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If you've ever been to Disneyland, California, you'll probably know about the so-called stretch rooms that kick off the park's legendary Haunted Mansion ride. On entering Disney's spooky old house, you're ushered into a windowless chamber that begins to change almost imperceptibly as your disembodied host bids you welcome, elongating so that its once perfectly innocent paintings stretch into ghoulish tableaux revealing the gristly fates of the mansion's inhabitants. And then, with a flash of lightning, it's onto the ride proper.It's a wonderful scene-setting moment, full of deliciously creepy ambience, but really that whole sequence serves one purpose alone: to distract you while the elevator floor you're standing on creaks and groans its way out of the mansion facade (built way before Disney knew what the final ride would entail), and into the far more spacious main show building, tucked safely out of sight behind a hill. It's a neatly thematic solution to a very practical problem, and indicative of the lengths that Disney's imagineers will go to to ensure that their park's spell is never broken.
That to me is the essence of theme park design, and it's why most theme park games have always fallen a little short in my eyes. Games like Bullfrog's Theme Park and the seminal Rollercoaster Tycoon series certainly tried to sate the whims of budding park designers and engineers, but the obvious technical limitations of the time meant that, even once each series had transitioned to full 3D, your creations were still fairly abstract, rudimentary entities, allowing for only very limited attention to detail.
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