If there was one place I wanted to go more than anything as a kid (besides Toys R Us), it was SegaWorld London. The indoor theme park was opened by Sega in the London Trocadero in September 1996 and was apparently the largest indoor theme park in the world. However, it was shut down 3 years later.
I never got to visit but after watching Badnik Mechanic’s definitive history video, maybe I wasn’t missing out.
Ah, who am I kidding? I was a child—I would have loved it! But the reasons why my parents didn’t take me were confirmed in the video: cost. There was also questions about its quality and some pretty bad reviews from critics (who absolutely weren’t the target demographic—white middle-aged British male journalists? It was destined for failure).
One thing it did have was the AS-1 which I wrote about for Cultrface’s sibling site, LOGiCFACE:
Michael Jackson in Scramble Training was a piece of software made for Sega’s AS-1 motion simulator. It came out in 1993, around the time he worked with them on Sonic 3 and sees the King of Pop instructing you how to pilot a spaceship.
And it had Sonic the Hedgehog because of course it did.