VirtualOrgy: DisneyQuest and the Fall of the American Empire, part 2

The general structure of DisneyQuest allows for more adult-oriented entertainment the higher in the building you climb, and ScoreZone is no exception. I am pleasantly amazed to discover that the entire fifth floor of ScoreZone contains, along with a BattleTech rip-off called "Invasion!," every single early-80s videogame one could ever name, completely restored, looking like they had just been shipped brand-new from the factory two weeks ago. In another surprise that actually becomes obvious once you think about it, these vintage games are the least-expensive things in the entire building‹two points apiece! Yee-haw!

This of course is the genius of the Disney Corporation and why they generate more revenue than the GNP of the 20 poorest countries in the world combined. Ultimately they understand that for a family entertainment experience to succeed, every member of the family must have an opportunity to be entertained. Our collective expectations of "family fun" have been driven so low in recent years that the mere appearance of a "Tempest" machine will fill our slacker hearts with joy, much like a modern show on television that is even slightly above average will be immediately hailed as a "masterpiece" simply by comparison.

The fifth floor of ScoreZone is filled -- and I mean completely filled -- with the 25- to 35-year-old cynical, overeducated male ilk of my generation, busily running our hands over the giant trackball of "Missile Command" and grinning in that zealous way that only a company like Disney can produce. I watch two guys running up a 250,000 score on "Galaga," a crowd around them like it¹s 1982 again and we're all loitering at the Highway 94 Pizza Hut. One of them dies a particularly stupid death and the crowd collectively groans; then we as a group realize how much we have unconsciously gotten sucked right back into the fierce competition of Man Versus Machine and we all emit a way-too-world-weary laugh. I watch a man who looks almost exactly my age, combining the complex deftness of joystick and paddle which the exemplary "Tron" simultaneously requires, while a four-year-old girl tugs on his khaki shorts the entire time and yells at the top of her lungs, "Daddy, stop playing that game! Daddy, that game is BORING! Daddy, stop playing that game!"

Every amusement park needs its unhip corner where the stuffy dad can go and kill a little time between his fatherly duties of parking the car, buying the overpriced lunch, and carrying his exhausted child on his shoulders around Hour Six of the day-long adventure. As much as I hate to admit it, my thirtysomething friends and I have become those stuffy dads, and at the edge of the millennium this has become our unhip corner of the park. Sad. But. True.

Before I get a chance to further explore, I get a page from Amy, one of several friends I had called earlier in the day when I was simply bored and drunk, desperately seeking Friday-night entertainment. Amy is immediately suspicious when I call her back. "God, where are you?" she yells. "It sounds like a madhouse!"

"I'm drunk and I'm at DisneyQuest!" I yell back.

"You're kidding me!"

"Unfortunately, I'm not!"

I hear Amy audibly sigh over the phone. "Well, how is it?"

"It's...fuck!" I have literally reverted into an overstimulated, sugar-high eight-year-old again. "Every corner is just...and there's all this...and these rides! God, it's so...fuck !"

"Should I come down?" she asks.

"Oh...yeah! Oh my God, yeah, come down and join me!" Ah-hah, an unexpected escort and witness to the fall of our civilization! Besides, I need a partner to go on the rides with me.

"Okay," Amy says. "Give me a little bit. I want to get drunk before I come down too." Click.

Faced now with another hour to kill before riding any of the rides, I decide to check out the two-story restaurant within the fourth- and fifth-story rotundas. A corporate tie-in with the franchised Cheesecake Factory (I would be disappointed if it wasn't), the twin "Food Quest" and "Wonderland Cafe" have surprisingly sophisticated menus, containing not only the standard pizza-and-nacho fare of family amusement parks but urban pleasures such as a full coffee bar with four different types of cafe au laits. Also surprising is the relative inexpensiveness of the forced nourishment, with my Super Grande 2 Percent Iced Cafe Mocha costing no more than its equivalent at Caribou or Starbucks. I am...impressed? Yeah, I guess that would be the word.

Also impressive is the sumptuous adult environment of the seating area. In a move that screams "focus group" at every turn, the seats of Food Quest are large, expensive and over-stuffed, made of blood-red velour and loam-brown leather. They are clustered in homey squares comfortably seating eight, or recessed into private clublike booths in the back walls. The overhead lighting is warm and dim, and the entire restaurant has been feng-shuied so that the chaos of the neighboring Zones are almost completely shut out. If not for the subtle cartoonishness of the furniture design, one can almost imagine being in a swanky dinner-and-dance nightclub. It is an uncharacteristically decadent detail in a garish family-oriented entertainment complex, like accidentally discovering a Spago in the middle of Mall of America.

Food Quest is littered on every table with the adult version of kiddie rides -- namely, Internet terminals. For a surprisingly expensive amount of money (ten points for ten minutes) the real-world part of you can jump on the web, check your email, surf around to Yahoo!, and pretty much go anywhere one could normally go on your home browser. (Barring the fact, of course, that these particular terminals are loaded with every piece of filtering software ever invented. Believe me, I tried every trick I could think of to pull up a porn site at DisneyQuest, just to say I had done it. No go!)

