Last month I went in depth discussing the iconic structures known as wienies at the Disney World parks in Orlando, FL, and this month I’d like to explore wienies in video game level design. Just as a quick refresher, ‘wienie’ is a term coined by Walt Disney to describe any prominent structure in a space that acts as a point of interest and geographical landmark. Video games and theme parks are both fully designed, interactive entertainment spaces so it makes sense that a design principle from one would show up in another.

The first stop on our tour today is the Great Deku Tree from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64 in 1998, later remastered for the 3DS in 2011. The Great Deku Tree is a giant anthropomorphized wise old tree with a loud, booming voice, who lives just outside the starting village. Once you have collected the sword and shield, the narrow path to the Great Deku Tree is made available. After encountering a few dangerous Deku Babas, the player as Link turns down a stone corridor which empties out into a large clearing housing the Great Deku Tree.

This corner and eventual reveal of the Great Deku Tree act in the moment as a camera pan, an example of the game borrowing from cinematic language. In the book Designing Disney, lifelong Imagineer John Hench writes that thinking cinematically was something they did often when designing for the Disney parks:

The Great Deku Tree’s reveal adds a moment of surprise and helps accentuate the character’s size as the moment you first see him, he is towering over you. Although many wienies are viewable from far away, drawing your attention, the Great Deku Tree is not centralized but a destination, much like the Hollywood Studio’s Tower of Terror. Placing a wienie off the beaten path can add to its mystique and perceived danger.

At the end of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Ocarina of Time’s sequel released a few years later with a remaster in 2015, we get a different type of wienie in the tree on the moon. I would struggle to explain how and why this scene even makes logical sense within the context of the game, but your journey to the moon and the tree sitting serenely in an idyllic field sets the player on edge. On an emotional level, you feel as if you may have transcended into a dreadful purgatory, not knowing what horrors may await at the base of the tree (spoiler alert: there are several). In contrast to the surprise and delightful reveal of the friendly Great Deku Tree in Ocarina, this area asks the player to run straight at the tree for an extended sequence without action, only the sound of birds chirping, your own footsteps, and the clanking of your sword against your shield. It only takes twenty seconds to reach the base of the tree, but you feel every last moment of tension. To use cinematic language, this is an effective slow push-in dolly shot with no cuts.

The next wienie on our tour is the Great Deku Tree from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The Great Deku Tree appears in several games in the Zelda series, coming in different sizes and environments. This one can be found only after navigating through the perilous Lost Woods. As you cross the threshold out of the Lost Woods and into the Korok Forest, angled beams of golden light break through the canopy above, the lively sounds of insects and wildlife fill the air, and at the center of this new cozy environment sits the colossal Great Deku Tree. Tucked away in this pristine grove are several paths with their own trials and challenges, but at the center sits the Great Deku Tree, acting as an icon for the peaceful area, a talking NPC, a useful geographical marker, and home to a few little koroks who live in a small tunnel within his massive trunk. If Ocarina’s Great Deku Tree is the Tower of Terror, Breath of the Wild’s is functionally closer to Cinderella’s Castle.

Wienie’s are not just for three-dimensional space. The Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening puts a mysterious wienie on its title select screen. A surreal, simple, and iconic image – a large spotted egg at the top of a mountain.

This egg not only acts as memorable location at the top of the game’s map, but it’s a lovely curiosity that captivates the player at any age. We all know that eggs hatch, but why is it there and what could be inside? You soon find out that it is the egg of the Wind Fish, a fact that really only presents more questions, and that the game’s setting, the island of Koholint may just be a manifestation of the creature’s dream.

The game’s symbolic icon, the Wind Fish’s egg, functions much like those in the Disney parks. It’s a towering structure with bold and memorable visual design that acts as a point of interest, a convenient geographical marker, and a destination in and of itself. What secrets does it hide? You’ll have to play the game to find out!

As a side note, I’ve heard that the developers of Link’s Awakening were big fans of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, a show that had its own cultural moment in Japan, and that the show’s strange and dreamlike tone helped inspire some of the game’s narrative decisions. Additionally, according to the Gaming Historian’s account of the game’s inception, the game started as an experiment to see what it might look like to port the SNES’s A Link to the Past to the Game Boy. Several employees of Nintendo started an “unofficial after-school project,” tinkering outside of regular office hours to see if a Game Boy Zelda title had legs. With both of these facts in mind, it’s not surprising the title has a strong unique identity that sets it apart within the series.

And now, the final stop on our tour of video game wienies: the island of Myst…

Cyan, the studio behind the Myst series, is the king of mysterious game wienies. Before playing either Myst or Riven I knew these were worlds I wanted to explore based on the cover art alone – depicting curious architecture and imagery that sparked something in my imagination. Myst with its island densely packed with mismatched yet purposefully organized architecture and Riven with its bulbous glowing tree firmly planted in a barren wasteland - like Disney’s Tree of Life with a cancerous alien growth. Curiosity is curiosity, and a wienie promising dark secrets can turn just as many heads as EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth.

Back in 2013 Robyn Miller, who co-created Myst with his brother Rand and is responsible for both Myst and Riven’s haunting music, gave a talk at the Game Developer’s Conference titled Classic Postmortem: The Making Of Myst. Their early games, including Myst, were developed on a program called HyperCard for the Apple Computer. The program programmatically joined a database and virtual card-filing system that, at the risk of sounding reductive, is comparable to an early version of PowerPoint. The game involves clickable mostly-still images that bring you from one static location to another, not unlike Google Street View. But as John Carmack was working on pushing the boundaries of how speedy a game could go with Id’s lightning-fast DOOM released just a few months after Myst, brothers Rand and Robyn Miller crafted a beautifully pre-rendered puzzle box that was rich with art, story, and some compelling motion video sprinkled throughout. Instead of DOOM - and my apologies for a horrible pun but I can’t help myself - they gave you MOOD.

The architecture would mean little without the narrative and creative - if not sometimes frustrating - puzzle design, but the Disney parks too are not plots of land with interesting looking buildings, but a fully realized and engaging play space. The wienies are both an experience and an advertisement for an experience, and the more one pays off, the rest become that much more enticing.

When the Miller brothers first tooled around with HyperCard, they started with a linear progression of images within their visual narrative but soon found themselves crafting branching paths "as if the medium was calling out to be nonlinear."

The Manhole (1988) was their first commercial game, a fully illustrated point-and-click first person experience for a younger audience. They released a handful of children’s games before being approached by the Japanese company Sunsoft to pitch a game geared toward adults. Instead of making the game for a PC, Sunsoft requested they develop one that would be playable on a home video game console. In his talk, Miller discusses how these limits would affect their production:

It's interesting that Miller stumbled into this type of design as it emerged within the technical limitations of the project. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, and I’m sure if I studied up on garden design and ancient towns I would discover similar design principles at play.

But getting back to video games, I gave just a drop of examples from the ocean of video game wienies. Some of my favorite examples not listed above include the mountain in the game Journey, the touring craig that you spend the entire game inching toward.

And an honorable mention to Boston’s own State House in the Last of Us, a real-life location that both works as a wienie and adds a level of verisimilitude to the world’s design.

Development on Sad Land is still going strong. I plan to devote my next newsletter with some updates on the project that I’m very excited about sharing. Until then, keep your eyes peeled for wienies and enjoy the spring.