War of the Worlds comes to Expo 3000

The War of the Worlds (WotW) attraction was the most ambitious project to date to be built for Wonder World. It was located in the new expansion to Expo 3000 which I showcased in the previous article. This attraction was never actually a part of the original scale model of Wonder World, built many years before. In the model, this massive indoor dark ride was originally called World of the Future. I never really had any master plan for what specifically the ride would be, other than slow-moving vehicles that would take guests through futuristic environments. This would have been very difficult to create in RCT3 at the time, especially since I had used most of the futuristic game scenery for the Expo 3000 Space Port. And my skills at creating custom scenery were not quite up to the task at that time.

The War of the Worlds building with the Super-Sounds Bandstand in the foreground.

It was around this time that Steven Spielberg's film, War of the Worlds, had just been released. Inspired by the film, I decided that an attraction depicting an alien invasion of Earth would be a much more exciting attraction for the park. And it was much more feasible to create in RCT3, as I could build it with mostly in-game scenery in addition to a few custom scenery sets that had been released by the RCT3 community. The end result was an attraction that was not so much as based on the War of the Worlds (films or novel), but was more or less simply inspired by its theme.

The new expansion to Expo 3000 was soon referred to as the War of the Worlds Plaza, although the other attractions in the new area had no relation to the WotW theme.

WotW Plaza

 An aerial view of the massive show building housing the WotW ride.

Guests get a view of the WotW ride vehicles. The monorail I used would probably not be my first choice today, but I was restricted to the limited selection that shipped with the game, and the ability to create custom tracked rides for RCT3 was not available at the time.

The WotW boarding station.

Beyond this portal lies the war-torn Earth during an attack by alien beings.

A car below is blasted by an alien ray gun.

A monorail glides past a city park set afire by the alien invaders.

The monorail is nearly engulfed in flames.

The airforce arrives to battle the evil aliens. But will it be enough?

The ride takes guests underground, past an erupting subterranean volcano.

Alien ships are spotted as guests barely escape the flames from the surrounding volcanoes.

Could this be a secret alien base, hidden beneath the earth?

Inside the base, the aliens are creating an army of cyborgs.

These guests seem to be enjoying the Earth's impending destruction.

Could this be the Mother Brain controlling the alien attack?

Things don't look well for the human race.

Here's a video of the War of the Worlds ride. While impressive for its time, it looks terribly dated compared to what can be done today. On a side note, the soundtrack of this video was not added later in the editor. All sounds and music you hear in the video are all being broadcast live throughout the ride via hidden in-game speakers or from the in-game ride events.

And that's it for Expo 3000 for the time being. There was still more to be added to the land, but that came later. The next articles will take you through the other lands of Wonder World, as they were dramatically improved by the use of custom scenery.