Don Carson played Walkabout Mini Golf during the pandemic in 2020.
In 2025, he puts on a VR headset in his Oregon home to sketch places he wants people to visit and enjoy from their own homes beginning sometime in 2026.
Carson works as senior art director for a team called Mighty Coconut that's steadily grown over his relatively brief tenure.
The Coconuts now number in the dozens.
Every seven weeks or so their creative engine releases a new destination priced just under $4. The last was Walkabout's 31st course, Viva Las Elvis, and we toured the place with its lead artist.
Globally across stores from Meta, Apple, Sony, Valve, and Bytedance, Walkabout players return to the Welcome Shack to find a new course available. According to Mighty Coconut, when players did that for Elvis in January it created the highest day of revenue ever for them, with players buying Elvis and continuing the journey by grabbing a few more courses too.
That it's unusual enough to be newsworthy for me to mention Martell uses no outside investment to employ these artists says something about the forces shaping the VR market. Here, you're reading about a company called Mighty Coconut making one of the best paid multiplayer VR games ever conceived, employing dozens of deeply skilled artists who basically only come together in the physical world when it is time to brainstorm new ideas.
I don’t care what measure analysts use to apply the label “unicorn“ to a certain class of endeavor. To me, Walkabout is a VR unicorn if only because you can see in recent courses the continuous steady ripening of a platform. You can feel it looking around at the smoke in the lights of Elvis or when plucking a giant guitar string there.
“We don’t have any specific openings at the moment,” Mighty Coconut's Job page says, though they do post an email address.
I include that because I know people out there are looking for jobs. You can read Quest To Horizon from my colleague Henry Stockdale. We also have a large body of links reporting on the many layoffs at a large number of studios. Some of them used to employ more people than Martell does for Walkabout.
What I've done is invite Carson for an intimate 1:1 voice conversation from his home in Oregon to mine in New York, hosted by my colleague Beck from Canada in the UploadVR Studios.
UploadVR recently received Carson's “Principles Of Walkabout Mini Golf Course Design” which I published as a guest post, and I streamed our conversation first for UploadVR site members.
The Art & Principles Of Walkabout Mini Golf Course Design
There are many insightful things Carson shared over the 45-minute discussion and I encourage you to make time to listen.
Don Carson
One comment I wanted to pull out for you from Carson:
“Some uninitiated person who sees Walkabout Mini Golf on the surface could easily eye roll at how simple it is what we're offering. But then they experience it. And especially when they experience it with friends, they'll say something else is going on here.”
“And my answer is, yes, it is, and it is by design and by listing out these principles, we're not showing off what we do, we're saying to other world builders, 'you can do this too. We give you permission to think about these things as you're designing and not because it's a secret, but because these principles thought in this order actually can create really immersive loved gifts to your audience.'”
“Why do I like this so much? Why is this so engaging? Why is this so immersive? It shouldn't be. It looks like Legos. And yet I'm...being evoked. I'm having emotions. Well, a lot of that is based upon these simple rules and the same tricks and same techniques that have been used successfully in image making, movie making, film making, and ride making.”
“We're just doing it in VR.”
If you enjoyed my conversation with Carson, you can also find us talking at length with Andrew Eiche, Rafael Brocado, and E McNeill.
Ikea, Aston Martin, and Red Bull are a few examples of brands that have found success in VR marketing. But it's easier said than done and there's a specific playbook for engaging audiences in VR. What are top considerations?
