As the platypus-loving town of Phantom Peak prepares to open its door for the ninth season of its ever-evolving story, we speak to Creative Director Nick Moran about the past, present and future of the open-world immersive experience.
Phantom Peak's Starlit Summer. Photo: Phantom Peak
Immersive Rumours: Hi Nick! Thanks for speaking with us today. Phantom Peak's new season opens in a few days time, and with it the show will have had 100 total trails since first launching. If you think back to the opening season of Phantom Peak, at the time did you envisage the show hitting a milestone like that?
Nick Moran: I think when we started Phantom Peak, we had an idea of what we wanted to do. We knew where we wanted to go, we knew the overall ending of where Phantom Peak was going to get to. I've always known that from the beginning. I was very confident that the trails system - which is kind of Phantom Peak's thing - would be something people would enjoy. But how we did them and how we do the show in seasons, that was something we learned as we went along. If you'd said to me that we'd do 100 trails back then, I think I would have felt quite unwell, considering how much effort it was to get those first 16 up. Looking back now, they feel quite rudimentary. The trails are much more sophisticated now overall in terms of what they do, how people experience them, the things we use and the content involved. That first season was as much of a learning experience for us as for anyone else.
IR: How has planning for Starlit Summer been going? The turnover between seasons is so short this time around you must have to start planning the next one as soon as one opens.
Nick: Yeah. This is season nine now, and I would say with each season we get slightly better at planning everything in good time. We knew we had a small amount of changeover time between these two seasons so we have been more organised and I think that's really helped us. The town of Phantom Peak is mostly what it is now and while things do change, there's only so much we can do in that time - we're a temporary venue in London and we can't build a skyscraper, you know?
Generally, when a season opens I already know three or four trails that I want to do next season pretty much from the word go, and then the rest emerge when the theme does. It's really just trying to work out what the theme is for the next season and how we make it into good fertile ground for stories that move the town along in a realistic way and feels different but also familiar at the same time.
Phantom Peak's Festival of Innovation. Photo: Alistair Veryard
IR: Phantom Peak as a town has constantly been evolving season upon season. There’s been multiple expansions and reworks of areas, on top of a string of new inventions being introduced. Why is it so important to keep introducing these changes to the show as part of each new season?
Nick: The thing we've always tried to do with new additions to Phantom Peak is that they fill a gap in what we we need, as well as feel different in the way that people interact with them. For me I'm a content guy - I want to make loads of content that people are excited by. The tangibility is so important, so when we're building those machines and inventions that power the experience, it's all about making it so people will smile when they're doing it. People love the Paracryptic mirrors! They love them so much. It's one of those things you don't know at the time. We'll prototype something like that and then we're like, 'Okay, great, it's gonna be unleashed on 1000s of people. So let's see, let's hope it's everything it needs to be'. It's about building something that's robust and exciting as well.
Last season the new addition was Klacky. When writing the trails and planning the seasons, we’re always thinking 'It'd be really good if...' and for a long time we really wanted a text input where you could type anything into it, which is so versatile across stories. While it may not be as big or exciting as maybe a new building or something, for us they're big and complicated and takes a lot of manpower and resources. Also, who doesn't love Microsoft Word's Clippy?! We were basically thinking 'What if we make a real Clippy, but it's a dick?'.
Every season for us is a question of what can we do that will delight the audience the most with the resources we have. We're a young scrappy startup company - we're not rich - but we're always just trying to think about customer, customer, customer.
Phantom Peak's Festival of Innovation. Photo: Alistair Veryard
"For me, it's as fun as ever. I think I enjoy coming up with the stories as much as I ever have done. But I think it's consistently the same level of difficulty."
IR: The show's first season had 16 trails, but over time you settled on 10 trails (plus a secret one for those who complete them all) being the ideal number for a season. Has it become easier to write them now that number is lower, or has the added complexity made it harder?
Nick: The trails are much harder, much more difficult to write now. In season one, there was no real bar for how they should be and every single trail was a new articulation of the world's story. That was exciting enough from our perspective to keep us motivated, but now I'm always like 'Hey, I'm going to tell a story about Perigate this season. What do I want to say that's new about Perigate that I'm excited about? What do I want to say that we've not done before with Perigate?'. For me, it's as fun as ever. I think I enjoy coming up with the stories as much as I ever have done. But I think it's consistently the same level of difficulty since the summer of last year which is probably when we started to hit our stride on how we want to put together the trails.
Phantom Peak's Wintermas. Photos: Alistair Veryard
IR: You've also shared with us in the past that you'll write several more trails for a season than what ends up in the final show. Can you explain the process of coming up with each season's storylines?
Nick: The process is actually really simple. We come up with trails for every character - probably five to eight different ideas for everyone, and then we'll whittle down to the best few. It's a process of elimination, so there's always more ideas. They don't always get written up as full trails, but they'll get quite far along, some of them. In most seasons there's a trail which doesn't work and then it's thrown out probably two weeks ahead of opening. A new trail will come in and basically replace it, because there's always just one that doesn't quite work, and I'm not having people have a bad experience. I'm a perfectionist, so for me, they wouldn't have gone into the show if they didn't work, and they weren't great. I think a couple trails each season, in my opinion, really smash it out of the park. We're always trying to one-up ourselves and write the best thing we can.
IR: Which trails from Festival of Innovation were stand-outs for you?
