Pushing Buttons: Why the closure of Disney’s Star Wars hotel isn’t the end of immersive gaming

The $350 million Galactic Starcruiser will shut this year – but experiences that combine the real world with online gameplay could still fly

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Next month, Disney’s immersive Galactic Starcruiser “Star Wars hotel” in Florida will shut down, less than two years after opening. Best known for being horrendously expensive – $4,809 for a couple for two nights, or a mere $1,500 a person if you fit four to a cabin – most have dismissed the Starcruiser as yet another of Disney’s recent spendthrift follies.

When I heard the news of its closure earlier this year, I rushed to book one of the remaining cabins. My path into the games industry was by playing alternate reality games (ARGs) that mixed real-world actors and events with online gameplay; I’d go on to make ARGs such as Perplex City and, more recently, augmented reality games like Zombies, Run! Even though I hadn’t been impressed by the Starcruiser’s marketing, I was desperate to see what an estimated $350m budget had produced.