David Elton brings nearly three decades of expertise in the game industry, having worked with top studios like Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Zynga, and Capcom. He has held diverse roles from Vice President - Product to Creative Director, contributing to a wide array of titles from Microsoft's Solitaire to iconic franchises like Need For Speed and SSX.

Today, David serves as the Fractional COO at Dave Elton Consulting, guiding studios in striving for operational excellence while they develop their best games possible. Join us to explore David's role as a fractional executive, his insights on game development and business development, and his contribution to Mario Kart Bowser's Challenge for Universal Studios, the first major attraction to incorporate AR. The discussion highlights the intersection of virtual and physical worlds in gaming and theme parks, offering a glimpse into the future of interactive entertainment.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Game Development Challenges
• Bringing Video Games to Real-World Attractions through Creative Processes
• Insights into Immersive Entertainment Across Industries
• Technological Integrations in Entertainment and Future Trends

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• David Elton on LinkedIn
• https://daveelton.com/fractional-coo/

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique video game recruitment firm, and this is the Here's Waldo podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about their success. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful.

You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry. This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs.

Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a thank you to Deconstructor of Fun, which is an incredible podcast. If you have not been listening, check it out. They have a Slack channel, which has so much information about any topic that you may want to know. And I connected with Dave through that. Thank you. And I've also had Laura Toronto and Jen on the podcast. So give those a listen. 

Today we have David Elton with us. Not Elton John, sometimes confused. He is an almost 30 year veteran of the game industry with a side journey into the world of theme parks and immersive entertainment. Thank you for being on the show. Glad we can make it work. 

David Elton: Thank you, Lizzie. Yeah, no, I've been looking forward to this. Looking forward to our chat today. 

Lizzie Mintus: Me too. So yeah, nobody's really talked so much about theme parks, but I want to have a little background on you. And I know you are consulting right now and filling in the business needs and more for companies. I would love to hear more about that 

David Elton: Absolutely.

Yeah. So these days, I'm working as, basically a fractional executive for a number of companies. So working with a tech platform that's in early days, stealth mode as a chief product officer for them, doing business development for helping bring games from North America and Europe into Asia, also looking at bringing some AI platforms potentially from the Asian region into North America and Europe, and chatting with other folks about potential, other product this time around mobile. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Certainly keeping busy, meeting a lot of really interesting people. 

Lizzie Mintus: You're a man of many talents. It was fun to look over your career and all the things that you've done. So I want to talk a little bit about your career and then get more into theme park. So, I'd love to hear like a high level overview of your background and how you ended up in games. 

David Elton: I started at a time when there were no courses around making video games. Locally here, there's Vancouver Film School as an example, where they've got courses on development, art, programming. But I started off in the early days of, It's a lot of making things up as you kind of went along. And I started back in the days of, 16 bit, so Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo on the very first CD ROM platforms. So Sega CD, 3DO, for those that want to reach back to some obscure platforms. Didn't develop for the Apple Pippin, but pretty much every single speed CD ROM drive out there.

I consider myself to have a very fortunate career and that I've worked with some fantastic companies like Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Zynga as well as some smaller ones along the way as well. And I've had the opportunity to try a number of different elements inside there from leading game development at studios through production doing business development for Microsoft. So I've been able to touch on a lot of aspects of the games industry over my time. And I think for me, it's a big advantage in that I'm able to kind of Wear different hats or take a look at problems from different lenses and see how things can be approached or have an understanding of how other people are looking at problems or what they may be going through.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm happy you're doing consulting because like you said, you've touched on so many different things and early stage companies always need help with a variety of things. So it's really helpful. 

So you did a few different stints at EA. Can you talk about what you worked on? And I'm also curious when you started at EA, what was the state of EA? How big were they? 

David Elton: Yeah, so, I started at EA before EA had the beginnings of their big campus in Burnaby, just outside of Vancouver. It was still pretty early days. There were only a couple hundred people there, whereas now it's in, I don't know, 3,000 odd people. 

Lizzie Mintus: No, it's like 20,000 people, I think.

