Fortress Party 2015 Retrospective, Part 5: Disney Big Game Hunting and Theseus Grocery Run

Two of my favorite pieces of Fortress Party tech were in FP''15. The first was Disney Big Game Hunting. It was a laser-based shooting gallery in which guests took aim at beloved Disney characters, like Ariel, Elsa, Eeyore, or Mike Wazowski. When a guest successfully hit a character with their laser sight, that character would recite an appropriate line from their movie. Sean built the rotating wheel and created the laser-sensing cartoon victims.

We 'Muricans love big guns and big game.

The other technological wonder at FP '15 was a live-action video game called Theseus Grocery Run. The legend of Theseus is that he was trapped in a labyrinth, and had to battle the Minotaur to regain his freedom. We broke in to Busch's grocery store after closing (thanks to our guy on the inside, Bryan Broulette) and attached a GoPro to the handlebars of a shopping cart. We walked up and down the aisles and filmed every possible permutation of turns.  

Andy strung the videos together into a functioning 1st person video game with the controllers built into a real shopping cart. When you got to the end of an aisle, you would mash the left or right buttons on the shopping cart handles, and it would play the appropriate video of you turning. 

The big red start button was to start the game, and smaller left/right buttons allowed for game play. 

Interspersed into the benign grocery aisle videos were clips of encounters... a sentry, a noblewoman, or the dreaded minotaur himself. To make it feel like a real video game, the live actors moved their lips, while we overdubbed the dialogue.

The Noblewoman Dialogue contains the following shorts:

• "Eurozone Bailouts"
• "Ghostbusters"
• "Greek Diet-Teas"
• "Greek Letters Joke"
• "Mac and Cheese"
• "Reese's Pieces"
• "Six Labors"
• "Tartar Sauce"
• "The Face That Launched"
• "Under the Minotaur's Tunic"
• "Virgin Goddesses"
• "White Sails"

The Sentry Dialogue contains the following shorts:

• "Greek Keys"
• "Ionic Columns"
• "Just Yogurt"
• "Marathon"
• "Orgy"
• "Start Em Or Sit Em"
• "Change For a Drachma"
• "Wind in a Deli Tray"
• "Discus"
• "Biggest Fan"

The rest of the room was decorated in a fairly uninspired way. The premise is that guests were Greek gods, watching Theseus running through the grocery store from their perch in Mount Olympus. There was a seat for each god. Above we have Poseidon (left) and Zeus (right.  

Hestia (left) and Dionysius (right.)

Apollo (left), Hermes (center), and Artemis (right)

Hades (left), Athena (center) and Ares (right.)