Volume 1, No. 22. November 30, 2001
New Arrivals
Photo of a teen sorting fruit for points at The Great Barn. Photo by Eric Minton
It's an interactive barn!
Stone Mountain Park in Atlanta,
Georgia, announces the arrival of The Great Barn, November 23, 2001. Measurements:
12,873 square feet (3,900 square meters), four floors, four slides including
two 40 feet long (12 meters), 69 game consoles, 24 bugs, tools and machine parts
good for extra points, one scoreboard and 12,500 pieces of play fruit. Delivered
by SCS Interactive, Creative Kingdoms and Setpoint.
Despite near constant rain, Stone Mountain saw a 20 percent increase in attendance in the post-Thanksgiving weekend versus the same time frame last year. These numbers offer vital evidence that the Silver Dollar City company's first major installation at the state park will be a winner.
"It was pretty unbelievable to see the response," said Sonny Horton, Stone Mountain's director of marketing. He could credit a heavy publicity campaign that included direct mail to 75,000 households with children under age 12, but the interactive play center engendered such a response that even the reporters who covered the installation came back with family members over the weekend to play. "We got great word of mouth, a good buzz," Horton said. "The guy who answers our switchboard had 10 families call on Monday saying they had been to the Barn over the weekend and wanted to book birthday parties there."
The latest partnership between SDC and SCS (the park operators and play structure developers, respectively, who created the Treehouse for waterparks and Foam Factory for dry parks) puts guests inside a sort of video game. Wearing ID wristbands with which they digitally tally a score that flashes on a huge scoreboard in the center of the barn, patrons move from play console to console sorting foam-like plums, apples, oranges and peaches per instruction. They ascend the four-level playhouse via stairways or rope ramps, and they can descend down serpentine slides. On the ground floor, stalls house Delta Play foam animals (a horse, cow and a sow with five suckling piglets) and play structures for the toddlers, and on upper levels older kids and parents fired fruit out of SCS ball cannons. Mingling with the pfft-pfft-pfft of the air pump cannons was a soundtrack of crowing cocks and baaing lambs, plus the shrieks of laughter from the players.
Though the game is aimed at tweeners, and parents with younger children can take refuge in the foam-play stables, teens grasped the computer game concept of The Great Barn, and Stone Mountain staff were amazed at the involvement of adults. "We were finding that parents really got involved in the game," Horton said. "They were engaged. It's a real family-shared experience."
Children were the honored guests on opening day. A line of two dozen members of local Boys and Girls Clubs simultaneously cut the red ribbon and started a steady stream of patrons—15,000 in all—that ran unabated from before opening to after closing Friday through Sunday. Despite continuous showers, people waited in line for an average of 30 minutes, and as much as an hour, all day Friday. A group of street performers—two juggling farm clowns, a magician and a Southern Belle on 15-foot-high stilts (4.5 meters)—kept the queuers entertained. While parents held the spots in line, children played with the interactive elements outside The Great Barn, including hand pumps that squirt passersby, a double drinking fountain at cross-purposes (the left fountain's handle operates the right spigot), and a real moonshine still, confiscated by the state, now blowing bubbles.
Photo of SCS Interactive's Rick Briggs explaining a game console to two kids. Photo by Eric Minton