David Elton: Oh, no, sorry. I meant in the studio. Worldwide, they're gigantron. But the footprint in Vancouver certainly has grown a lot since the time when I started. So I joined about a year before we all went into the new campus out in Burnaby.

And yeah, I was with the EA for about 12 years altogether across two different stints. Majority of my time was with the Need for Speed franchise, as well as with the SSX franchise. Worked with EA partners for a number of years. So I got to work with some fantastic companies around the world. Overall I very much enjoyed my time with EA. I think Need for Speed was probably, overall, the franchise where I certainly had some very, very interesting experiences. 

Lizzie Mintus: Please do tell. Story time. 

David Elton: I'll get to some stories about Need for Speed, but SSX, I think, was probably my favorite game to work on, especially SSX3.

 I think it was one of those times when it was just a fantastic team that we were all working really well together. Even though it was the days of crunch and you were putting in a lot of hours, it was a really supportive group and I really enjoyed working with the team there, but, Need for speed was again, another fantastic group to work with. 

Some of the more interesting things I think for the car fans out there, when Nissan was releasing or had mentioned that they've got a prototype version of their new GTR. There was some original specs for what the prototype of the GTR were. And we did a demo for one of our need for speeds with that prototype GTR in there. But while that was all that was being shown publicly, what was behind the scenes was we got all the specs for the actual GTR, Nissan GTR. And I think I was one of a handful of people in North America that had actually seen all the actual specs for the car. It was sent to us with a sealed envelope and it was like, this must be in lock and key at all times. So there was just a few of us that actually got in, put together that car, so how it felt and everything. 

And the day that it got announced around the world, first pictures went out. It was the day that we switched the demo over so that had the actual car in there. And I think that was a really fun thing for us to do to be able to have such a large premier for a car happened inside the game at the same time as going live.

 And then when we're working on Need for Speed Pro Street, because we were going from more arcade physics to more realistic physics, we wanted to capture what the movement of the cars look like more realistically. So we went with a number of professional drivers. We were able to get a number of different types of cars. So front engine, rear wheel drive, mid engine, all wheel drive, all different variations, and film them going through the track. And we had the drivers being really smooth in terms of how they were driving and really herky jerky. So you'd be able to see the difference when driving the car. 

But some of the drivers took us out around the racetrack that day. And one of the drivers that the scariest one, even though we had super high powered cars, the scariest car ride that all of us checked, I was in the 3 25 BMW. So you think of a really, really basic car, but the driver wasn't saying. That guy was able to Do things for that car that just made all of us need to change our underwear afterwards because he would have it going sideways. And we'd just be, ripping onto the car thinking, Oh my God, we're going to hit that wall. We're going to hit that wall. We're going to hit that wall. And he's just very casually, just kind of flick at the steering wheel and just be driving, all forward. And he's just having a grand old time while the rest of us are just sweating buckets and hoping that we had our insurance all paid up and everything and our wheels done because we weren't sure we were going to survive the lap.

Lizzie Mintus: I don't think that I would enjoy that. Even if I could ride it, it would be a little bit stressful for me. I like your description of Herky Jerky, too. I had this really janky Honda CR V. And its name was Herky Jerky, because it would do this Herky Jerky thing when you were driving it. 

David Elton: Well, you know, we wanted to get that sense of that visual feedback when the player wasn't being really smooth with the controls. If you can think of the early D pad players, where it's just tap, tap, tap, tap on a D pad, we wanted to kind of get that herky jerky sense inside the car versus the people that are playing with the analogs, get that more smooth transition around the corners and that, but it was fun.

Lizzie Mintus: Any other challenges from your EA times? Lots of people see people have successful careers and these magical games come out and they're so good, but there's so many struggles and challenging decisions that you have to make along the way. And It's kind of a one word decision, right? You need to make this decision. Your game is shipping. 

David Elton: Yeah, like it's a lot. Working on consoles, especially at that time, were a lot different from working on mobile right now where you can put together a very basic test inside a week. Maybe two weeks, put it out, get audience feedback from it. Versus then it was, you know, you kind of made your calls early on in terms of what you were planning on doing. And you ended up not getting feedback from players until it was on the shelves. And you didn't know if you had made the right calls or not until you saw the sales where you saw what the reviews were like. So I definitely like this style or more current style of getting feedback earlier on. And I mean, over time we were getting feedback earlier and earlier and earlier on in the process.

