Once upon a time, Disney boasted what was almost their “fifth, indoor virtual” theme park. At least that’s what the guide book called DisneyQuest when my Mom had me researching the trip we took my freshman year of high school. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I can see how amazing DisneyQuest was when it first opened in 1998. Almost twenty years later, it’s more of a trip down memory lane than an indoor theme park. Last year Disney announced that DisneyQuest would be closing sometime in 2016 to make way for a new NBA attraction, but that date was pushed back to July 3rd, 2017. Jay, Robert, Victoria and I decided to make one last stop in to check out DisneyQuest before it’s gone for good.
Our first impression wasn’t stellar as the Cast Member at the door was so busy holding a conversation with the group in front of us we weren’t even acknowledged for about two minutes. The entrance to DisneyQuest is a cool concept but not very well executed, you go immediately into a elevator that takes you to the third floor, which is supposed to be the center of the building. There are five floors, and even looking at a map on my fifth visit, I still find it confusing.
We stood in the center for a minute unsure where to go, so I picked a direction at random and started walking. We wound up in the Create Zone which I quickly realized was a mistake. There’s not a lot there. They have the Living Easel, which involves point to color pages and stickers you can drop in, something any 90s kid is very familiar with. There is the Radio Disney SongMaker where you can choose a song and use multiple choice answers to fill in the blank to make it your own.
[lgc_column grid=”40″ tablet_grid=”40″ mobile_grid=”100″ last=”false”]The last remaining Animation Academy at Walt Disney World is here as well, but you draw on a screen instead of on paper so you can’t take it home unless you want to pay for it. Not the quite the same as the one that used to be at Hollywood Studios.[/lgc_column][lgc_column grid=”60″ tablet_grid=”60″ mobile_grid=”100″ last=”true”]
[/lgc_column]On the same level, but out of the Create Zone is CyberSpace Mountain where you can design your own roller coaster. We decided to pass on that since Jay doesn’t do well on simulators and I didn’t want to ride it right after eating. (Yay lunch at Blaze!) The final attraction on Level Two is Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride which involves sitting on a bike sort of contraption with a virtual reality helmet on a quest to find the Genie. I’ve done it before, I always die without finding him and I usually end up with a headache. Pass.
We made our way down to the first floor, the Explore Zone, which houses what is arguably the best attraction at DisneyQuest, Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for Buccaneer Gold, and one of the strangest, Virtual Jungle Cruise. At one time or another, all four of us have been Skippers, and three of us were Pirates, but Pirates is the better ride/game/attraction/thing so we started with it.
There was another guy in line for Pirates, the first guest we had encountered since the entrance, and the attendant offered to put him with us. None of us actually said no, but we were relieved when he said he wanted to go by himself. When it was our turn, they asked who wanted to be the Captain and we all awkwardly looked at each other before Jay raised his hand. She handed us our “Eyes of Blackbeard” and we stepped into the ship.
[lgc_column grid=”50″ tablet_grid=”50″ mobile_grid=”100″ last=”false”]Pirates is essentially a small boat with a steering wheel in the back, six cannons and two screens on each side. The middle right screen was really faded on ours. The idea is one person, the Captain, steers while the others, the Gunners, man the cannons. The goal is to sink as many of the ships passing you as you can, and to kill any sea monsters that pop up, as explained by a Skeleton Pirate at the beginning of the game, in order to collect as much treasure as possible. This works much better if your cannons actually fire where you’re aiming. [/lgc_column] [lgc_column grid=”50″ tablet_grid=”50″ mobile_grid=”100″ last=”true”]
[/lgc_column]One of the cannons on the port side (left) would shoot high off into the sky as far as it could even when I was aiming straight down. After you’ve sunk a few ships, the scenery changes and the Skeleton Pirate comes back, “One more thing about gathering treasure, you’ll have to fight me to keep it!” Suddenly, you have ghost pirates chasing you on either side trying to take your treasure. When you destroy the last one, the Pirate Skeleton says “Maybe you’ll make good pirates after all!” For the finale you are transported back to the original lagoon as fireworks go off. Apparently there’s a different scenario if you lose, but I’ve never seen that one. Then it gives you your score. We were not happy when it stopped on “Kings of the Caribbean”, the second highest rank. Resolved to do better next time, we moved onto Virtual Jungle Cruise.
