Mighty Coconut brings Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit to VR in Walkabout Mini Golf
Walkabout Mini Golf: Wallace & Gromit is launching on July 25 as the latest DLC for the ongoing hit multiplayer virtual reality game. …
Mighty Coconut, the creator of Walkabout Mini Golf, has teamed up with franchise creator Aardman to bring the zany Wallace & Gromit characters into a new course for the VR golf title. Adding DLC like this has kept Walkabout Mini Golf going strong as a VR title since 2020.
The aims is to push the limits of the technology, craft a low-poly art style, and ignite players’ imaginations for what is possible, said Daniel Efergan, creative director of interactive at Aardman, in an interview with GamesBeat.
“The animation roots of Mighty Coconut and the animation renown of Aardman come together in a way that creates a really interactive course,” Efergan said. “It’s a big and beautiful world, with all the different interactive gadgets. It’s been a real challenge.”
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Following courses based on the Jim Henson Company’s Labyrinth, Cyan’s Myst, and Meow Wolf, the latest collaboration brings the players together into a very nostalgic place: 62 West Wallaby Street.
Here, Wallace and Gromit’s industrious spirit comes to life, allowing players to explore their beloved home and garden. It’s an apt metaphor for the 100% independent studio behind the game, which is putting innovation at the center of their simple strategy, Efergan said.
This is not the first trip into VR for Wallace & Gromit. The duo was also part of Wallace & Gromit in The Grand Getaway. That title debuted on the Meta Quest in December and it featured a mixed reality experience called Jamtastic.
Regarding the earlier Wallace & Gromit game, it provided some learnings.
“That was a separate team and a kind of lovely, happy accident,” Efergan said. “While that was already in production, this conversation had started. And so we went over to this one.”
There were some learnings, like how big a coffee mug had to be in VR to fit in Wallace’s enormous hands.
“We had to think about how to get things in the right scale,” he said.
The collaboration of Aardman and Mighty Coconut
Mighty Coconut started as an animation studio in 2014 on the heels of Walkabout Mini Golf creator’s Lucas Martell’s award-winning short film The Oceanmaker. It owes much of its success in the virtual reality games space to it’s animation and storytelling roots—and episodic TV production discipline—which are evident throughout the first couple of dozen mini golf worlds they’ve launched.
With their 27th course, developed in partnership with Aardman, those animation and tech skills have been pushed to the limits. Examples are ten times the moving and interactive contraptions, characters, and other elements, pushing modern VR platforms and hardware to their limits for deceivingly simple and deeply enjoyable experiences.
The game has hundreds of thousands of active users. Many play about once a month and some play daily. A lot play for a couple of hours until their headset batteries run out. Some are older players who play with their adult children or college friends.
“We see this play pattern where people come in every week or every month with their mates and coworkers and their family,” Efergan said. “They want to come back.”
David Wyatt, spokesman for Mighty Coconut, said the community has formed around the game and that keeps players engaged and coming back.
“People love to come and hang out with friends,” he said. “It’s antithetical to what most gaming communities are about where the the top players are the ones that dominate. And they really need each other and they’re loud. And they’re braggadocious. Ours are more about people that help each other and teach each other.”
A cracking real experience
Both studios said they were excited by the idea that this mini golf adventure will feel like a very real part of the Wallace & Gromit cinematic universe, for longtime fans as well as new audiences.
For its part, Aardman not only licensed the rights to 62 West Wallaby Street, Wallace, Gromit, and Feathers McGraw along with gadgets from several of their award winning films, but Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park contributed sketches for mini golf hole ideas.
In addition, the course features the voice of Ben Whitehead, the voice actor for Wallace since 2009, when he first voiced him in Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures. Players can brace themselves for a whirlwind of ingenious contraptions that will tickle die-hard fans and curious newcomers alike.
The new course release comes at a time when Mighty Coconut is adding an increasing amount of content and experiences to each release, including new game modes, avatar packs, and forthcoming surprise features.