I took, you know, versions of our games and did testing, consumer testing with big Need for Speed fans across Europe and into North America and got early feedback. But, you know, even by that point, we had already made some calls in terms of what the game was going to be like, that there was no going back on.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Did you collect feedback that you were able to make really major changes still? 

David Elton: I wouldn't say they're necessarily... yeah, not so much major changes. Maybe like, where did we focus a little bit more down the road in terms of what feature sets were we focusing a little bit more on, like more effort on a particular feature, be it a little bit more career or a little bit more sort of random play. But yeah, it was more making sure, what the messaging that we were trying to do inside the game, but what type of game we're trying to get across was coming across. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. That stresses me out to think about too, just coping and creating your game and making these big calls and having to come out on the shelf as opposed to being able to patch it. It's a really different scene. 

David Elton: And there are times when, you know, you finish the game and everyone realized, you know what, it was a good concept, but. It didn't work out in the end. And you end up with what was referred to at times, a pack and a parachute game, where you put a pack on it and create a packaging for it and you put it out. You don't spend a lot of money on, on marketing for it. But yeah, those are definitely different times. You know, companies like EA, Electronic Arts, they were fine with putting out, 20 different releases inside a year. And now, that much more focused around, okay, there's really only going to be three, four or five titles that they're going to put out and put a lot more effort behind those individual titles.

Lizzie Mintus: Well, the cost of 20 games, then three or four games now might be the same too. And there's so many different games on the market. So, a whole different scene. 

And then you did business development at Microsoft and you evaluated studios and games for Microsoft Game Studios. What valuable experience to work in business later and have seen the other side of the coin. So how did you evaluate both the studios and the games? 

David Elton: Well, I think one of the benefits that I had, because I had been a game designer, been working as a game designer, working as a producer prior to that, was I was used to seeing game concepts at such an early stage of, it's just all on paper or really, really, really basic prototype. So that meant that when I was getting pitches coming into Microsoft, that I was able to take a look at it at the paper stage at that very early, early demo stage and have an understanding of, okay, well, this is what it could be. Where, I think some people, if they don't have that background necessarily have the ability to transition or translate what's on paper into a visualized version of what that game could look like or should look like. 

And also because I was from that development background, I was able to give a lot of feedback in terms of, okay, well, you know, thank you very much for bringing in this pitch. Here's my general comments on it. And we'd be able to give detailed feedback on game play, on sort of what their process was for how they were looking at shipping the game. And the end result was, I met the person that replaced me at Microsoft a couple of years after I had left. And apparently there's still studios calling up and asking for me specifically. I'll take that as a compliment, if people are still looking for me there for a number of years later.

 And I think it was specifically because I didn't go in and say, I'm sorry, but we're rejecting your proposal. It was, I'm sorry, you're rejecting your proposal. However, here's a whole bunch of feedback for you. The reason being was that particular game might not be right for Microsoft and the same philosophy I have going forward may not be the right game from that particular time, but I want them to feel comfortable to come back to me later when they have something that may be actually a fantastic fit. So Certainly want to have that relationship there where both sides feel very comfortable about sharing our thoughts and opinions and where we saw things and how we thought we can continue that relationship in the future. 

Lizzie Mintus: Did you do due diligence for studios to be acquired as well?

David Elton: In that particular case, not for being acquired. I did do that at some other companies, but that was making sure that they were great studio partners for us to be able to either do a game that they've pitched or in situations where we were looking for studios to help out with porting a title.

So for example, if we had a version of a game on Xbox, but we wanted a PC version released, but didn't have the resources in house to do it, then who could we work with as an external partner? So yeah, a lot of evaluation on those lines. 

Lizzie Mintus: Well, what did you look for? I think there are probably some listeners who would like to work with Microsoft. So it's always nice to hear the other side. 

David Elton: Well, I'd say Microsoft has probably changed a little since I was there. 

