Funworld September 2009

Lessons Learned from 57 Years at the Helm

When you step into a modern family entertainment center, you’re often greeted with an array of dazzling high-tech video games employing the latest audio, video, and special effects. But the recent 11th annual Classic Video Games Tournament at Funspot in Weirs, New Hampshire, showed there’s quite a following for the older games as well.

The tournament attracted 160 players from around the world and demonstrated that the marketing instincts of Funspot’s 78-year-old founder, Bob Lawton, are as keen as they were 57 years ago.

In 1952, at the age of only 21, Lawton borrowed a few hundred dollars from his grandmother to start a miniature golf course and arcade named Weirs Sports Center. Fifty-seven years later, that start-up is now Funspot, a 70,000- square-foot family entertainment center that was officially recognized in June 2008 by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest arcade (number of games) in the world.

Lawton is still at the helm, working every day of the week at his pride and joy. Over the years, he’s seen booms and busts in the FEC business, and he’s learned the secrets to surviving and thriving. “You always have to be innovating,” he contended. “That’s absolutely one of the things that’s kept us in business. We just know how to generate maximum income.”

For instance, Funspot’s miniature golf course has no attendant— it is completely self-service. Also, he decided early on against having attendants walking around with cash, so he installed numerous “bill breakers” for guests to use. In 1971, he opened an antique arcade with about three dozen machines dating back to the early 1920s, all restored. Then, in the late 1970s, he began to change his old pinball machines over to video games. “From 1978 to 1990, video games were huge—it was an amazing time,” he said.

Lawton noted that when the arcade video game industry hit tough times in 1990, FECs were fortunate to have another innovation: “Winning tickets for prizes. You don’t live on video games now; you live on prizes. My guess is if that hadn’t developed after what happened in 1990, we wouldn’t be here—that’s what saved this industry.”

In addition to the arcade games and mini-golf, Funspot’s other offerings include a bowling center, golf simulator, bingo hall, tavern, and classic arcade game museum. The classic games arcade may not be the biggest money maker, but that’s not the whole story. “It’s a wonderful thing because we have about 200 pre-1987 games,” Lawton said, “and people come from all over the world for it. It’s not a big profit center for us, but it’s a lot of fun!”
www.funspotnh.com

Playing Spy in Washington, D.C.

Every day in Washington, D.C., a high-stakes drama plays out at many of the city’s most famous landmarks and attractions to expose and thwart a terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol. This isn’t a real-life threat, however, but a GPS-based interactive experience offered to guests of the International Spy Museum.

Called “Spy in the City,” the self-guided outdoor game is designed for play by individuals or small groups. Equipped with GPS Ranger handheld devices, participants set out to discover the identity of a double agent by finding evidence, following video clues from “headquarters,” cracking codes, answering trivia questions, and solving Flash-based games and puzzles, all in an effort to earn points toward completing a mission.

As players approach predetermined GPS locations around the Capitol— and landmarks such as the National Archives, the Newseum, and Ford’s Theatre—the GPS ranger presents clues and information using a variety of media, such as videos, text documents, codes, audio intercepts, and photos for analysis. The game and technology were designed by BarZ Adventures of Austin, Texas.

Peter Earnest, executive director of the International Spy Museum, explained the facility’s interest in the game: “The museum already has displays and artifacts and so forth, but we see this kind of interactive immersive experience as part of our mandate for educating the public.”

Earnest said the game is attractive to adults as well as children because it’s a challenge. The museum has 50 of the handheld GPS units and will soon add more “missions” to the spy game. The cost to play is $14 per person. www.spymuseum.org

Aquarium of the Bay Purchased

The Bay Institute in San Francisco announced that its four-year effort to purchase the Aquarium of the Bay has finally come to fruition, taking the facility from a private to a nonprofit entity.

Originally opened in 1996 as Underwater World, the aquarium declared bankruptcy in 1999 and was purchased by BNP Paribas in 2000. Extensive renovations led to accreditation by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, and the aquarium finally became profitable, eventually becoming San Francisco’s third-most popular gated attraction.