The terminals also come with several pieces of proprietary web software, and I spend a few minutes composing mad-lib-style "electronic postcards" to send to my snotty art-friends who I know will appreciate such an ironic gesture. ("Dear Greg -- well, here I am at DisneyQuest! Me and the kids just finished riding 'Aladdin's Magic Carpet Ride' and was it a blast! Wish you were here!") DisneyQuest also has its own website and while inside the building, you and the family can create a page in their "Eternal Journal" complete with photo from attached webcam, which you can then add to on a daily basis from home after your vacation or simply print as a free souvenir of your trip.

By the time Amy arrives at the corner of Ohio and Rush, I am sober and starting to get a headache. Amy however is newly-drunk ("Thank you Kahlua!" she yells when she sees me) and excited like a kid in a candy store. Amy has decided to dress in costume, and she is clad in skin-tight black rubber pants and matching cyberpunk half-shirt, complete with binary code stitched in horizontal lines across her breasts. Combined with her bright-blue punk-rock haircut, she is now half Sleater-Kinney, half Tank-Girl. Perfect.

We venture immediately to the aforementioned "CyberSpace Mountain" rollercoaster, the one ride that seems to be the most thrilling and adult-oriented. Tied-in with "Bill Nye the Science Guy," yet another Disney-owned Saturday-morning ABC television show, the wacky digitized professor guides us through a series of physically-impossible multiple choices as we quickly generate our 10,000-foot-long Screamin' Eagle. Among our completed course are such daring feats as jumps over uncompleted track, a chase through the woods with flying police cars, and a tight 40-foot spiral that would leave even astronauts disoriented. We are given a chance to name our monstrosity (the apt "CyberWhirl"), we are disappointingly informed that our track has a danger level of 2 out of 5, and we stand in a small line to wait our turn at the actual ride.

The physical portion of CyberSpace Mountain is a series of small enclosed structures much like you find at parking-lot carnivals and suburban malls. The difference here is that they are constructed with full 360-degree movability, much like a hamster wheel gone mad, which means that every loop-de-loop and 7-G turn created a few moments ago will be rendered in full sickening glory. We are forced to empty our pockets into a locked drawer and we are strapped into a bright-red torture device with oversized videoscreen directly in front of us.

It is when the suddenly-terrifying CyberWhirl starts up that I have my first of what is to be many nauseating and disorienting moments over the course of the evening. It is also the first time that I realize how horribly wrong this experiment of a "virtual amusement park" really is, like some David-Lynchian version of Westworld where you want to run screaming from the building after every ride but you can't, because you just spent sixteen freakin' dollars to enter in the first place .

Let me just make this clear -- CyberSpace Mountain is not fun . It's disorienting and nauseating and makes you want to pee your pants. Instead of the collective terrified smiles and laughter you see from the average crowd stepping off a real coaster in the physical world, the people exiting this virtual ride have a particularly glazed, ashen look on their faces, a stupefied frown on their mouth that says, "Is it just me or was that just the most unpleasant amusement ride I have ever been on?" This is certainly Amy and my reaction walking off the Habitrail from Hell, but we decide to chalk it up to the fact that we're drunk. We keep on keepin' on.

The next ride for us is the "Virtual Jungle Cruise," the water flume that, as promised in the ad outside the building, will "actually get us wet." Again we are plopped in front of a 15-foot-high video screen, but instead of being strapped into a rat cage we are told to sit in a rubber raft which is then inflated four feet off the ground. We are given oars with sensors at their ends, which can digitally tell which direction we are paddling and adjust our computer environment accordingly.

We quickly discover that the reason our raft is raised four feet into the air is because the computer hydraulically pitches and maws the boat that amount over the course of the ride. No matter which direction we oar, our virtual raft calmly floats directly towards rock cliffs, and as we sickeningly "bounce off" the crags and into waiting rapids our raft starts careening so badly that we must hold on for dear life.

Again, the Virtual Jungle Cruise is not fun . Yes, in theory it seems like it should be a blast, a virtual version of whitewater rafting where, each time your craft dips below the surface mark, the computer sends an automated squirt of real water into your face. But the actual experience is anything but enjoyable. By the end I feel like I've just spent a half-hour in a car with a crazed drunk driver, fearing for my life as he careens out-of-control down the highway, narrowly avoiding cars and frequently driving up onto the curb. Shaky and terrified, I step off the virtual Deliverance starting to seriously doubt the claim of "family fun" on my DisneyQuest brochure.

Time after time, ride after ride, Amy and I are confronted with the same dizziness and fear. Surprisingly, for the life of me I cannot pinpoint what the crucial difference is between riding these rides for real at Six Flags and being entertained, and riding them virtually here and simply being sick. Maybe there is something inherently necessary to all five of your senses being affected by the same stimulus at once. Maybe DisneyQuest proves that one must feel the air rushing by your skin and up your nose to fully appreciate something so terrifying as a rollercoaster. Maybe it's the disjointed way that our bodies are physically being shook yet our eyes are interpreting that jerkiness through the images of a flat stationary screen. This actually has some precedence -- when I was a kid and going to the St. Louis Six Flags every summer, Chevrolet sponsored an annual movie filmed with a special apparatus, recording the same event from 12 different cameras in a 360-degree panorama. They would load this apparatus on rollercoasters, planes and cars, then simultaneously show all 12 movies on a specially-designed theatre at the park that would wrap all the way around the audience. Even as a kid, standing on the relative stability of hard concrete, the "Chevy Show" would get me sicker than any damn twisting ride at the park itself, and I would spend each summer patiently getting my stomach back under control after the movie's end.