Lizzie Mintus: Sure, but I mean, there are some fundamentals. 

David Elton: Oh, yeah. In general, the question is, do they know what they're doing? But it's not just in terms of, Do they know how to do the art? Do they know how to do the engineering? How do you know design, but also do they know how they're actually going to deliver the product to us? Cause we were working with very specific timelines and shipping schedules. And we had a particular product that fit inside a particular window and we wanted to make sure that we knew that the product was going to be able to come out in that particular time.

So it was also looking after, What was the project management side of that thing? Well, how's the company itself organized? Is this a situation where, if they come back to us and say, Hey, we will be finished. Alpha will be delivered in June. Gold Master will be end of September. And yes, we'll be hitting the store shelves you know, beginning of November. Do we believe that they have the infrastructure to ensure that they'll actually hit those times? And obviously at the quality part we needed, but wanted to make sure that we were able to have those conversations where here's a feature set that needs to be delivered. We can see that you have the talent based on what products you've released and meeting with the leads. Do you also have the infrastructure to ensure that everyone is going to be working in one concerted effort and that if there are any challenges that they're shared easily, they're shared transparently. And that they're going to feel like really good partners and not just deliver a great game, but on time, on budget. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, so you want them to be buttoned up, be transparent, and maybe have some past history of delivering things on time that you could look at. 

David Elton: Absolutely. Absolutely. That doesn't mean that there... there was never a situation where there wouldn't be any flyers taken. We signed up, for example, at EA the DICE team for Battlefield. They were a pretty young team at that particular time. They had done some products before, but I don't know if you would say that they were necessarily a team that was really of an EA scope group. But they ended up delivering a fantastic product for us. And there was another story that, well, that one I wish I could tell, but I won't.

Lizzie Mintus: If you choose. 

David Elton: Yeah. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. You said you did studio due diligence for acquisition later. Can you say where you did that?

David Elton: I can say where. So at Capcom, I did some of that on the mobile side. So there certainly were some products and teams that we were interested in acquiring.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

David Elton: And again, we didn't end up going through with the acquisitions, the ones that I looked at. It wasn't necessarily that they weren't a great team. It just wasn't what we wanted at that particular time. So a little bit more on the fit side. And at least one of them continued to do really well for themselves and can continue to make some great titles. It just wasn't a fit for where we decide we want to take the group as an all as an overall strategy structure. 

But very much the same thing, same sort of things that we're looking for in terms of that game development. Are they going to have the ability to keep releasing games, but also are they going to be able to maintain themselves as a company? The idea being that the leadership that was in place prior to purchase would continue to be the leadership, but that there are the people that help drive the vision that got them to that level where there was interest in saying, Oh, we would want them to continue to make sure that company thrived.

Lizzie Mintus: So really, if you're acquiring a studio, you're looking at the key leadership hires and you want to ensure that those are locked down. 

David Elton: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think that conversation is always going to be there. Is it going to be something where it's where a company gets absorbed. I mean, it's one thing that EA was famous for, probably still is famous for being absorbed into the EA infrastructure. And then there are other examples where companies want to provide more of a loose infrastructure and support, but not having that requirement of you must do everything the way that the parent company does everything.

It's the recognizing that each studio will have its own culture. Each studio will have its own pluses and minuses. And then you look to see what are the things that they can do to support them, either through knowledge transfer or in some cases, it may be a studio weakness where maybe they don't have the best customer service, or they don't have the most, comprehensive QA or something that they normally did outsourced, then what are the things you can do to support them? 

But my personal take on it is, they've been successful for a reason. Don't destroy your acquisition by destroying the reason why they were successful. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I had Ed Frietz. He was my first podcast guest. Ed is so great. And he talked about being at Microsoft and acquiring, I think it was Ensemble. And he brought them in, showed them the office with the view of the lake and how everyone was going to have their own office. They said, we don't like that. We don't want to do this. And he said, what do you mean? So yeah, it's interesting how some companies do in Microsoft terms, blue badge you. You go completely into the system and sometimes they leave you alone. And it'd be interesting to figure out what the formula is. I mean, what companies are going to do best under what circumstances? Cause I would imagine it's not all, you know, one way or the other way. 

