Before Animal Treasure Island opened at Gardaland, guests launched campaigns to stop it being changed. The original ride, open since 1992, had become something people felt genuinely protective of. Families had ridden it together across generations. It carried real sentimental weight.
That level of emotional attachment is not a complication. It is proof of what immersive attractions are capable of at their best. Experiences that move people, that lodge themselves in memory and become part of how guests think about a place, are the ones worth studying and the ones worth fighting to get right.
When XOrdinary took on the project, the challenge was not technical. It was emotional. How do you honour what people already love while creating something new enough to carry the next generation of guests? The answer was to start, as we always do, with how the experience should feel.
Animal Treasure Island went on to win best new ride at the 2025 Theme Park Awards and became Gardaland's highest-rated guest experience in more than ten years.
Story as the foundation
The most enduring immersive attractions are designed around an emotional journey first. Not around technology, content, or production value, but around how a guest should feel at each moment, and what every element of the experience needs to do to carry them there.
This is the starting point for every project at XOrdinary. Before any system is specified or any content produced, the questions are about feeling. What should build and what should resolve? What is the moment a guest will describe to someone who was not there, and what needs to happen in the thirty seconds before it to make it land?
The answers to those questions become the brief that everything else answers to. Lighting, spatial audio, physical effects, scent, the pacing of a scene, the timing of a character moment, every decision is measured against the emotional intention of the story. When that discipline holds all the way through delivery, the world gains a coherence that guests sense even when they cannot name it.
Read more about the technology systems we use to bring these worlds to life, here.
Designing for genuine connection
The guests who campaigned against the Animal Treasure Island renovation were not responding to production value or technical ambition. They were responding to something the original experience had made them feel. That is the standard immersive attraction design should be measured against: not what the experience contains, but what it leaves behind.
At Bluey the Ride at Alton Towers, the guest who matters most is a four-year-old on their first ever coaster. Everything about the experience, the familiarity of the audio, the accuracy of the characters, the way the world introduces itself, was designed around that guest's emotional experience first. The technology exists to serve that. The content exists to serve that. The brief was never about what the ride would do. It was about how it would feel.
This guest-first thinking is what separates an attraction guests enjoy from one they genuinely remember. It requires resisting the pull toward what is technically impressive or visually spectacular in favour of what is emotionally true. The two are not mutually exclusive, but when they are in tension, emotion wins.
Worldbuilding that holds conviction
Immersive experience design works when the world feels complete. Not just visually rich, but internally consistent, where the characters, the narrative stakes and the sensory environment all belong to the same reality and reinforce each other at every turn.
For Animal Treasure Island, this meant building an entirely new narrative world within a beloved physical environment. New characters, a new story, new emotional stakes, with knowing nods to what had come before woven in for those who knew the original. Every scene was designed so that the technology, the physical sets and the storytelling felt inseparable. The world worked because every element was answering the same emotional brief.
This is the discipline XOrdinary brings to every project. The craft and precision of how we deliver it is what ensures that world survives intact from the first creative conversation to opening day.
If you are creating a world that deserves emotional depth and narrative intention, we would like to help shape it.