Horror amusement park themed around Chernobyl. Recreate Pripyat, and have a lot of walk-around areas specifically designed to be creepy and feature little else; the existence of infrastructure but the apparent lack of life, occupants, and rules. Have dark rides and shows meant to unnerve as opposed to startle you. In attraction design, embrace nuclear fallout, radiation poisoning, and withering desolation. Perhaps have a attendance-cap on the park to keep the relatively large park at a creepily-empty degree. Main area would be the Pripyat amusement grounds (dilapidated carnival rides) and the hotel/school square. (Hotel should have a elevator drop ride inside.) Many of the abandoned areas would have secret thrills and themed spooks, in their décor, and cosplaying ghoulish mutants that pop-out of numerous hidey-holes.
Adventure Park—a playground for thrill-seekers, explorers, and adults. Indoor skydiving over a projection of the approaching Australian terrain, or of a zooming descent down Swiss slopes if wanting to recreate the thrill of wingsuit base-jumping. Rock-climbing in the Himalayas, using VR headsets with their imagery matched to the holds on a rock wall. Kayaking in the Colorado River rapids, in either a wet simulator or a physical canyon track. Spelunking in the caves of Peru, in a custom underground cavern. Dune buggy racing in the Sahara Desert—likely a simulation. Urban exploration beneath Paris, similar to Peru but more of a creepy exploration than a physical trek. Etcetera.
Theme park with areas reflective of America's most iconic periods and places. Prospectors' mining town in the American West. Redwood logging town in the Pacific Northwest. Bayou fishing village with jazzy nightlife in the antebellum Southeast. Post-Colonial Boston with rows of brick buildings and factories on the water's edge. Desert 1880s outpost (missionary-turned-military fort) with adobe buildings. Atomic Age suburban downtown on a quaint Main Street in Upstate NY. Art Deco cityscape of 1930 NYC. The tough but groovy tenement streets of 1968, Brooklyn/Berkeley, at the peak of the Peace movement. (Rather than laying-out the areas in the shape of America (a la Freedomland), connect countryside areas to city areas with intricate blending; connections determined not by geographic or temporal proximity but by atmospheric likeness.)
Themed zoo like Seattle’s Woodland Park—with cultural areas and places to rest, eat, learn, experience, and of course scope some animals—but also hire performers to pretend to be the residents of that manufactured place and time, to give a deeper feeling of immersion to a place that would otherwise just be a zoo. Beyond that of a standard zoo, it should feel like you vanish into one themed area after another, and the animal enclosures appear to be natural features and encounters, with believable villages adjacent that seem just as natural while dispensing food, knowledge, and the human element. For example, peasants and pirates of Borneo and Bali (SE Asia, Thailand) during the reign of the Dutch East India Trading Company, with thatched buildings, bamboo, and orangutans, tapirs, monkeys, sloths, tigers, Asian elephants. Post-colonial Africa in the savannah—a small village with a schoolhouse and huts; clay and cement buildings—with giraffes, zebra, hippos, rhinos, lions, water buffalo, gazelle, and a separate African area depicting the Congo, with gorillas, birds, reptiles. Tropical rainforest in Brazil during the ‘pith explorer’ era of the Amazon; tribal men both friendly and foe, and buildings made of thin trees lashed together; jaguars, birds, birds, birds, more birds, monkeys, amphibians. Also, Peru—north for alpacas and bats, south for penguins—and an Alaskan/Yukon gold mining village for bears, elk, eagles, otters, wolves, as well as a PNW Native American coastal village for the aquarium. Could also have physical attractions, like set shows, circulating theaters, and copious museums, and even a few amusement rides, like dark indoor rides, water rides, etcetera, so long as they are not loud or disruptive, for the sake of the animals’ mental health (and somewhat also the sake of immersion, for the guests).
Prospector-themed waterpark, based around an abandoned flooded mine. A network of slick tunnels allow you to traverse different areas without exposing exterior infrastructure, and navigating seemingly deeper and deeper underground… On the surface, however, is a faux-mountainside whose rocky channels are open-air slides, including racing slides. Also, a former drilling platform is now a wet jungle gym, with the perennial favorite ‘bucket dump’ at its top. Underground, the many mining shafts have become flumes, steep chutes, and twisting dark slides; at the very bottom of the mines (again, theoretically underground, but rather a quarry-esque dugout with elaborate roofing built over it for the illusion of being underground) is a cavern—a massive pool system—to which all the shaft-slides release their riders; and in the center is another wet jungle gym, though this one is themed like a washed-out prospector camp. In an adjacent smaller cavern is a “hot springs” for hot tubs. Within the cavern and its adjoining network of slick tunnels are the changing rooms, bathrooms, eateries, bars, shops, and an arcade.
Original document created 10/19/2014.