The Pokémon Gym

Across from the Lab is the POKÉMON GYM. Nearly every city or town in a region has a gym, overseen by a Gym Leader who typically specializes in a given Pokémon type. Here, this experience will have replaced the unused Toon Lagoon Amphitheater.

I thought a lot about how to create a Pokémon Gym for a theme park. On one hand, it needs to be a “capstone” experience to the land, providing a sense of participation and victory, satisfying the land’s narrative arc of learning about, receiving, catching, training, and battling Pokémon. On the other, it needs to be high capacity (as all things in a theme park do), and to involve every member of the family at once. 

Those needs leave some holes in the most obvious concepts – like filling a facility with Battle Pods just like the ones outside, but where you battle against a digital AI Gym Leader. Not only does that lack the sort of scale, finality, showmanship, and importance a Gym Battle should have – it also means families would need to queue again for each participating member to have their battle.

For that reason, I settled on a concept that would be much grander in scale, with the trade-off being that you, personally, don’t get to battle the Gym Leader. But you do participate by way of a fast-paced, action-packed special effects show!

Basically, entering into the Cipresso City Pokémon Gym (a modern glass and steel facility built into the historic marble columns of Dominio’s past), you’d enter a grand, column-supported lobby built around a statue of the city’s Gym Leader. At the opposite end of the lobby, the path into the stadium would split, giving you the choice to support either the Gym Leader or a Trainer challenging the Leader for a Gym Badge.

With the queue having split, guests would be routed into pre-show spaces where they’d get the pre-battle rundown on their chosen participant – either the Gym Leader (a constant) or one of three Trainers cycled throughout the day, each with their own Pokémon lineup. This pre-show would give you the chance to learn your contestant’s Pokémon. From there, guests would routed into a Grouping Room, with their entire party assigned a space to stand (for example, in the diagram above, smaller parties would be assigned “Green A” while groups of 4 or more would be assigned “Green F,”) each corresponding to a small, family-sized seating area in the stadium.

With all guests grouped, the doors to the arena would open with Team Members ushering each party to their own assigned viewing space. Larger parties would end up at semi-circular “conversation pits.” Smaller groups would be assigned curved bench areas located a level down on the arena’s floor. Regardless, all party’s seating would be oriented toward the Battle Arena in the center, with a digital touchscreen monitor in front of them.

With everyone seated, the Gym Battle would begin! Both the Gym Leader and the trainer would be live, costumed actors, with Pokémon appearing on stage via Audio-Animatronics, rising from a hidden conveyer system under the stage. In-theater effects (like fog, fire, lighting, surround sound, and projection) would bring the battle to life. But guests would direct its course, using the monitors at their seat to select moves for either the Gym Leader or trainer, watching both creatures’ battle in real time!

The result, I think, is that guests would feel that this was a sort of participatory experience, and that their selections impact the battle. I think being invested in either the Gym Leader or the Trainer would also add such life to the experience, with cheering and excitement and investment that would be really, really cool to see.

And if you imagine an average of 4 people in each of the 64 seating pods, each continuous show could accommodate 256 guests, or about 800 people per hour (with 3 shows). That’s not very good versus a pack-’em-in arena show, but in a Blue Sky project, it’s easy for me to sacrifice that capacity and add significant complexity to operations in order to focus on interactivity and personalization. And in any case, it’s a not-insignificant capacity add versus the empty Toontown Amphitheater.

Oh yeah, and rides

Basically, I wanted the Pokémon World to be a part of the park you could literally spend the whole day in. If you just wanted to dedicate yourself to catching Pokémon, battling them (either with friends via Battle Pods, or out in the wild on your phone), and evolving them, you could. I just think that’s such a powerful level of immersion, that this literally becomes a land so interactive and so wish-fulfilling, we haven’t even needed to mention a ride yet.

Speaking of which, this land does have rides. I actually salvaged Popeye & Bluto’s Bilge Rat Barges – the white water rafting ride. Orlando parks need a water ride, even if I might remove some of the turbulence-causing planks from the waterway to create more of a lightly-spinning, floating water ride where you’re sprayed by effects, not torrents of water.

I called the refreshed ride POKÉMON SNAP: SPLASH SAFARI, as I think the ride winding through various environments would be perfect for lightly-animated and static Pokémon figures to peek out from behind trees, pop up from the water, etc. as riders try to use on-board Snap Cameras to catch photos of them while floating past.

Something about the winding river, the spinning, the splashing, and trying so hard to snap these Pokémon as they move… it just sounds like good, chaotic fun that’s 100% optional for those who don’t like water rides. I can see a lot of laughing families on the ride, which is cool. Plus, you could maybe see the photos you took either via linking to your Pokédex app, or in a sort of post-show showcase wall of the best (and worst) photos of the day.

I also kept the current “Me Ship, The Olive” as the S.S. SQUIRTLE since you can’t have too many family play areas (and especially splashy ones) in an Orlando park.

The land’s major attraction is JOURNEY TO HIPONEA: A POKÉMON ADVENTURE. In keeping with the Italian setting, I created a temple of the outskirts of town (the ancient columns of which still sprawl throughout the otherwise-modern Cipresso City). This Tempio del Mare – Temple of the Sea – is a flooded ruin, with water pouring down its steps and from a nearby waterfall, collecting into a rocky basin below (which also finally separates this island and Jurassic Park with a bridge, which the transition today lacks. To accommodate this, I had to shift backstage access to VelociCoaster, but it all still works.)

Journey to Hiponea would be an indoor, boat-based dark ride – again, filling the niche of a “Pirates of the Caribbean” style attraction, which Universal lacks altogether. This ride would send us in a search for Dominio’s legendary Pokémon, Hiponea the seahorse, whose ability to control the oceans is all that stands between Dominio and tidal ruin. Though it’s been centuries since Hiponea has been seen, legend has it that he waits deep in the Temple, to be awakened by those brave enough to find him.

In this Pokémon World, I really tried to create a really compelling, built-out land that just feels so filled with life, energy, and activity. This is a land you could spend a full day in, “gaming” and advancing and growing, like Super Nintendo World on steroids. I really, really like that. I think this land feels like Pokémon even if – like the games – it's a new place and new Starters. More to the point, I think it fits Islands of Adventure, too – a land that's fantastic and immersive and exploratory, rewarding those who dive deep.

And remember, this Pokémon World: The Dominio Region is just one land in my fully expanded and built-out Blue Sky reimagining of Universal's Islands of Adventure... so if you loved this concept or love Islands of Adventure the way I do, check out the rest of the park to see what new and reimagined adventures await...