Concepts - Theme Park Ride Interview Assignment

Theme Park Ride Concept


This was a very early piece of concept work with schematics for a job interview at a company that added themes to theme park rides and put on high tech shows.

I was asked for ride ideas that could be built in the future and this is what I came up with taking inspiration from several films and rides / interactive tours I had seen.

The concept I came up with combined an interactive adventure, putting the ‘riders’ into a setting you could expect in a film like Aliens, they get to do many things seen in films from a space dogfight, to scrambling around a sci fi base, being attacked by monsters, getting into a laser gun fight, dogfight in space and spaceship crash that they may have wanted to try, we through in a few battles for them to take part in all as a warm up for a super drop ride.

As said this is pretty old. I have not been able to find the original digital Corel Draw files. All I could do was to scan an old copy or the document that had been printed on a low resolution late 90s colour printer and try and clean up the images in Photoshop.

There was very little time to produce anything and I had no CAD training so these just show a rough set of floor plans and concept schematic for the drop ride space dogfight section.

  • The ride concept was to be called Escape from talon 1 and combined several stages.

  • The first was to be led around a maze / base by actor soldiers, very much like something out of a movie like alien. This would include clichés like crawling through the air ducts having pulled off a grate. Very similar to the Alien War Tour that was in the Trocadero centre in London in the 1990s

  • A sneaky trick would be plants in the groups who get killed, grabbed and eaten by monsters, shot by ‘alien troopers’ invading the Talon 1 base etc. 

  • The group would be led to a arsenal of laser weapons then to a gantry and pulls into a laser gun fight similar to that in Quasar / Laser Tag centres only part of the set would react to shots blasting holes etc.

  • Once the other side is cleared the group would be led over a bridge, to a boarding tunnel and into a space ship set, under which there would be ball laser gun torrents for them to get into.

  • Here they would be belted in similar to a rollercoaster ride only holding the cannons and roll upside down.

  • They would then have the  of rocketing into space as the ship and a surrounding dome screen using an Imax like projector would be a drop ride unit pulled fast to the top of the tower.

  • Unlike others their view would not be that or the theme park below but a rocket into orbit. They would then have what would be effectively a virtual reality space battle very much like the escape from the Death Star battle in the original Star Wars film.

  • During this the ‘Ship’ would appear to be hit and the view would be falling back down to hover above the theme park at which time the screen canopy may open (or continue the VR) at which time they are crashed down to earth with just the last of the shield saving them in the impact.

  • Their seat would then turn upright with sirens, smoke and pyros scream at them to drop down the escape chutes (think tube slide) into a foam pit in the souvenir shop, bringing the ride and adventure to a shocking stop.

  • The graphic above was to show this last stage designed in Corel Draw over a decade ago. The videos from rides and films below should give some sense to the concept I came up with.

  • The videos below should give as feel of what this may be like.

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