Now imagine combining this motion sickness with a glorified bungee cord that is throwing you physically four feet up, four feet down, up, down, up, down, over and over and over and over again. Or imagine viewing this movie not from the relative safety of 20 feet but from a screen literally strapped to your head, as the goggled form "Ride the Comix" are, a particularly Clockwork-Orangy nightmare where you literally cannot turn away from the nausea-inducing images flooding your vision. This is not an amusement park -- this is a Kubrickian horror film!

Still, even with all of this evidence, I am ready to chalk up my entire disorientation to the pint of bourbon coursing its way through my veins. That is, until I ride Buzz Lightyear's AstroBlaster. The glorified bumper cards mentioned earlier (technically, a two-seater where one person steers and the other shoots rubber balls at your opponents), the AstroBlaster seemed to me particularly juvenile and I was more than ready to skip it altogether. It is however the one ride that Amy absolutely insists on riding and hey, Amy and I are busy right now trying to establish our post-relationship friendship and I am wisely avoiding all actions which might lead to a fight.

In a massive surprise, the AstroBlaster turns out to be the most fun, adrenaline-producing event of the entire evening. There is something incredibly comforting about physically moving around in a real environment and interacting with random strangers, as talented 13-year-old boys laugh their heads off after successfully shooting us, making our computer-controlled car spin wildly out of control for a few seconds and strobe lights fill our cabin. Drunk over-the-hill kids that we are, we're humiliated in battle. It is the most job I experience the entire evening.

Starting around 10 pm and lasting until its midnight closing, more and more exhausted families start dropping like flies, happily passing on their unused debit cards to us "young whippersnappers." By 11:15 we have amassed enough points to literally ride every ride again. We choose instead to run a full gamut of the fifth-floor ScoreZone, keeping a verbal record of our trek: Zaxxon ("I forgot how hard this game is in the open space part"); Pac-Man ("Why does this game seem so slow?"); Ms. Pac-Man ("Oh yeah, that's why"); Joust ("Egg Round! Egg Round! Scoop up the eggs before they...oh, damn"); Defender ("Okay, now I remember why I never played this game when I was a kid"); Star Wars ("Up! Down! Down! Up! Awwww!").

Finally around 11:45 we drag our inert bodies back into Food Quest and spend our remaining points on the Internet, constructing our appropriately-snotty entry into Disney's permanent "Eternal Journal." Amy looks around at our deliciously-adult, suddenly-empty surroundings (we are one of maybe ten couples left in the entire building) and she says, "You know what would be the absolute coolest? And so entirely appropriate for this building? If Disney closed down at midnight, kicked all the families out, then reopened at 12:30 as an underground sex club!" She pats the overstuffed leather couch we are lying on. "Can't you just imagine," she says, "having anonymous group sex with a crowd of random strangers on these couches? With all the webcams on and broadcasting on the rides' videoscreens? Or fucking someone in that raft thing downstairs?"

I think about it. Actually, I can imagine it and, curiously enough, Amy is absolutely right -- DisneyQuest would be the perfect place to hold an expensive and exclusive underground sex club. In fact, Amy has accidentally stumbled upon the metaphor I have been searching for this entire evening to describe my experience. DisneyQuest, in essence, is a virtual version of the orgies which marked the end of the Roman Empire. In its purest form, this "amusement park" is in reality an enclosed elite structure of pure hubris, situated within the confines of a truly disturbed society where social ills are going unheeded. Unlike DisneyWorld, Six Flags or any other traditional amusement park, DisneyQuest is plunked down in the heart of a century-old urban epicenter with a population of nearly six million. Not even five feet away from the structure, DisneyQuest visitors are barraged by a series of homeless beggars, street musicians, and just plain crazies who always seem to be hanging out in the tourist sections of large cities. The act of ignoring these miscreants and walking proudly into the turquoise "coliseum" to spend $16 per person on a series of mindless entertainment devices is in actuality the 1990s equivalent of Caesar on his chariot, of Marie Antoinette yelling "Let them eat cake!," of Nero fiddling away as his city burned. And, much like modern historians can point to the decadent and pointless Roman orgies as the beginning of the end of their Empire, perhaps future sociologists will deliver lectures on the invention of DisneyQuest, saying, "If only the poor Americans had known that this was a sign of the End Times for their society. If only."

Or, well, maybe. God, I'm tired. And hungover. And exhausted. And broke. Amy and I gather our things, walk through the requisite "exit gift shop" (complete with $400 limited-edition DisneyQuest wristwatch) and board the el to take us to our respective northside homes. Finally -- an amusement ride completely connected to reality. What a rush.

Copyright 1999, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved.