The video games industry is swimming in legendary and iconic franchises, but few (if any) can truly compete with the cultural phenomenon that is Minecraft. What started as a survival-crafting game has become so much larger than that, so I wasn't too surprised when Xbox and Mojang Studios announced a new way for people of all ages to experience Minecraft... This time in the real world.
Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue is already live and in business in Dallas, Texas, and its doors are open to all of us. I unfortunately wasn't able to attend the premiere (Dallas is not exactly a brisk walk away), but I did get the opportunity to sit down with Olivier Goulet, Managing Partner and Executive Producer of Minecraft Experience, and Craig Leigh from Mojang, Principal Design Director. In lieu of a hands-on experience, I instead discussed what brought this unique Minecraft attraction to life and where Xbox plans to take it from here.
You can keep reading to learn more, but if all you needed to hear was "it's in Dallas" than you can pick up your Minecraft Experience tickets for $65/person through feverup.com.
What is Minecraft Experience?
Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue is a real-world, interactive group activity designed in collaboration between Xbox Game Studios and Mojang Studios, Experience Mod LLC. (in charge of production and technology), and Supply + Demand. Minecraft Experience aims to immerse groups of up to 25 people at a time in the world of Minecraft by having them explore a multi-biome space taking up over 20,000 square feet, all during the course of around an hour.
You don't need to be a Minecraft fan or even be familiar with the game; Minecraft Experience is designed to accommodate people of all ages, skills, and knowledge levels. Villager Rescue tasks you and your group with saving a village. To do so, you'll need to explore, collect resources, battle mobs, and craft everything you need to cure zombie villagers of their undeadness.
The first iteration of Minecraft Experience is situated in Dallas, TX and will remain there until around the first week of Jan. 2025. After that, the Minecraft Experience team will pack everything up and move to a new city, repeating the process over and over through 2025 and beyond across the United States, Europe, and Latin America. If you're interested in participating, you can purchase Minecraft Experience tickets for $65/person from feverup.com, with group discounts for 4-15 tickets and an even larger discount for 16-25 tickets.
Bringing Minecraft to everyone in the real world
"I come from theatre, I come from rock-n-roll, I come from getting people engaged into stories and experiences," Olivier Goulet, Managing Partner and Executive Producer for Minecraft Experience, told me early on in our discussion. "Looking at my kids play Minecraft, the idea triggered of doing an experience and then bringing it to life."
Goulet is the founder of Supply & Demand, and over his storied career has assisted in the design and production of countless shows, events, and TV products including multiple Cirque Du Soleil performances and even concerts for artists like Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Bon Jovi. For him, the Minecraft Experience is simply the next chapter in immersing people in entertainment.
Accompanying Goulet during our conversation is Craig Leigh, the Principal Design Director of Minecraft Experience and a long-time part of the Mojang Studios team. Before this, Leigh was instrumental in bringing Minecraft Legends to life, and before that played a key role in the creation of Minecraft Earth. For him, this is another opportunity to give people a unique, all-new foray into the Minecraft universe.
Unlike the woefully fated Minecraft Earth, though, Minecraft Experience is a lot more grounded in our world. "No more augmented reality, just reality," Leigh said at one point.
It turns out, building the Minecraft Experience into what you can go enjoy right now was a long, arduous process that involved no small amount of creativity and technical ingenuity. I learned a lot about the tech behind Minecraft Experience, which is designed to captivate multiple senses — touch, sight, and sound chief among them. It may not stop there, even! I jokingly asked if Minecraft Experience would eventually target participants' noses, too, and the response surprised me.
"What does a Creeper smell like? I don't think I want to know what a Creeper smells like," Leigh matched my tone. Also, gunpowder and lightning, I thought that was obvious.
Goulet, however, had a different answer. "[The technology] isn't there yet, but it's something that we're starting to explore. There's nothing to say that we're not going to do it in the future," he explained. I'm getting ahead of myself, though; the Minecraft Experience already combines a ton of different technologies, so how does it work?
It all starts with the Orb of Interaction. Every participant in the Minecraft Experience is given their own Orb, which they'll use with gesture controls to interact with the environment. The Orb doesn't just accurately track your unique movement and gestures (even when there are 24 other people around you), it also provides visual and tactile feedback with RGB LEDs and vibration motors that respond to your actions and new events.
Beyond the Orb of Interaction, the Minecraft Experience utilizes a ton of technology to make everything come together, and it's both seamless so you never see behind the scenes during the event and modular, so everything can be easily packed and moved to the next city. Touch comes into play through the Orb of Interaction and the plethora of physical props and environments. Sight enters the picture through projected screens and digital interfaces. Sound is introduced through over 100 meticulously placed speakers that provide precise, natural 3D audio during the entire experience.
You'll explore multiple biomes during your time in the Minecraft Experience, too, and each biome offers a unique experience. Some may make use of touchscreens, other arcade-like systems, and others still using LiDAR technology to track your movements with even greater precision. Creating the Minecraft Experience also meant "special technology that was made and designed just for this experience," Leigh told me. "We've had to develop this through the course of the last two years to do all of these amazing things."
The end result is a cohesive experience that seems to be resonating with the first wave of visitors. "We're used to working and living in Minecraft, being in real life in the Minecraft world, but seeing people come in and be blown away by the technology is incredible," Leigh said.
"We wanted to make this accessible to everybody. It's not just for Minecraft players, it's for people to discover Minecraft as well," Goulet added. "It's for families, it's for parents to understand better what Minecraft is. It's for legacy players to reconnect with the game, as well."
Technology isn't all it took, though. The Minecraft Experience is a part of the wider Minecraft universe, and that meant faithfully capturing its soul. "This is another way to step into the game. It's not a replacement," Goulet said. Apparently, that started with coming to terms with the fact that the Minecraft universe is big — and I mean actually big, not its level of influence.
"It was actually an interesting technical challenge because the real virtual Minecraft world is a different scale, and it's a little too big for us humans," Leigh explained. If you weren't away, Minecraft blocks are canonically 1m x 1m, or around 3.3ft x 3.3ft, which is unwieldy to the average human, to say the least. The Minecraft Experience scales everything down to 60% of its normal size, and the work done to design the countless props for mobs, environments, and more in the Minecraft Experience has helped bring Minecraft into our world in other places.
Originally, I was actually meant to speak with Torfi Frans Olafsson, the Creative Director of Entertainment at Mojang Studios, before Leigh took his place. Torfi is a well-known name and face in the Minecraft community, and for the last few years he's had his hands in both the Minecraft Experience and... 'A Minecraft Movie'. Yes, you may have heard that Minecraft is getting a live action movie starring Jack Black and Jason Mamoa, and that project isn't entirely separate from the Minecraft Experience.
Leigh and Olaffson apparently work very closely together, speaking every day, and discussing how best to bring Minecraft into our world in different ways. "Now that we have a foundation for what Minecraft is like, we've used the same scale for the movie set, for all the movie props and everything," Leigh told me. Where 'A Minecraft Movie' will make us an audience, though, the Minecraft Experience lets you go hands-on as an active participant... And the work isn't done, yet.
Where does Minecraft Experience go from here?
"Minecraft is more than a game. It's a huge, iconic entertainment brand," Leigh said during our conversation.
"Villager Rescue is the first iteration of [Minecraft Experience]. We're scratching the surface... The end goal is exploring how we can interact with the brand in a different way," Goulet continued. Yes, that does mean there will be new Minecraft Experiences telling different stories, experimenting with new technologies, and discovering new ways to bring people into Minecraft. From a different perspective, it means that Minecraft Experience is here to stay.
"As technology develops, we will continue to experiment and make new adventures. It's not a marketing stunt... it's almost like a traveling theme park attraction," Leigh explained. Minecraft Experience is starting its journey in Dallas, TX and will remain there until the beginning of the new year, but Leigh and Goulet's eyes are already on what comes next. Beyond new experiences, it also means new locations.
"We are actively looking for where our next locations are and we're planning for the future... Don't worry, it's going to come to you," Craig said. "It is a standalone experience and we're looking for this to grow. It premieres in Dallas, but it will travel across the states and then on to Europe and Asia and Latin America." Considering Minecraft Experience plans to spend 15-20 weeks in each location, at least a couple of years are already set in stone.
Goulet also hinted at how Minecraft Experience could evolve beyond my half-joking comment on smells, mentioning other attractions that use puffs of air and other effects to introduce even more sensations to the experience.
Minecraft Experience could be a rolling snowball, progressively growing and evolving as it continues down its path, and Goulet's production team is ready for it. "We're there to upgrade. We're there to listen to the guests and the visitors and make sure that as this evolves, we're going to get better and better. We're going to get much more focused on this," Goulet said toward the end of our discussion.
I'll admit that I was a little disappointed that I couldn't check out the premiere of Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue for myself, but I'm hopeful I'll get my opportunity in the future. Leigh and Goulet both seem very excited about what they and their colleagues have accomplished, and that kind of passion bodes well for the future of this attraction.
Who knows, maybe there's a future where Minecraft Experience sets up permanent shop in some places in addition to its traveling show. It all comes down to how well the Minecraft Experience really gives participants the Minecraft experience, bringing them into a world that many of us have spent many, many digital hours with.
If you want to put that to the test yourself, you can purchase Minecraft Experience tickets for $65/person from feverup.com. You can also keep an eye on MinecraftExperience.com for the latest news and updates.
