observer. Sometimes when one of the characters gets wet, or experiences a bumpy ride, we do too. Sometimes not.
Then, too, there’s a lead-in sequence (like in the Simpsons ride) where the audience watches a little movie before going in — but the narrative of the intro movie (we’ve been captured by the angry ghost of Lord Farquaad, who is going to torture us for information about the whereabouts of Shrek and Fiona) has nothing to do with the story that happens in the theater with the moving seats.
Anyway. It feels like a lot of what’s going on in all three cases is play with the boundary between story and real life: the “surprise” moments are the ones where what’s going on in the story somehow affect the rider physically, or the story is used as a bit of misdirection to distract from something scary that’s about to happen on the ride track.
This isn’t always done with an especially coherent aesthetic goal in mind, and I’m not sure I should be expecting a lot more — these are experiences that necessarily last only a few minutes, and they’re constrained quite a bit by the range of viable special effects. It’s mostly interesting that a narrative framework is considered desirable at all.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
I’m under the impression that the Pirates of the Caribbean was fairly narrative forty years ago. So these things at least have roots going way back.
Have you read The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell? The author worked at Disney’s VR studio for a while, and he writes extensively about their experiments with “CAVEs” (Computer Augmented Virtual Environments), which seem to have been halfway between a videogame and a Simpsons-style simulator ride.
I seem to recall PotC being a little more… atmospheric, for lack of a better description; more about being in a given environment than following a story. (I also remember it being a lot longer, but as I haven’t been on it since the late ’80s, my recollection is a bit hazy.)
Don’t know The Art of Game Design — thanks for the suggestion.
Uncharted 2 is a roller coaster ride with a bunch of annoying climbing puzzles sprinkled throughout.
I was expecting a post detailing how narrative can be viewed as a roller-coaster, with its peaks and valleys corresponding perhaps to action and dialogue, or to the protagonist’s successes and difficulties throughout the story. I’m sure I’ve read such a theory somewhere, and if I haven’t someone should write one – but it turns out you meant actual roller coasters. :)
_Dream Park_ (Niven and Barnes, 1981) is a classic romp with SF writers making up how the Ultimate Theme Park of the Future would run.
It has buckets of ideas. The haunted house waiting room isn’t shabby Victorian, it’s sterile steel, with a whiff of disinfectant fading away as you walk in… a shill among the tour group, to be yanked away by the zombies and devoured… right about the fourth time the mechanical voice says “please stay on the path for your own safety” — it’s a walking tour — the glowing green path-lights start to fade out… It’s set in 2051 so the park relies on magical hologram technology, but it’s the right attitude.
Was this at the California Universal?
I was at the Orlando one a couple years ago, and the Mummy ride did have the exact trick you say would be great, with a fake disembarkment, complete with a fake employee who turns out to be another incarnation of the evil mummy.
Yeah, I was on the Hollywood version of the ride.
And, man, now I’m sad I didn’t see the real version. But also kind of pleased that I was right about where the concept could have been going.
Besides speed, it’s hard to make an effective roller coaster narrative, what with the mechanical noise, screaming, and wind in the rider’s eyes. The “Batman: The Escape” ride at Astroworld (RIP) told its story in the queue area, but opted for sheer vestibular overload (dampening out any visual or auditory stimuli) on the ride itself.
Queue storytelling suffers from imprecise pacing. If relatively few people are in line, ambling through the line area while admiring the audiovisuals risks annoying those behind in line. If the ride is popular and progress through the line is slow, one hears the same looping video 7x in a row, made more tedious by hearing fellow riders mocking the video on every iteration.
The Simpsons ride did something clever in that it parceled people up into small rooms to watch the preliminary video together before putting them into the ride proper, which dealt with the pacing issue. (There was some less-important goofiness going on in the line area, which I confess I largely ignored because I was chatting with my companion about something else entirely.)
But… yeah. I had sort of assumed, going in, that the rides were going to be more atmospheric than narrative, which is what I (perhaps incorrectly) recall about similar things from when I was a kid.