Admittedly, it has been a while since I last worked on the World Famous Jungle Cruise, but I do not remember paddles, or dinosaurs for that matter. You get into a four person raft, and then the “water” inflates around you to form a river that you rock back and forth on. The paddles you’re given have skate wheels on the bottom so the ride can tell where you’re paddling, so in theory you can steer. I honestly have no idea if we were going the way we wanted or not. You start off sitting at the dock with Jungle Cruise boats in front of you. What already throws me off is I’m looking at boat names that I know belong to Disneyland, not Magic Kingdom, but Cinderella Castle is visible in the background. Then a Skipper, at least I assume he’s a Skipper but he’s not dressed like one, shows up waving to you as the screen begins to swirl and you go back in time, and he proceeds to drop the “gizmo”, leaving you stranded in the age of the dinosaurs. I think the idea is you paddle after it, because he starts yelling, “The gizmo! Get the gizmo!” As it floats downstream. I have never once caught it, and I am pretty sure we should have died about six times. We kept dropping over waterfalls and we were almost eaten by a T-Rex. We went behind a stream of lava and I yelled, “It’s the backside of lava!” Apparently no one else thought it was funny. After a while, the Skipper shows back up waving frantically to you as the screen begins to swirl and you find yourself back in the strange Disneyland-Magic Kingdom hybrid park. A map pops up on screen to show you where you went, and we had made it all away across. “Well, we made it pretty far, if that’s the point of this,” Victoria said. Jay answered, “I don’t think anyone knows what the point of this is.” We climbed out of the raft and left our paddles where we were told.
We then wandered back upstairs to find ourselves in a mix of games you would find in most arcades or Celebration Station. Jay immediately went to one of the games where the goal is to turn the lights off by hitting them as fast as you can and he wanted me to play too. Turns out, I’m not very good at them. After he beat me, I grinned and said, “Four player air hockey anyone?” We each took up a side and started batting back and forth. It’s a very different game than normal air hockey, it’s harder to bat it off the sides like I’m used to. We quickly discovered a critical problem with the game: my goal was the only one that would register when it was scored on. All of the others never buzzed or had the lights go off when the puck went in. So we played until I lost twice and moved on. I proceeded to kick Jay’s butt in normal air hockey before we tried the four player Pac-Man.
I know what you’re thinking, four player Pac-Man doesn’t make sense! It’s super cute. You each get a Pac-Man that’s a different color and it works just like normal Pac-Man except you bounce off each other if you collide. If you eat a Power Pellet, in addition to eating the ghosts you can eat the other Pac-Man. You play five rounds, so there’s no way it ends in a tie because someone has to win more than once. Somehow Jay was Pink and I was Blue, and I have no clue how I won.
Yay!!!
Jay went over to the DDR machine, but quickly decided he was too out of practice for it. I was highly disappointed in this decision and should have started recording sooner.
We made our way to Level Five looking for more classic arcade games. I was specifically looking for skee-ball, I don’t know why but it’s one of my favorite arcade games even though I’m terrible at it, and when it’s on free play it’s even better. I remember them being on the top floor at one point but they had been replaced with shooting games. I did find X-Men Pinball and Fix-It Felix, Jr., the game from Wreck-It Ralph. I am not good at either one. Jay went to play another blinky light game, that he claimed to have lost because the buttons weren’t working correctly.
It is pretty commonly known that DisneyQuest is not super well maintained. Annually, it basically breaks even, in that it doesn’t make Disney money but it doesn’t really cost them anything. I know first hand how they don’t always put the care and love they should into upkeep, *cough* Jungle Cruise *cough*, so I’m not exactly surprised by how much wasn’t working.
Robert and Victoria were absorbed in a Terminator game, but I got bored and went down to Level Four where I finally found a skee-ball machine. Jay quickly joined me, we must have played it ten times before Robert jumped in too.
