The cancelled Willy Wonka Experience in Glasgow has been plastered across social media over the last week, thanks to how terribly it all went down. There’s so much to meme – the Oompa Loompa who looks done with everything, The Unknown (definitely a key character in the source material), and the Dashcon-level of set dressing.
Filmmakers have already jumped on the story of the Willy Wonka Experience’s breakout character, The Unknown – supposedly a rival chocolatier hellbent on stealing Willy’s ‘Anti-Graffiti Gobstopper’ – for some sort of B-grade horror story. However, I propose that in the spirit of other urban legends and cooked IP horror game flips, that the games industry should be clamouring to turn the Willy Wonka Experience into a horror survival game. For your imagination, I’ve used my passion for realistic graphic design to create a mock teaser poster of what that might look like.
I can see the Willy Wonka Experience horror game with perfect clarity: the dodgy warehouse with (supposedly) AI-created images of a fantastical chocolate factory pinned to the walls. The lights are out, and you’re locked up with the colourful cast of off-brand Willy Wonka characters, Five Nights At Freddy’s style. Survive the night, £35 Golden Ticket clutched in hand. It’s got the trappings of a cult classic written all over it. The horrors of AI are already spooky as it is.
We’ve seen plenty of other horror game flips in recent history, from Infestation: Origins featuring the recently in public domain Steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse, to titles like Winnie the Pooh: Realm of Torment and Winnie’s Hole. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that building on the ridiculous cultural capital of arguably 2024’s funniest viral story could be a banger.
Of course, there is the fact that as quickly as these stories rise to peak meme-ability, they fall just as fast into obscurity. But I simply do not care; I want to see the exhausted Oompa Loompa actor go absolutely apeshit in ways akin to a Silent Hill enemy.
Every single thing I’ve seen out of the Willy Wonka Experience in Glasgow is deeply cursed and primed for SCP-level horror.
I’ll be waiting patiently to see whether such an iconic failure of an event (again, supposedly written and fuelled by AI, if that’s telling of anything) pops up in some sort of itch.io experiment any time soon. And if it doesn’t, well, there’s still The Unknown horror movie to look forward to I guess.
Image: X / Konami / Kotaku Australia
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