Village Roadshow Theme Parks’ Fright Nights event has become an annual spectacle over the years.
Taking place at Warner Bros. Movie World on the Gold Coast for the month of October and in the lead up to Halloween, the theme park is transformed into a downright spooky precinct, featuring terrifying mazes, rides after dark and live entertainment.
Now, Village Roadshow have kicked it up a notch by teaming with local creative technology company, Taste Labs, for an even more streamlined experience.
The companies new initiative, “Horror Quest,” is a digital choose-your-own-adventure experience inspired by the original stories, characters and world of the Fright Nights event. Fans can create their own character, enter the Fright Nights universe and make a series of choices that shape their journey – with a brand-new collectible trading card unlocked every night for the month of October. “Horror Quest” can be played at Movie World or even at home.
“Fright Nights has always been about immersive storytelling, bringing together compelling characters, detailed environments and live experiences that place our guests at the centre of the action. Fright Night’s ‘Horror Quest’ adds an exciting new dimension to that experience, allowing fans to discover more of the story around their visit to the park and continue engaging with the world of Fright Nights throughout October,” Village Roadshow Theme Parks CMO, Renee Soutar, said.
“As audiences increasingly move between physical and digital entertainment, we are always looking at new ways to evolve the guest experience. This collaboration with Taste Labs gives us an opportunity to explore how digital storytelling can complement what happens inside the park, deepen engagement with the original Fright Nights stories and give fans even more reasons to be part of the event.”
We sat down with Taste Labs’ co-founder and CEO, Alex Flamsteed, to talk all about it.
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Variety Australia: Can you give us an overview of how “Horror Quest” came to be and your involvement in it?
Alex Flamsteed: It’s one of the first products from our company. We’ve been in conversation with Village Roadshow Theme Parks for quite some time about these kinds of experiences. It started as a way to engage fans before, during, and after they go to the theme parks, and we’re using our technology to make that possible with personalised, gaming-style experiences. With Fright Nights, we’re creating the digital layer, and that’s “Horror Quest.”
There are four mazes in the park that have been developed over many years by Chris Grew, the creative director. We’ve taken those stories, the art, the photography, and the full backstory of those mazes, and developed them into a choose-your-own-adventure horror game. It’s something for people to do before and after they’ve been to Fright Nights. Each day you’re presented with a chapter of the story, and you make choices: go down the stairs, go through the hallway, run away. The choices you make shape the trading card you get.”
Fright Nights has been running at Movie World for a few years now. Do you need to go to the park, or go multiple times, to complete the game?
No, you don’t even have to attend Fright Nights to play! It’s a digital experience. To complete it, you sign in each day and play throughout October. If you join late, you can catch up, too. Say you joined on the 30th. You could play 30 chapters back-to-back, which would be a cool experience as well.
Was this something Village Roadshow went to market looking for, or did you pitch it?
We pitched it proactively to Clark Kirby, the CEO. We’d been in conversation with him for some time about in-line entertainment, which basically means extending the experience of a ride out to everyone waiting in line. When it’s busy, the queues at theme parks can get pretty long. All of this stemmed from asking how we bring people into the world of that IP and give them something cool to do while they wait.
That’s where it started, and it’s grown from there. We expect to work with them on other things as well, but this is the first one with Village Roadshow.
Have you been to Fright Nights yourself?
We have. We went last year, and we’ve been a couple of times. We’ve actually been to the two Fright Nights that have already happened this year. What they continue to do with those mazes is awesome, and terrifying. You walk through, and there are actors jumping out at you. It’s a major production, and it’s good fun.
In entertainment, the rise of AI is a big, scary word for a lot of people. How do you see it from the tech side?
It is a crazy time we live in. At Taste, we’re very much on the artist’s side. We’re building our entire platform to protect rights holders and artists, and to give 100% of the control to the rights holder. We believe the only person who should be able to grant permission to use your IP is the artist, from the ground up.
This is a perfect example: we’re working directly with the rights holder, Village Roadshow, and building a product around their IP. We use fine-tuned machine learning and AI in very specific areas, only where it’s the one way to get the user experience we want. That means personalising the story. We’re not using it to create or write stories. It’s all based on Chris Grew’s work, and our writer, Joshua Scicluna, has expanded those stories. The AI comes in with how the user explores the story. The choices you make personalise your journey through it.
That’s an exciting opportunity for creativity. Fans can get that much closer to their favourite artists and brands, because they get this interactive, personalised kind of content.
In the industry, there’s definitely a lot of fear out there, and rightfully so. We’ve put a submission into the Joint Committee on AI here in Australia, and we’re fighting for artists and for some clarity around how IP is used and how it relates to copyright. We feel all control should be given to the artist, because it can be done. It is possible.
If you could sum up the top line of your submission, what’s the main concern?
Australian copyright law already gives artists the rights. The way it sits is correct. What’s missing is the technology to enforce those rights and register the usage when AI uses their work millions and millions of times. That’s where we see the issue. What we’ve built is a solution.
The core of our submission is a shared national standard so licences can be read and checked by machines. We also want consent that’s detailed and revocable, not just a tick box or a yes/no. There’s been talk of opt-in and opt-out, and we don’t believe that’s a solution. It’s a bit of a Band-Aid. Beyond that, test the technology and back the Aussie companies that are building these solutions, because there’s a happy middle ground to be found, and it is possible.
That’s probably why this initiative stands out. Village Roadshow’s theme parks are an Australian institution, and here you are starting something new and homegrown.
Exactly, and we appreciate them backing us and doing this with us. It’s a wild time in the creative world with AI, but they’re very forward-thinking. As rights holders, they want a solution that gives them control and lets them be innovative with their IP without giving away the keys to the kingdom. And they definitely don’t need to.
Where does this go from here? Is there a five-year plan, or is it one and done?
It’s definitely not one and done. We’ve been discussing other things with them, but the objective is to start creating these types of experiences, then roll them out and scale them up. All of this comes from enhancing the fan experience in the park. If you can give fans different ways to engage with the rides and the IP they love, like the Fright Nights ‘Horror Quest,’ then the plan is definitely to scale that up.
See here for more details.