David Elton: Yeah, and I think there certainly are some advantages, some big advantages to working with some of the larger companies. Microsoft, for example, as I brought studios or teams to come through Microsoft and kind of show off what we would have to offer as a publisher, the testing facilities and the consumer feedback that we were able to get at Microsoft were, especially at the time, pretty much second to none. We had testing facilities where you could be across the country and it's quite a long time ago. Across the country, but we'd bring people in to test the games, we had cameras on people's hands, so you can see how they were doing the controls, they had a fantastic system for setting up heatmaps for inside the games where players were dying or getting stuck, cameras on players faces on the game itself. So you could always see, okay, well, I see that they're having trouble navigating this particular part of the game. Is that because they're having trouble with their hands? Are they having trouble, but still being very much enjoyed. You can see the expression on their face at that particular time.

So you can get a lot of that feedback, and especially a lot of that non verbal feedback, which was fantastic for people wanting to see how players were doing inside the game. I think some of the larger companies are certainly getting more and more of that inside their systems, and have been for a number of years by this point. By that time, it was almost unprecedented, that type of feedback you can get from players. And obviously that's something that, if you have a 20 person studio trying to make their first few games, they're not going to have the resources to be able to do any of that. So having access to that is phenomenal. 

Lizzie Mintus: I hadn't really thought about that. But that seems really true. Maybe the least in the future. Business idea there. 

You were an entrepreneur in residence at the Innovation Factory. That's like the best possible name for an entrepreneur in a residential area. Can you talk about joining that and what during your time? 

David Elton: Yeah, so that was in Hamilton, Ontario. So just outside of Toronto the people are not familiar with geography in Ontario, Canada. And so I was working with companies that were interested in either getting into games or early stages in getting into games or technology that is associated with games or. The last sort of category was people interested in gamification for whatever software or apps they had at that time. 

So it was really interesting in terms of just meeting with people, such early stage, development of their ideas, of their concepts. You know, Innovation Factory was a place that had a lot of support for up and coming founders and people that were interested in bringing their concepts to life and would support them through community. There was a location for people to actually do work out of a coworking location. And there were even some dragon's den type competitions where people could pitch their ideas as well for funding. It was really good it was part of actually a larger infrastructure across Ontario where they were looking at how they can best support founders, allowing founders to have an opportunity to survive those first crucial years of being able to get their ideas or concepts or their products out to market.

Lizzie Mintus: That's the hardest time. Yeah. What a fun thing to be a part of. So were you incubating something yourself or were you more observing? 

David Elton: No, no, I was there. I was there to help other founders and entrepreneurs. 

Lizzie Mintus: Cool. Well, I feel like you learn a lot from doing that yourself, right? You get a peek inside many different businesses.

David Elton: And I think for me, there's also the beginnings of a love for working with startups or young companies and then being able to work with them on making that transition from a concept to shipping something or from shipping something into a more mature company, with proper processes in place to allow them to actually survive as a company, not just make a great game, but make a great company. 

Lizzie Mintus: What kind of things do you think are commonly overlooked from startups? I know you talked at the beginning when we weren't even reporting about how so many companies have designers and they have a vision, but they don't always have the business side of things.

David Elton: Yeah. There's a few different parts that are generally the big things. It depends on what infrastructure they have outside, be it lawyers or bankers or what have you, but generally it is not having the best understanding of their financial situation, what their runway actually looks like. So most of them will say, okay, you know, well, I only pay myself $25,000. They pay themselves $25,000. We pay this person $50,000 and that's our cost. 

And it's like, well, no. It's a part of your cost, but it's not all of your costs. Absolutely. So, it's working with them in terms of, well, let's properly set out what your P& L looks like, or most likely will look like for the next while.

