Amusement Park News

Jacksonville, Florida ride manufacturer Sally Dark Rides is offering a new concept this year: the Mini Dark Ride. Designed for theme parks and other locations with limited space, the new ride is structured to provide a true dark ride experience with a small footprint.

According to Sally Dark Ride's chief creative officer Rich Hill, the mini dark ride was a necessity for the amusement industry. He notes that throughout the years the company had conversations with “clients who were interested in purchasing an ‘E-Ticket' level dark ride attraction but didn't have the space in their park or FEC.”

And until now, space was essential, as most dark rides require a large structure to house such an attraction. But Sally has filled a major gap, coming up with a product that fits in a smaller space, which Hill called a “fun design challenge.”

He credits pandemic downtime as allowing the necessary time to consider solutions and provide a simple turnkey product that can be installed in tight spaces. The company began the process by examining guest perspectives on their large-scale ride attractions built around IPs like Sesame Street, Care Bears, and Justice League. By doing so, the design team was able to examine and consolidate “the most impactful ride elements” down to their core, Hill related.



These core items included vehicle motion and encounters with animatronic characters. Hill noted that traveling at a fairly rapid pace through the physical sets of the rides as well as the scenery itself in those sets were both vital for a “quality dark ride” experience. Additionally he described interactions with animatronic figures as being most successful when they are “impactful.” The other important feature for a mini dark ride was the use of “wrap around media screens.”

Those screens were key to coming up with a compact version of a dark ride experience, because they create the ability for riders to virtually travel across extensive distances and spaces at a high speed. Also important, Hill asserts are “having an individual, first-person experience” in an attraction, without encountering other riders and ride vehicles. Seeing other ride vehicles detracts from the impact of a scene and jars riders out of the dark ride world. With that in mind, eliminating those kinds of encounters could make even a small ride feel larger and as if it were engineered for individual riders according to Hill.

With these ideas and elements in play, Hill says that the company was able to come up with a dark ride that was effective and fun yet used a compact two-vehicle, four room layout. The design employed a range of clever and cutting-edge techniques such as projection mapping, rotating stages, and invisible UV paint. The result of these combined elements allows riders to see entirely different scenes in just four rooms because the tech and artisanry made the look of those rooms appear entirely different each time the vehicle made repeated passes through them.

Hill refers to the approach as being inspired by a magic trick, with the first vehicle ducking into a central room in order to prevent a second vehicle entering the ride from seeing the first vehicle. Using this concept and plan, Sally came up with a nine-scene experience for riders. That experience is indistinguishable from the guest's perspective from that of a much larger dark ride building. Essentially, Sally was able to compress the experience of a 20,000-foot space into 2,000 square feet.

This unique approach should be able to handle up to 300 riders per hour, but if more space were available to add a third or even a fourth car, then capacity could increase exponentially. Mini dark ride vehicles could alternatively be sized larger with more space, to hold eight to ten riders.

Hill describes a lot of positive and enthusiastic interest for a mini dark ride. He says it is not meant to be “a replacement for a traditional E-Ticket ride,” but rather “allow an entire new segment of the attractions industry access to a style of ride” previously not accessible to them due to size and cost.

And speaking of cost, Hill stresses that along with a compact size, the mini dark ride concept is also easier on the wallet, as he terms the construction to be budget friendly.

The company describes the ride as a solution for those who want a dark ride but don't have a space for a traditional construction. Sally's media describes the new ride as delivering a “complete dark ride experience with two trackless ride vehicles, towering interactive media screens, and changing immersive environments on dual turntables.” The combination of these elements is designed to provide an experience for guests that is still “larger-than-life.”

The compact trackless ride vehicles will have the ability to stop, spin, and speed rapidly through scenes, while carrying between five and six passengers in each vehicle. Gaming features in the vehicles include an interactive slingshot blaster, score displays, and on-board audio, while the ride system itself is complete with immersive theming, and animatronic characters and props.

One such mini dark ride adventure is based on the Angry Birds franchise, which is described as taking riders through a colorful and interactive Angry Birds world as Palace Pigs attempt to mount an attack on the Bird Nest and steal eggs.  

Sally CEO John Wood notes that the interactive nature of its dark rides allow multiple visits, a staple for the success of smaller regional parks and FECs in particular “On our rides you shoot targets, and that makes the rides repeatable,” he says.