Theme Park to Themed Golf: An Interview With Walkabout Mini Golf’s Don Carson

Today marks the release of the latest Walkabout Mini Golf course, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It’s the first of three Jules Verne-themed courses Mighty Coconut has in the works, and is set aboard Captain Nemo’s iconic submarine, the Nautilus. You can find it on both the Meta Quest and Rift Platforms for $2.99 USD.

We had the opportunity to sit down with Mighty Coconut’s Don Carson, once an Imagineer and now Senior Art Director for Walkabout Mini Golf. We have an article on the Meta Quest Blog, but the entire interview was full of fascinating details and we wanted to make that available as a resource to the community (or for anyone interested in a behind-the-scenes look at VR game development). Below you’ll find our longer Q&A, covering the development of both 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the previous Labyrinth course, how Carson’s role fits into the larger studio, the overlap between theme parks and miniature golf (and where the two differ), and more.

Don Carson: Yes, I worked for Imagineering during the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Then in the mid ’90s my son was born and we decided we didn’t want to raise him in LA, so we moved to Oregon.

They assured me when I left LA they’d never use me again, and the only other career I could think of was game design. I was hired by Dynamix, which was a subsidiary of Sierra On-Line, up here in Eugene, Oregon. And then a year into that job the theme park world went “Yeah, we will use you,” so I went right on back. Then I jumped back and forth between computer games and theme parks.

I’d say theme parks were my passion and my career goal until VR. And then a lot of the rules I learned at Disney as far as placemaking applied so perfectly [in VR]—plus the advantage of being able to see your work done in a nine-month period as opposed to a five-year period, and being able to share that work with anybody in the world who happens to have Quest. I’m full-on VR now.

DC: Yeah! Originally the gaming world was an entity unto itself in that it has its own rules, like architecture. They’ve been trained to think of their product a certain way, and video games are often achievement-based or goal-based. Environments are often a necessary evil to get through to kill another room full of zombies.

So when I started in the game industry—they didn’t know it at the time, but I was force-feeding them theme park design principles. For example, even if I was doing a 2D menu, I would always make it a 3D place.

And the reason I did was that theme park rules taught me that when we enter a space, we have expectations as to what it’s going to deliver, and then we can play with those expectations and bring people into a narrative that we lay out for them. Sort-of breadcrumbs.

DC: I think so. The door was slightly open to imagine that those two worlds coexisted. Emotionally the approach to a themed miniature golf park is very much the way we approach a themed environment like a theme park. We’re willing to suspend our disbelief and let it take us places, whether it’s a pirate village or it’s a ride, so we have that as an advantage.

And miniature golf is also a highly social experience. Because only one person can play at a time, there’s a lot of standing around talking. I think the secret sauce of Walkabout is the fact that it’s multiplayer, and often what you’re talking about has very little to do with the actual environment you’re in. It’s about how your day was, the kids, and we get just as many complimentary emails from people saying that they reconnected with their dad as we do saying, “Hey, we had a really great game.”

DC: So there, what we try to do is design something for you to not only look at, but for you to deduce some narrative from. And it doesn’t take a lot. We don’t have to download a novel to you. But if we give you El Dorado, we’re going to reference conquistadors in some way—and the way we chose to do it was the skeletal remains of some thwarted conquistador who never got his fingers on the gold.

It’s not important to the game that [the skeleton] is there but the person who stumbles upon that first builds a story in their head, and they get to share that story with the people who arrive after them. Like, “Hey, look at this guy over here.” We like to play with that as much as possible.

Another thing we have going for us is the fact that no matter how serious the intellectual property we’re working with or the project we’re doing, in the end it’s something that should offer fun. So even when we’re re-telling the story of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth—which fans have a huge emotional connection with and it’s a very dark and moody environment—we can take a light, almost Lego-like approach and fulfill the expectations of fans without necessarily feeling that we have to recreate every single rock.

DC: We put a huge amount of pressure on ourselves because everybody at the team loved Labyrinth so much. But you’re right, we’re telling the story with 18 chapters. No matter what, there are going to be 18 holes.

Luckily Labyrinth is very Alice in Wonderland in that the main character is constantly going from environment to environment and meeting different characters along the way. We started plugging in characters and situations all the way up to 18, and even though it meant that a couple of things didn’t make it in, most of the big moments are there.

The other thing is that each character had its own environment, so we had to design something where when you turn the corner you’re in a new environment, a new character, a new hole. Turn the corner, another character, new environment, a new hole. It ended up working out really well for us in this particular case.

DC: Everything happened organically all at once. We’re a tiny team, so we were coordinating from the very beginning as we were laying out which holes would be which themes. And then we started talking about what are the opportunities mechanics-wise—and definitely, the big upside-down gravity maze, that was a perfect place to showcase this technique that we were playing with already. That was a really nice addition.

And we’re starting to do that a little bit more with our future courses. “What is the mechanic that’s unique to this particular course that we could expand upon?” Very much like we used wind for Quixote Valley.

DC: We had started The Lost Cities as a group, and Lucas [Martell, Creator of Walkabout Mini Golf] was trying to decide what would be the most appropriate next pack. And we knew that we wanted to be able to have our own say about things that were in the public imagination but weren't necessarily owned by anybody.

And so since Jules Verne is in the public domain, and it is definitely wish fulfillment to be able to go into the Nautilus and journey to the center of the earth, it seemed like a perfect fit for a pack. Being able to do these three Verne books and interpret them in our style is just too good to pass up.

DC: In that case, the chapters are the quarters or the rooms that you are going through. And then we start to ratchet up what’s going on for the finale at hole 18. We know that we want something really special at the 18th hole—and then the 9th hole too, we often aim for a nice mid-point experience.

The rest is a variety of things—sometimes we just want a nice simple hole. You don’t want every one of them to be super challenging. Sometimes you just want a really nice, pleasant environment where you get to feel like you’re good at golf, which I’m not. [Laughs]

DC: What we try to do is build on your expectations of what you think you’ll see, not recreate any single source. If I were able to explore the Nautilus, what would my expectations be? And if I could play miniature golf in the Nautilus, what would my expectations be? Where would I get to go and what would happen?

That’s the approach we’re taking with all the Jules Verne courses. And who in their career gets an opportunity to design even one of those stories? We’re getting to do all three.

DC: All of the above! I tend to live on the front end. Usually during the really, really raw beginning, the conceptual phase, there’s a lot of diving into Google Images and Pinterest, and using MURAL to create these mood boards of the direction we would like to go in. I actually sketch a lot more than I was doing in my theme park work because a lot of that helps inform what the course is going to look like. That’s then handed off to the rest of the team to reference.

And I have to say that Walkabout—every single thing that gets handed off, the next person makes better. A theme park job, you might run it all the way from beginning to end, and you might ride through it and there are a couple of moments that are just cringeworthy. Like, “That didn’t come out like I thought.” All the Walkabout things I’ve seen, I’m just so incredibly proud of the choices that were made, and they weren’t necessarily mine. It’s the group ensemble way in which we build things that means it just gets better and better each time we create something.

DC: Everybody does to a certain extent. And also people at the eleventh hour will go, “I know we don’t have time, but…”

Like the Bog of Eternal Stench [in Labyrinth] was something we talked about probably on the very first day, laughed about it during concept, but it didn’t get built until the very, very end of the process. And then Lucas decided, “Yes, I’m going to invest time to make sure that it’s in there,” which is really good because it’s one of the favorite parts of that particular course. [Note: If your ball falls into the Bog of Eternal Stench, it gets green “stink” lines for the rest of the course.]

We’re also doing courses simultaneously. We’re working on seven at the same time, so it’s not like I only worked on Labyrinth and then I only worked on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It’s a constant ebb and flow, as each course shifts into a different phase of production.

DC: There’s a standing rule used in theme parks, which is: “Meet expectations, then exceed them.” The worst thing you can do is give someone something that is vastly different than what they have in mind.

