Good lord, I suck at keeping this updated. It might have something to do with the 10-11 hours work days (disclaimer: which I voluntarily work).

Anyway, I need to rave about something: the Disney empire.

I went to Disneyland last weekend, which was my first interaction with a Disney park in probably a decade. And I must say, I was absolutely floored by the quality of the experiences that Disney creates. Read on for some anecdotes on my trip and the brand in general, and on why I just fell in love with a kid’s theme park.

Let me start with an example of what impressed me the most; on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, there’s a point where your boat emerges from a cavern into a much larger room… and it genuinely feels like you just went outside. The air smells like outside air, and the perfectly-synced audio/lighting/splash effects on the water really, honestly do feel like canon balls hitting the surface. But my absolute favorite part of the experience was the ceiling.

Yes, the ceiling. I went on that ride three times this past weekend, but the first time, as soon as the boat went ‘outside’, I gaped in awe for a second or two and then stared at the ceiling until my eyes adjusted, determined to figure out how the hell Disney was creating such a stupidly convincing experience. After my eyes adjusted… I realized that the ceiling was simply a high, black, slightly-patterned wall with curved edges. The room had curved edges just so that riders wouldn’t be able to see the ceiling creases unless they were looking for them!

While a fairly simple example, this degree of attention to detail really impressed me, and I began paying closer attention to all of Disney’s rides for similar bits of polish that would normally go unnoticed, but that really separated Disney rides from any other rides I’d ever been on.

What else caught my attention? The Haunted House, for one. There was a room with a ghost bride with some poorly-done projection, but other than that the effects were spectacular – my favorite part being the four stone busts singing in the graveyard. I had to stare at them for about five seconds as we passed to ensure that they were simply projections! I was also extremely impressed by ToonTown – as you enter this area of the park, the cartoony skyline looks real – almost eerily so. Tom Sawyer’s Island was also one of my favorites, but that’s mostly because I liked running around inside of the kiddie caves.

Finally, no post about Disneyland would be complete without a mention of Toy Story Mania, made by Schell Games! It’s one of the most popular rides at Disneyland apparently, and easily the longest line we waited in. Here’s a picture of  my Disneyland Partner In Crime Rick, a programmer from Schell, posing in front of the ride as we were about to get on:

Finally, to wrap everything up, there was another story that came to mind when I was marveling over the Disney experience. I had a professor who recently got married, and she told us something interesting about her wedding planner – she would never say no. Crazier requests would get a hearty caveat, of course, but she would never flat-out say that any request was impossible. One day my professor asked her if this was conscious, and she replied that it definitely was; it was something she learned during her time at Disney.

Anyway, I just wanted to rave about the Disney standards of quality, as it were. I consider myself rather hard to impress, and I was absolutely floored. Definitely go see a Disney theme park sometime soon if you haven’t any time in the recent past!

PS – I’m tagging this as ‘game design’ related as well, since I think there’s a lot to be taken out of the Disney philosophy in terms of game design repercussions, even though Disney isn’t strictly in the ‘games’ category.