The another common bit is the on the same lines people will take a look at the large chunk, but then we'll end up dying the death of a thousand cuts, not understanding that, you know, if you look at. So a lot of consumers make the assumption that if they buy a game for $70 or $50, that $50 goes to EA or Activision or whomever. It's like, well, no, the distribution costs, they probably sold it in at $35. So, they only get that amount. And then they have certain percentages that go to the platform holders. There's certain percentages that go to licensing for the engine. There's certain percentages that go to and it's that on and on and on and on. And a lot of companies don't take all those little bits and pieces into account, and end up dying of a thousand cuts. 

Another very simple aspect is the HR side of things. Just having proper contracts in place with all of your employees. Even really, really basic things like tracking of time off depending on the situation inside the country. Some countries have a requirement that you must pay people X number of days off as a bare minimum per year. If you don't have a proper accounting of how many days that person's taken off and they leave, well, you either could owe them money or they actually could owe you money, depending on how many days they took off and how your agreements are structured.

Lizzie Mintus: Business nightmares. 

David Elton: So it's a lot of those organizational paperwork type things that people just don't want to do because, Hey, there's a really fun thing that we could be working on like making a game. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I mean, throw in a business to look at your PNL and figure out what are your cogs and do some financial forecasting. I would say, I mean, I have a lot of friends. Many of my friends own businesses and operate businesses. Some do come from the financial background and usually they buy a business and for them that's really fun, but generally the person that starts their business because they're passionate about the thing that they've started their business to do are not passionate about finance.

David Elton: Absolutely. Absolutely. I've been teased a few times in that I really enjoy putting together headcount, Excel spreadsheets, being able to take a look at what long term headcount looks like and be able to put in automated processing and therefore costing against each of those from headcount from average salary costs to benefit costs to cost of equipping them and so forth.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I already got that stuff up and running and figured it out. I saw an event last night that was about financial literacy for women in business. And my friend Kia created a game. She just made a simple analogy. You're selling pickles. What are your costs? Soft pickles, right? And then, okay, we're gonna subtract these, and then you have to pay taxes. And we have poker chips. And at the end, someone's like, Oh, I don't have any money left. 

David Elton: But I've only got one chip left. And you start it with a pile like this. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's exactly how it works. Okay, I want to talk about theme parks. So you worked at a company, DreamCraft Attractions, that makes AR and VR location based entertainment for theme parks, including Mario Kart Bowser's Challenge for Universal Studios Nintendo World. How cool. Tell me about working on theme parks versus games. 

David Elton: So the part that sort of connects everything there is the fact that we were doing, it was interactive entertainment. So we were still using game engines for the projects that we built out. But I will admit the coolest part of that... so I knew some of what the company was doing when I signed on. But they couldn't tell me exactly what it was. So sign the paper and they went, great, come on in and we'll tell you what you're working on. And so, you know, show up inside the office and they went, Oh, by the way, your first title that you're focused on is Mario Kart.

Mario Kart, yes. That's awesome. And it was, for me, such a fantastic experience. The Universal Creative Team is a great team to work with, but it was one of those projects where it hadn't been done before. So it was a lot of, well, how are we going to do this? How do we do that? And our focus was really, it was just on the software side of things. So all the game portions of the project. So there was a company that we worked with that created the visuals that we then brought into Unity and created the experience inside Unity. 

But I had the opportunity to sit in on a number of meetings with all of the different vendors that were creating this one theme park ride and I forget what I think the meeting started at 7 a.m. Vancouver time because we started off with companies that were on the East coast. And it went on for hours and hours and hours because all these different people talking about different aspects, everything from what the pre-ride experience was going to look like, what was it looking as people were walking through, was it going to be like, all the way through to the headsets that users were wearing. How did they get cleaned and then brought up for the next set of riders?

In the early days, we had created the space inside of VR space because, for those that aren't familiar with the attraction, it's four people inside a car, and then there are two cars side by side, and they're racing. And you're going through an environment where there are, it's like you're driving through an actual Mario Kart world, where there are, if you can imagine, a number of the characters and, and items you see inside Mario Kart are inside the Mario universe are all inside the space.

So when you see the piranha plant, it's like an actual physical piranha plant. Like, the thing moving and all that, it's just fantastic. The giant blocks with the faces that come down, smash you inside Mario Kart. They're real world things inside the space. Of course, they don't smash you while you're driving your car, like they do in Mario Kart. 

