This may be a little bit of a diversion, but looking at some of these operational issues that Epic has been having leads me to wonder what the opening months of Disney's Animal Kingdom were like.
That park opened with far fewer attractions and before the days of all these ticketing schemes aimed at limiting capacity, so watching some of the challenges Universal has faced makes we wonder how Animal Kingdom didn't absolutely collapse when people showed up to experience a new park with so few attractions. Is it just that memories have faded of those challenges? Was the technology more straightforward and thus reliability better? Or is there some kind of other mix of factors?
There certainly were a lot of people who felt there wasn't enough to do.
Much of that came from Disney, I guess, expecting the live animals to hold people's attention for longer than they did. In my personal experience, a disappointment was that the majority of the animal stuff was all gate-kept within a single attraction that had long lines - keep in mind that the Asia stuff like the tiger trek and bat experience weren't open at that point.
The train ride and conservation station were pretty big disappointments to a lot of people. Many expected both more to the ride experience itself and more to do when you got to the end of the ride.
The boat ride around the center of the park was a flop because people waited in long lines for what they thought was an entertainment ride in the vein of Jungle Cruise (but maybe with live animals) and it really wasn't much of anything. They'd planned to have someone on board with a small animal to talk about and show to add more to it but that never fully panned out. This was a poorly thought out experience in a park that didn't have a lot of official "attractions".
They tried to change the name from what it was to "water taxis"
(and did some weird Radio Disney tie in) to better set guest expectations but that didn't work either since they only took you from one side of Oasis to the other in about six times what it would take to just walk it and if for some reason, after experiencing almost nothing on it going one way, you wanted to experience the other half for a return trip, you'd have to get off and get into another hour+ line. The two things to "experience" on it were some floating armor and sound effects meant to represent the anticipated beastly kingdom (there was a cave reported to have fire shooting out that I never experienced working) for one half and a single animatronic Dinosaur if you were on the opposite route.
The boat thing was a mess because they desperately needed the capacity but guest satisfaction for the experience was through the floor after how long people had to wait to do it so they ultimately closed it.
None of the guest-facing tech in the park was particularly ground-breaking, though. They had some problems with the safari (the major attraction) due to some issues with animals and the "track" but as far as I know, that didn't consistently affect capacity/up time.
The only attraction I recall having real technical issues was Countdown to Extinction (Dinosaur) which wasn't even new tech by the standards of the day since it was a clone of the years old Indy ride system and had little in the way of animatronics/sets.
They had huge problems with heat. I remember them giving out free cups of water at stations in various parts of the park in an effort to prevent guests from overheating.
Having said all that, this was the late 90's. Sites like this didn't even exist yet, Youtube was still almost a decade away and most people didn't have even dial-up internet access much less access to online reviews so there isn't much of a record of what that experience was like to look back on unless you were there for it.
For what it's worth, I still remember the opening of USO well before that, too which in many aspects was a disaster in its own way with attractions failing all over and them having inadequate covered queue space. A lot of people were really unhappy with MGM studios in the beginning too considering it to not be a full park compared to MK and Epcot and with basically only two major attractions that were both incredibly long but also had incredibly long waits.
In contrast, Epic is the first major park to open here in the era of social media and it has
so much newness and ambition to it with tech and ops for what Universal is accustomed to. Thank goodness this is the third iteration of the Nintendo area or I feel like probably every interactive question mark block in that land would be down.
I really
LOVED Monsters Unchained but I'm glad I got to experience it in preview because with so many advanced animatronics and so many effects and knowing how ambitious projects loose pieces over time (current state of Rise for instance), I kind of worry where this one will settle.
This attraction is remarkable to me because having ridden it a number of times, I realize how precise everything has to be for it to feel exactly like every scene is focused just on your vehicle and happening just for you despite having to reset and create that same experience for the vehicle right in front and behind you - just look at the troubles Disney's had with TBA and how spaced out everything is on that one to try doing the same thing and with this ride at Epic, it's basically packed from beginning to end with that sort of thing and literally no dead spaces (pun intended). I think this one is going to be a challenge to keep in A-mode the majority of the time as it gets more wear.