These enhancements ensure that the game remains a compelling, persistent experience where players can meet up, challenge themselves and one another, and choose any number of adventures together.
The new Walkabout Mini Golf: Wallace & Gromit course will be released this today at 11 a.m. CST, featuring 18 easy mode and hard mode holes, specially designed lost balls to collect, a commemorative in-game putter, and themed avatars.
But unlike the 26 courses before it, Walkabout Mini Golf: Wallace & and Gromit will also invite players to use (or avoid) a litany of themed contraptions from the minds of Wallace and Gromit to make their putts under par.
Wallace & Gromit’s first VR experience was Wallace & Gromit in The Grand Getaway, coproduced by Aardman and Atlas V in association with No Ghost and Albyon, and distributed by Astrea. It was just nominated for a 2024 Emmy Award in the Outstanding Emerging Media Program category.
A very crazy golf adventure
The new course will be available for $3.99 as an add-on to Walkabout Mini Golf (on Meta Quest 2/Pro/3, PlayStation VR2, Steam, and Pico platforms (and soon on iOS devices via Walkabout Mini Golf: Pocket Edition).
Mighty Coconut has announced that there are still three more courses coming in 2024 to be followed by Walkabout Mini Golf: Viva Las Elvis in early 2025 as part of a full slate of releases in 2025. Many more modes and features are also starting to show up in the game along with licensed cosmetic packs including ones themed to Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, and Exploding Kittens.
Mighty Coconut launched Walkabout Mini Golf on the Meta Quest in the fall of 2020 and it has steadily grown to be a player favorite and system seller, with a nearly perfect five-star rating with over 12,000 reviews on Meta Quest—making it the best-rated multiplayer game on Quest and Steam platforms as well as a top 10 selling PlayStation VR2 title since launch.
Player engagement boasts a two-hour usage rate for more than 50% of users (around 10 times the standard), meaning they play Walkabout Mini Golf until their battery runs out. Hundreds of thousands of intergenerational players from over 40 countries meet in the game regularly to play mini golf, to catch up, and to make new memories together.
Development details
It took about 15 months for a team of as many as a few dozen. The course was created in partnership with Aardman in Bristol, United Kingdom. The Aardman team attended the Meow Wolf launch event at SXSW in 2023 at Peter Pan Mini Golf. They so enjoyed the vibe and players in attendance that they asked to discuss collaborating without having ever experienced Walkabout Mini Golf.
The course features 10 times the amount of animation Mighty Coconut has ever put in any course, thanks to the gadgets, creatures, and gags filling 62 West Wallaby Street.
Players will encounter characters, creatures (including dozens of sheep!), scenes, gags, and other references to many of Aardman’s classic films as well as new inventions and even holes inspired by the sketches of Nick Park for crazy golf particularly.
Might Coconut had a good sense for environmental storytelling, where story unfolds in the VR environment. Both companies engaged in what they called a co-production.
Whitehead has been the voice actor for Wallace since 2009, when he first voiced him in Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures. Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park provided the team mini golf hole design ideas, which players will see in the garden with a familiar windmill design.
Mighty Coconut took on the challenge of fitting together the home at 62 West Wallaby St. in a way that had never been done. The layout was a puzzle for the Walkabout team that even Aardman has never done exactly.
Efergan said he joined Aardman and they asked what “we could do with all of these kids and adult fans hanging out on these websites.” Games was the answer. At first, years ago, they made a lot of Flash games, where the interactive content was just a marketing tool.
Then they moved into building apps, but Efergan said it was a “struggle to tell good stories and well crafted experiences in the way that the world was going to have a beginning, middle and end” rather than a bunch of loops. Aardman looked for external partners to work on console, PC and XR games.
“I think in XR we’ll all admit we’re still scrambling around to find our audiences,” Efergan said. “We hadn’t made something as wonderful as [Mighty Coconut] had. But we want to take storytelling into the future with a lot of interaction. It’s like our experimental space.”