Lizzie Mintus: Hopefully not, yeah. 

David Elton: But they are there, and they do move. Then the riders wear an AR headset. And then it's on there that you actually see and interact with a number of other characters as they're racing through the world as well. You're collecting gold coins inside the space, you're fighting against Bowser. 

But it's an experience that's never been done before. And certainly it was hats off to Universal for coming up with the experience as a whole. So it was a very interesting challenge, but because it was a real world space, the ride was meant to be inside of a real world space, but that space hadn't been built yet.

We had to build that space in VR. Now, for anyone who's ever tried a VR experience with really bad frame rate and movement inside there when you have no feedback. 

Lizzie Mintus: Very sickening. 

David Elton: Oh, it was. I think it was one of the things that we used to certainly test people's endurance for really bad VR was going through and testing out just because, unfortunately it was the only way that we could really test out what was being built in those early days. It was a little challenging. You got used to it after a while. I'm somewhat used to it. 

Lizzie Mintus: Get your VR legs. That's what I've heard. 

David Elton: Yeah. It was a really good team. And there were a lot of people just asking questions about, well, this is what we're supposed to do, but how in the world are we going to do that?

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. What a challenge. Has there been anything since this attraction that has kind of mimicked b eing a similar experience, having an AR headset going through this physical...

David Elton: Not to the same degree. And I think part of that is probably just because of the timing of when it came out. So we were doing the installation. The first installation was happening while COVID had really started to hit the world. And the first installation was in Osaka. And Japan was pretty hard hit and had some pretty strict guidelines around how you could gather in places. 

So as you can imagine, COVID did horrible things for the attractions industry. A lot of companies ended up going down or were in very tough times, Dream Craft included. But now the industry is coming back sort of into the swing of things. And we're certainly seeing a lot more investment in interesting projects. Universal has their epic world being built right now down in Orlando, so that'll be a huge, new land for Universal Studios down there. Should be some great experiences down there. Their Nintendo world continues to have new attractions added to it. 

Lizzie Mintus: So can I tell you a secret? 

David Elton: Absolutely.

Lizzie Mintus: I've never been to a theme park. And I really don't like large crowds of people, so I really have to work myself up and get a fast pass or whatever you call it at whatever park it is. And probably only be there for a very short amount of time, maybe one day.

David Elton: Fair enough. Fair enough. It certainly isn't for everybody. There are certainly some rides that people just are like, there's no way in the world you'll ever catch me going on the ride. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, I don't like to, I don't like to hook myself off of cliffs when I ski. That kind of stuff is not personally appealing for me. I don't like that sort of thrill, but maybe it would be a good experience. And if it's a video game meets a theme park, I think that'd be a work trip, really. 

David Elton: Absolutely. You know, I think there are smaller scale versions. So if you look at some of the family entertainment centers or things like Dave and Busters, where they've got the four person, small sort of attraction rides rear of the VR headset. You can kind of get a bit of a sense of what could happen on a larger scale. 

Lizzie Mintus: I did go to one of those after a conference, a game conference. And I had free tickets and I gave some kid my tickets and they were so happy. It is just another form of play and it is really cool to think for me about games meeting a physical world and what that means for the future, especially now that people want to go out in the physical world again after Covid. So maybe there will be another version of the company you worked at that takes off. 

David Elton: I certainly hope so. I think at the time, just before covid, so we're looking at sort of what were viable business models for VR. They were certainly struggling inside games, and there were a number of companies trying to figure out where they could pivot to. I think we probably would have seen more of a VR renaissance in terms of family entertainment centers, which much smaller versions of theme parks or the Dave and Buster's all the way through to the large theme parks of VR and that if COVID hadn't happened, because I think I was starting to see a certainly swing in that direction.

 We did another attraction for Lionsgate Entertainment. They've got a park inside China where it's a number of different rides that are based on their various IP. And so we did a ride based on the Twilight IP. 

Lizzie Mintus: Cool. That's very close to me. You can go and visit the town. 

