From a devastating fire arose an award-winning family attraction at Germany's Europa Park. The Themed Entertainment Association this morning honored the park's Snorri Touren during the latest 2021 Thea Award Digital Case Study.
Conceived, designed and created in just 18 months, Snorri Touren fills a basement space under Europa Park's Scandinavia land that the park had to rebuild after a May 2018 fire destroyed the adjacent Pirates in Batavia attraction.
"Luckily nobody was hurt, but really, my heart was bleeding at the side of the smoking ruins in the next day," MackNext's Matthias Lange said. "But two days later, we had the first ideas written on paper, and it quickly became clear that the Pirates should come back. And also it was clear that we have to rebuild Scandinavia and the Netherlands true to the original with upgrades, and for this reason, the 25-year-old idea to have a dark ride under the Scandinavian area in the basement came up again. And really, this was the perfect time to do it."
"There weren't too many options for a decision making, because when you first realized how many columns there would be in this cellar, we thought it would be impossible to build a dark right there," he said. But the teams at Mack Rides and the new MackNext design studio found a way, working with the team from Jora Vision, which has worked on recent limited-budget Thea Award winners Popcorn Revenge at Walibi Belgium and Bazyliszek at Park Legendia in Poland.
For the story, the teams focused on Snorri, the mascot for Europa Park's new Rulantica theme park, creating a backstory that placed the young octopus along with treasures from the mythical world of Rulantica inside a vault underneath a Scandinavian village. Using his magic, Snorri creates a tour business to take visitors to Rulantica, all within the confines of the vault. That gave the park a welcomed new family attraction that also served as indirect marketing for its new gate.
The dark ride includes scenes inspired by the nearby water park, highlighted by a projection dome sequence that virtually drops riders onto an ice slide meant to evoke the Rulantica's water slides. You can see more of MackNext's and Jora Vision's work on the ride in this video:
"I love the end result and the way that visitors enjoyed a ride, but I always hold that the journey to the end is as exciting as the ride itself, and I believe that was definitely the case in this specific project," Jora Vision's Robin van der Want said. "It was a real enjoyable creative collaboration together with Europa Park."
Other honorees in today's session were the Qu Yuan show at Jingzhou Oriental Heritage Park, "Becoming Jane: The Evolution of Dr. Jane Goodall" at Washington DC's National Geographic Museum, and Dale Sprague at Canyon Creative, who is this year's TEA Peter Chernack Distinguished Service Award winner. You can buy tickets via the TEA's website to watch the complete session on demand, as well as past and future sessions in the Thea Awards Digital Case Studies series.
Previous Thea Award 2021 Digital Case Studies:
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Perhaps, late autumn checkup visit !