We made our way through the arcade games. Jay stopped off at some Star Wars thing and Victoria and I gave a “simulator” game a try. Honestly it was more like a massage chair, which wasn’t a bad thing. Then we decided to head back down to Level Three to give the Mighty Ducks a whirl.
That alone tells you how dated DisneyQuest can be. There is a Mighty Ducks attraction: Mighty Ducks Pinball Slam. You stand on a giant hockey puck with a handle and control it by leaning back and forth so you shoot across the screen. We were the only four playing, and I thought I was doing pretty well. If you can make it past the goalie, you score 25,000 points and I did that a few times, but I lost to Victoria by about a hundred thousand with my score of 722,250.
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[/lgc_column][lgc_column grid=”50″ tablet_grid=”50″ mobile_grid=”100″ last=”true”]Our next stop was Buzz Lightyear’s Astroblasters, though it has the same name as the Disneyland ride it is a very different attraction. These are essentially bumper cars with cannons to shoot the other cars. There was no one in line when we arrived and the attendant told us it would be about two minutes before she could get us on so she invited us to go play and she would call us over. Duffy and I tried Super Pac-Man. [/lgc_column]
Turns out we’re not very good at it.
By the time they were ready for us, a few more people had joined the line. Which is good-more targets to shoot! She asked if Jay and I wanted to ride together or separate since each car seats two. Jay looked at me, “What do you want?” “I wanna shoot you!” “Well, okay, then.”
[lgc_column grid=”50″ tablet_grid=”50″ mobile_grid=”100″ last=”false”]The attendant went over the safety instructions, all pretty standard stuff. Lever for forwards and backwards, pedal and steering wheel in the Pilot seat, ammo between the seats and the cannon in the Gunner seat. [/lgc_column][lgc_column grid=”50″ tablet_grid=”50″ mobile_grid=”100″ last=”true”]
Shot from inside the vehicle.
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Since we were riding by ourselves we had to sit in the Pilot seats and reach for the cannon. If you hit another car in the right spot, it would cause them to spin out of control for about ten seconds. Seems easy, right? Not if you’re trying to do both. I kept having to stop to load the cannon! It was still a ton of fun and I know I shot at least Robert once in addition to a couple of the other random people. I missed when I tried to shoot Jay, but I only got hit once so that’s something.
We wandered back down to Level One. Robert and Victoria found some sort of pirate shooting game which was going great until Robert wandered off because he thought it was done and there was another level. I jumped in to help, but I probably would have been more help if I had realized I was pink from the start instead of blue. Video games really are not my thing. Jay finished his game on Temple Run and stepped in to take over for me when I almost got us killed.
Then we decided to take another shot at Pirates since there was still no wait. Robert was the captain this time, and we got a different ship. From the start it went better than our first try. All of the screens were bright, and the cannons actually went where you aimed them. We started out strategically dividing up the cannons but once it started, we were jumping all over the place to get the best angle on whatever we were shooting. Robert did a much better job of steering us so we had things to aim at, and we even fired on some of the forts. We beat the Skeleton Pirate for a second time and this time were declared “Masters of the High Seas”.
There sadly was no way to make the camera go through the Eyes of Blackbeard 3D goggles.
We walked out of Pirates and debated if there was anything left we wanted to do. We all agreed we were good and Victoria laughed. “I knew we weren’t leaving until we got the top score on Pirates.” So we headed back out to Disney Springs.
I wish I had seen DisneyQuest in the early 2000s, when I’m sure it was at its peak with state of the art technology and immersion. That being said, I’m really not that sad it’s closing. It’s fun to do every so often, but it makes me sad to think of people who are here for a once in a lifetime visit playing arcade games that aren’t working properly. I hope the new NBA attraction is better maintained.
Cost: $47.93 at the gate. They usually have a half price special after 5 pm.
Duration: 2-4+ hours. We there about two and a half hours, but it was deserted. It gets more crowded later in the day so the lines get longer.
Value: If you’ve never done it, do it once before it’s gone for good on July 3rd, 2017. It is a really cool piece of Disney history.
Add Ons: You can purchase a print of your drawing at the Animation Academy or the CD of your song.
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