David Elton: Well, so for that traction, you're actually seated on an actual motorcycle that was on a motion base. And then you had a VR headset on. And we actually added so that you and three other writers were inside the experience together. It was a multiplayer experience. We had the sensors on the front so you could track your hands. And so you could wave to your friends inside the experience, but, because of the feedback inside the motion base, we were able to make it so you could actually feel there's one point you go across a rickety old bridge. You felt as if you're going across each of the things and then you got into the sand and the wheel would actually feel like it's digging into the sand. So you can actually feel like you're going through, and through that world. So the peach was one of the places that we actually had the ride going 

And that was, I think for everyone except for motorcycle riders who are actually thinking about what they were doing, was a really, really fun and interesting ride. The reason why it was a little bit of a struggle for some motorcycle riders is inside the experience, regardless of what speed you're going, if you wanted to turn right, you turned right. For those that ride either bicycles at higher speeds or motorcycles, at some point, when you want to turn right, you actually turn your steering wheel a little bit left and lean. And that's how you turn. So it's a little weird for some people to be like, I'm going fast and if I did this in real life, I would kill myself. It's not how it works. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I could see that being hard. I did go see U2 at The Sphere, which was a cool experience and I actually hired for The Sphere. That was one of my early clients. Yeah, a long time ago, so it was really cool and U2 came on and the sphere kind of crap. It looks like it cracks open. Super trippy, but your seat starts to vibrate. And it's really just this immersive experience. And I don't even particularly like U2, but I went to Dice and I saw that it was after Dice. And I just get really fixated on doing experiences. Like no one's going to tell me I'm doing anything other than the thing I want to do, right? And I was like, okay, I'm doing it. So I recruited people to go with me. That was really cool. So if you have the chance, I highly recommend that. 

David Elton: It is certainly on my bucket list. I definitely really do want to go to the Sphere. I am a fan of immersive experiences, be it VR, AR projection, mapping, really cool monitors, experience, whatever.

Lizzie Mintus: It was like nothing I had ever seen. And I think even if you don't particularly like the artist, it's still so worthwhile. 

Okay, I have one last question for you. Where do you see the future of virtual worlds meets physical worlds and entertainment, sphere, theme parks, everything, games, all colliding? 

David Elton: I am really hoping that we're able to get to a sense of virtual reality without the headset as much as possible. And that probably will be a combination of projection mapping, maybe AR, so some sort of headset, but something you can actually see through, so you still feel more involved inside the space. So, one of the things I loved about the Mario Kart experience is the fact that you actually saw pieces and you knew that they were real. Virtual reality certainly can trick your mind into some things.

 I know that I have stood on top of glass plates in some experiences when I know I'm standing on concrete, but still I'm like that glass is going to break. I'm going to fall to my death. Being inside of a space where you actually see the things and have a much better sense that they are really there, having those elements inside the space, but then having some of the more fantastical experiences are built into that. So if you're thinking of the sphere, if you have the sphere around you, and you have some of the physical inside, and you have that combination, then potentially have an air overlay on top of that, the worlds you could create with that sense of, I'm actually there, that sense of immersion without that sense being broken... VR, you need a whole bunch of senses agreeing with your eyes in order for you to feel like, okay, this is real and I'm not going to just hurl.

If you're inside of a space and you have an AR over top and you feel like I'm in an actual space, you don't have that. You have much more sense of being grounded, much more sense of this is real, even though you can have incredibly fantastical things in front of you. So for me, that's where I'd love to see the space go. And if I ever had the opportunity to help drive that or make that, I would hop on that bus so fast. 

Lizzie Mintus: If I have the opportunity to recruit for that, I'll hop on it. I'll recruit you to it. That'd be awesome. 

We've been talking to Dave Elton, a fractional executive offering services to early stage companies in products and games and technology. Dave, where can people go to contact you, learn more about your services and maybe hire you? 

David Elton: So very easily, my website is DaveElton.com. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. Yeah, I'm there as well. Those would be the best places to find me. 

Lizzie Mintus: Great. Thank you so much. 

David Elton: Thank you. Always a pleasure to speak with you, Lizzie.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.