Whether it’s Transformers or Jurassic Park, Super Mario or Harry Potter, theme parks are trying to send their guests into what seems like a fully realized world—often one ripped from a book, movie, or video game.
But to make such an immersive experience work in the real world, designers need to combine excellent stories with grand visuals, Bob Dennis, senior director of creative studio and resort development at Universal Beijing Resort, said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Design event on Thursday.
When it comes to building an experience that theme park guests will remember, designers need more than just a grand canvas. “You need a beautiful picture, but you also need a logical story that the guests can connect to,” he said.
Dennis has worked on theme park design for over 35 years, getting his start in 1988 as an art director for Sanrio’s Harmonyland, based on Japan’s southern Kyushu island. Theme park design has changed a lot in the following decades, he noted—if only that everything in the Eighties needed to be designed by pencil, due to the lack of computers.
But the theme park designer noted that emotions, and its connection with consumers, have remained just as important now as it did decades ago. “The best connection is always made through emotions,” he said. Dennis highlighted eight emotions—joy, sadness, disgust, trust, fear, anger, anticipation, and surprise—as part of his toolkit for building an emotional experience. And all the emotions, even those like disgust and anger, can be leveraged to build a narrative.
“You don’t want to manipulate people, and you don’t want to use emotions as trickery,” he says. “But in the story itself, we also engage [in] many of the emotions. You may be angry at the villain.”
Universal Resorts’ theme parks also feature experiences leveraging ideas and intellectual property from partners like Warner Bros., the owner of the Harry Potter films, and Nintendo, the developer of video game series like Super Mario.
Universal’s Orlando resort opened “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter,” its first Harry Potter-themed area, to the public in 2010. Similar areas are now found in several of Universal’s parks, including its newest in Beijing, which opened in 2021.
“Super Nintendo World,” an area based on the world of Nintendo’s Super Mario game series, debuted in Universal Studios Japan in 2021; Universal has since opened a similar Nintendo attraction in Los Angeles, Calif. and is building a similar attraction in its Orlando, Fla. resort.
Nintendo is trying to adapt its intellectual property to other mediums, such as film. 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, distributed by Universal Pictures, went on to become the second-highest grossing film that year, with a global gross of over $1.3 billion.
These external partnerships, and work with creators like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling or Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto are key to the success of Universal’s attractions. “They can pretty much create anything that they can imagine. So our job is to take that world and those stories and connect our guests to those characters.”
Though, he noted, with the added challenge of doing it with “steel and concrete, building codes and safety regulations.”