So if you imagine what it would be like to approach and enter the Nautilus—we want to deliver that. And then from that point on we can delight you by doing things that are more than your expectations or different than your expectations.

We also accordion large places and small places—so you’re contained and then moving to a larger space and then contained again, always giving you variety and a sense of “I’ve arrived.”

DC: Right. Theme parks are like that too! There’s nothing realistic about them. They’re utterly theatrical, and we take advantage of that a lot. In the case of the Nautilus, we do have a container, so we are going to fill every square inch of that tube. But most cases, we get away with murder.

One of the things we introduced fairly early on was the ability to fly, and one of the questions that Lucas had was, “Now that you can go anywhere, does it disrupt the suspension of disbelief?” And we decided, no, that’s just not something we’re going to worry about. We’re going to let people fly outside the bounds and get a really good look at how we’ve constructed it.

And many people have said they actually like that. Being able to see the finale of Labyrinth from underneath is kind of fascinating, like going behind the scenes at a movie studio.

DC: Working within limitations is the best possible thing you can offer an artist actually. Telling an artist “You can do anything you want” is the worst, most vicious thing you can do, because immediately their inspiration grinds to a halt.

The biggest challenge with the Nautilus is that it’s so packed full of things—and things mean polygons, and that means a lot of complexity that will tax the PC or Quest. We’ve had to be really, really clever about making things feel dense and populated while not necessarily rendering the stuff that is unnecessary.

DC: The Salon. The big room with the big organ, that’s really the core of the Nautilus. We wanted to have multiple holes in it and approach it up high and constantly peer back into it.

So that one was a challenge because that meant there was going to be a lot of stuff going on in there—and we want to be able to see outside too. There’s big old windows on either side that are bringing in caustic light that’s shining off all the surfaces. And there’s a giant squid that’s attacking the underside of the sub at the back and you see its tentacle outside the window, waving.

Also, we were working on the squid before we started animating the characters for Labyrinth, so in many ways the squid was the first full on animated character. Since Labyrinth, it’s now kind-of a thing we do, but at the time that was a challenge too!

And we’re doing something differently. We wanted you to see the Nautilus before you got into it, so you actually arrive in a miniature sub that docks to the Nautilus and then you disembark and then start your mini golf journey from there. That was also a new challenge, to have two kinds of “Outside.”

Then probably my favorite part is that when you’re in “God mode”, you get this sort-of Wes Anderson, wall removed, dollhouse version of absolute everything that’s going on inside that very complex sub. That came out really nice.

DC: We went into Labyrinth thinking, “Well, we might put a character in.” But as soon as we started designing the spaces, “We can’t leave Ludo out. We’ve got to have Hoggle. We have to have the Worm.” All of a sudden we were producing a lot more animated characters than we thought.

In the theme park world, the last thing we want anybody to do is to touch anything. You’re in a boat with a belt and you’re in this sort-of envelope of safety—and that safety is for you, but it’s also to keep anybody from destroying the characters. So you end up having a character that’s kind of doing a looping animated sequence that you’re passing linearly through.

Here we have you standing in front of Hoggle, who is doing this repeated fairy poisoning. How do you make it feel like he’s not just a mannequin, that he’s actually a living and breathing creature? We wanted to fulfill the “Oh, goody, I get to meet Hoggle,” but at the same time, we didn’t want to get into the slippery slope of him making eye contact and having a conversation with you.

And I think we found a really nice balance because it does have that sort of theme park vignette feel, “Oh, I see this character I want to see and it’s doing the thing I expect it to do.” But what I think surprised us is that the fact he doesn’t interact with us doesn’t ruin the experience. There actually is something kind of lovely about it.

So you can stand in Hoggle’s path and you can walk right through him—stuff we would never want to happen in the theme park, but in the virtual world, everybody is just willing to give that a pass and say, “I’m just so happy to get to be in his presence.” That’s enough.

Thanks to Don Carson for chatting with us, and like we said, you can find both Walkabout Mini Golf and the new 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea course on the Meta Quest and Rift Platforms.