Nick: I really liked Some Body to Love - the Halloway trail that involved Jonas. Also, The Last Laugh and Sweet Disposition were my favourites, but it's also a question of personal favourites more than anything else. Oh, and The Very Best! It's great, it's fantastic and had some amazing moments in.
Phantom Peak's Festival of Innovation. Photo: Alistair Veryard
"Phantom Peak at its heart has a comedy bent to it. Comedy is such an important part of the world - it's got to be funny."
IR: The Very Best was our favourite from last season. The title sequence and physical trading cards were such a great parody of Pokemon. You've done a string of trails that parody pop culture in previous seasons, are there any trails in Starlit Summer that do the same?
Nick: Well, Phantom Peak has always been culturally literate right from the beginning. I think it's about finding something that we find exciting enough to use as a fun hook for a story. You'll be pleased to know that we're doing our first-ever sequel trail. We've never done one of those before, but we're doing a second Monstermon trail because people loved it so much.
We always want it to feel like something where people are in on the joke if there are jokes. That it's exciting, that it's relevant, that it's fresh, that it's frothy and funny. Phantom Peak at its heart has a comedy bent to it. Comedy is such an important part of the world of Phantom Peak - it's got to be funny. And drawing on those things that we find funny is very, very important.
Phantom Peak's Wintermas. Photo: Alistair Veryard
IR: When writing new trails, how do you balance making them satisfying for new guests, but also rewarding for those who have visited Phantom Peak many times and are more clued up on the lore and backstory of the town?
Nick: The most important thing is to focus on a good story. If you focus on a good story that is about a character in a situation with a motive, with stakes that you care about, with a journey that you care about, and people understand what's going on from the beginning, then it shouldn't matter whether it's your first time or your final time. The secret trail is always our opportunity to tell something which is very context-heavy. We need context for the deeper fans - that's always the way that I consider that.
As for the rest of it, for example, if we do a trail on Dr. Furbish, I'm going to go out of my way to make sure we get something on Dr. Furbish early in the trail, which explains who he is in a different way to how we've done it before. We've got to make sure that someone who's visiting for the first time will have an introduction to it.
For me, it's always about making sure that everyone is always reintroduced, but also, I like long-running TV shows, I like long-running things. I can't be assumed to be studying up on it all the time and having a memory of that. Just a little refresher sometimes is needed within that. As long as we make the story good, it's always compelling. With a good hook at the beginning, it's fun and exciting. It takes people on the journey and makes every step clear and accessible and digestible, then no matter who you are, it should be an exciting place to be and an exciting adventure to be on.
Phantom Peak's Hallowed Peak. Photos: Alistair Veryard
IR: Given you're now over 300 performances into Phantom Peak, and there are breaks between seasons where you can make changes in ways other shows are maybe less able to do, how much of your decision-making for the show is based on audience feedback?
Nick: In terms of the stories, it's always what we think is best. We can't think about what people would want otherwise you end up working in a fan service-y way, and that's probably not healthy for anyone. What people want for the characters is not necessarily what's best for the stories. We're trying to do the best we can without pandering, but also staying core to our values of what we think are the right stories to tell and move the overarching grand plan of where Phantom Peak is going and what the overall story is at the same time.
In terms of the experience as a whole, we're very, very customer-focused. We really, really try and make it something that answers to peoples need. For example, the closing ceremony was created because people said 'Wouldn't it be nice if the show had an ending?' And we're like, 'Okay, we'll give you a closing ceremony'. People said 'Wouldn't it be nice if there was something more puzzle-related?' so we did The Innovation Games. That aspect is for puzzle people, because although the trail may have puzzles within them, puzzles are not the focus. Phantom Peak isn't an escape room, although it has escape room elements in it. It's all about stories, exploration, discovery, adventure, characters, situations, motive, and storytelling.
We're always trying to work out what we think the customers want from the feedback. Especially on the food and the drinks, we've always been listening, trying to get better and better. The evolution of the food in Phantom Peak is as much of a thing that we've cared about as anything else. People said they wanted slightly more elaborate, more fancy, Instagrammable cocktails. If that's what you want, that's what we'll give you.
Video: Phantom Peak
IR: There’s been talk of Phantom Peak expanding to other cities besides London in the future. Is there any news on the potential opening of a USA-based experience?
Nick: We'd love to launch Phantom Peak elsewhere. We're still in the process of raising investment for it, so that's the big question. Hopefully something on that front will happen soon. We're looking at venues across the United States. I'm not going to toot our horn on this because it sounds arrogant, but we're currently by some metrics one of London's best experience now which is really exciting. We'd love to take it to other places around the world and expand the world of Phantom Peak. There's so much more that we can do with Phantom Peak - Jonas has his terrible, amazing plans for the universe. Jonas has infinite ambitions let's just say....
Phantom Peak's Festival of Innovation. Photos: Alistair Veryard
IR: If you had to sum up your goal with Phantom Peak in a few words, what would it be?
Nick: We're really trying to build a world that people can come to and explore, and have adventures. That's what we're trying to do with Phantom Peak, we're trying to make a true other-world experience. That's always been the goal - it's about building a world and a place that people can feel comfortable in, feel excited about, and somewhere they can feel at home and grow with over time.
Phantom Peak's Starlit Summer season begins on 21st June and will run throughout the summer in Canada Water. To find out more about the show and to book tickets, visit phantompeak.com