Park People
parkworld-online.com Q Lines Dan Mitchell Rovio
Since the debut last spring of Angry Birds Land at Särkänniemi in Finland, a total of 10 Angry Birds themed attractions have opened around the world. This rapid roll-out mirrors the growth of a consumer brand that has received over 1.7 billion app/game downloads in just four years. To spearhead its push into the parks and attractions market, Angry Birds creator Rovio Entertainment recruited former Universal Theme Parks man Dan Mitchell as its director of location- based entertainment. Following the opening of the latest Angry Birds Activity Park at Lightwater Valley in England, Mitchell tells us more about his mission to bring the brand from the digital world into the physical world
Why did Rovio decide to enter the theme park and attractions market?
It really started as just another way for us to engage with our fans. Following the opening of Angry Birds Land at Särkänniemi, Rovio started fielding a huge number of enquiries, both from park operators saying ‘Hey, how we can we get one too?’ and also from fans, keen to see one in their country. So they went about formalising things and setting up a division to deal with location-based entertainment, which is where I came on board. I had heard about Särkänniemi and the great things that Rovio was doing there. When the opportunity presented itself to be involved in the start up of all this, as I had been as part of the team at Islands of Adventure and Universal Studios Japan, it seemed to good an opportunity to miss. Rovio is a great company to work for.
Why have you chosen playgrounds as the main component to most of the Angry Birds attractions so far? Some of that is because it’s a lot easier to engage people when they aren’t spending a lot of time queuing in line for attractions. We’ve heard great stories about husbands playing Angry Birds with their wives, children playing with their grandparents, and so on. It’s a family experience that people are doing together anyway, and we wanted to create shared experiences in the park too.
How important is it to gets kids active as part of the Angry Birds park experience? It is important for us to have this blend of digital and physical in everything we do, and we feel good about encouraging healthy, active play with Angry Birds
Dan Mitchell and a NASA astronaut greet an Angy Birds fan at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida
Activity Parks. But even in the gaming world there is a lot of great new technology coming out, things like “exer-gaming” and active play that takes us beyond what you may think of as traditional gaming.
How have some of the parks and attractions that have opened Angry Birds attractions benefited so far? In some of the classic ways you would expect – attendance increase, overall length of stay, guest satisfaction, but also if you look at Särkänniemi it provided a ‘halo effect’ that provided a great uplift for the whole park. As a Finnish company, it was great to have the first attraction in our own backyard.
What criteria do you look for when choosing sites/partners? We look at all the basics, such as site selection, attendance, financial viability, their core management strengths, but then we look at the fit between the brand and their company culture. The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, for example, is at the hub of all the great attractions in Central Florida, but for us is was a great fit because beyond active play we also have a desire to be involved in education and learning, and here we were able to align ourselves with NASA’s role within science, technology and engineering. With each new location, we are refining our strategy. We want to be accessible to all our fans, so in addition to these gated admission attractions, we also have some free- to-play parks as well.
Angry Birds Land at Särkänniemi in Finland JUNE 2013
New Angry Birds attractions are being rolled out quite quickly. Do you have an optimum number of attractions per region? Certainly there needs to be a balance. On one hand, we would like to be as successful as our game is; to reach as many fans as possible. But there obviously needs to be some sort of exclusivity from region to region, which makes sense from an operator’s standpoint.
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