The Bay Institute and the Bay Institute Aquarium Foundation will continue fund-raising efforts to secure support for additional science, education, and conservation programs. “Raising the capital to acquire Aquarium of the Bay through traditional fund-raising during the most serious economic downturn in our country’s recent history was an uphill battle,” said Steven N. Machtinger, president of the board of The Bay Institute Foundation, in a statement. “Thanks to the aquarium’s strong operating income, we were able to borrow the balance of funding. Moving forward, our growth strategy calls for an ongoing campaign to raise additional funding and grants to realize our vision of Aquarium of the Bay becoming a world-class interpretive center that will shape the Bay for years to come.”

Under the Bay Institute’s ownership, the aquarium will expand its efforts to become a center for science and education, according to Kati Schmidt, the facility’s public relations manager. “We’re now educating about 15,000 children a year for free,” she told FUNWORLD, “and the goal is to make it 40,000.”
www.aquariumofthebay.com

Knott's Chicken Dinner: Celebrating the Birth of an Industry Landmark

In June 1934, Cordelia and Walter Knott opened Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant, a five-table tearoom in Buena Park, California, where homemade chicken dinners were served to grateful Orange County residents who paid 65 cents for the meals.

Turn the clock forward to June 2009. The small tearoom has grown to a huge dining hall that accommodates 900 guests and serves 1.5 million meals a year as the anchor to a 160-acre amusement park, Knott’s Berry Farm.

Members of the Knotts family— including Marion Knott, the last surviving child of Cordelia and Walter Knott—and restaurant employees who served guests over those many years all gathered June 13 for the 75th anniversary celebration of the restaurant’s opening. The Knott family sold the restaurant and theme park to Ohiobased Cedar Fair in 1997, but the park company invited the family and longtime workers back for the anniversary event.

Jennifer Blazey, spokesperson for Knott’s Berry Farm, said she heard Marion Knott still had some of the serving pieces from the original restaurant, so she contacted Knott and invited her to come to the celebration. “She said when she left here 11 years ago she wasn’t coming back, but she’s now glad she did,” said Blazey. “She thought [the restaurant] would become something completely different, and she was pleasantly surprised it hadn’t changed. When she came out to the park with me, she was amazed that so many people came out of the stores and greeted her, people who had worked with her years ago and were still working here.”

Blazey said as they ate in the restaurant, Knott and another family member were actually counting the boysenberries in the pie to see if it had as many as it did when they worked at the restaurant years ago. “I was really nervous,” joked Blazey. “But then they said ‘Hey, that’s a good number!’ It’s that attention to detail that helped earn Knott’s its loyal following.” www.knotts.com/camplace/dine_restaurant.shtml

They Know What Time It Is: Monitoring Queue Lengths

Many parks try their best to make guests aware of attraction wait times by posting signs at queue entrances, but those displays don’t help guests who are in another area of the park and trying to figure out where to go next.

Brent Pope of Jacksonville, Florida, often faced this scheduling challenge when he took his kids to Walt Disney World in Orlando, so he decided to do something about it. Pope developed “Wait Watchers,” an application for Apple’s iPhone that provides wait times at attractions in the resort’s Magic Kingdom park. The downloadable program went on sale for 99 cents in June.

“The wait times are recorded through a community effort—by people who are actually in the park,” said Pope. “It shows the most recent wait time posted and the time it was posted, and you can also bring up all of the wait times for that day so you can compare times.” Pope said this allows users to spot wait times that are entered erroneously and are far out of range. He also said the program is GPS location dependent, meaning a person entering a wait time has to be within a certain radius of an attraction to participate.

Pope, an ad agency creative director who was laid off at the beginning of this year, is planning to introduce wait-time apps for the other Disney parks in Florida and California, as well as the Universal Studios parks in both states. He sees advantages not only to the guests, but to the parks as well: “Anytime a person has a better time at a park because they didn’t stand in line all day, that’s a value for the parks. Also, I think one reason why parks provide the [wait time] boards is to spread people out, and this will help do that. Finally, it’s pretty easy to feed advertising messages into the apps—to partner with certain amusement parks and let [the partnership] be supported by messages that appear in the apps.”
www.themeparkwaittimes.com