Early artist rendering for the design of the first Two Bit Circus
Two Bit Circus is bringing its micro amusement park to tinseltown.
On a scorching July day in Los Angeles, the normally bowtie-bedecked co-founder of Two Bit Circus, Brent Bushnell, was taking a group of guests on a tour through the virtual reality inflected extravaganza of an indoor amusement park that, at the time, was still very much a work in progress.
But in a few short weeks everyone in Los Angeles will get the opportunity to take the first peak at what, for Bushnell and his co-founder Eric Gradman, has been a years long quest to reinvent the funhouse for a new generation of amusement seekers.
The story of Two Bit actually begins in 2008 in a warren of lofts and artist spaces on the outer edges of downtown Los Angeles, where Gradman, Bushnell and a merry band of pranksters would experiment with all the new gadgets and gizmos that earlier generations of tech designers and manufacturers were bringing to market. In the tradition of the best hardware hackers Bushnell, Gradman and their motley crew (crue?) were looking for ways to combine nascent sensing, projection and visualization technologies in experiences and events that would delight and amaze.
“It was eight to ten of us just hanging out and sharing projects that we were working on,” says Bushnell. At the events, called MindShare, which were hosted all over downtown LA, Bushnell and Gradman were called in to be the “brain trust that was tasked with coming up with fun ways to screw with an audience,” Bushnell recalled
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Two Bit Circus co-founders Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman
Those experiments around screwing with an audience began to take on more of a shape when Bushnell and Gradman began incorporating narrative elements into their games. One of the last experiences that the two did for fund was “The Versic Institute of Counter Espionage” — itself an early escape room that included aspects of immersive theater that took place across the brewery complex where everyone lived and worked. “This whole thing was basically a high-tech scavenger hunt,” said Gradman.
Eventually, the popularity of the games and events that the two created gave them something of a reputation in Los Angeles and that’s when corporations came calling.
“Phase one was us bringing our stuff to other people’s parties and phase two was us building using other people’s stuff and take it to other things,” said Bushnell of the company’s early years.
Their first paid job was providing the entertainment for a big Microsoft launch in LA around the gaming conference E3. Other gigs followed for companies like Intel, Warner Brothers, where Gradman and Bushnell were able to build games and create experiences that drew inspiration from the old carnie and Coney Island boardwalk games of skill and combine them with new technologies to create an experience that was both digital and physical.
“In the beginning we did temporary installations because our biggest struggle was that no one understood what it was that we were building,” Gradman said. “We had to convince people that this is what they wanted. Now, many years later people are starting to acknowledge the fact that tech is changing the way we have fun.”
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Source: Techcrunch