Designer Times
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53. Las Vegas - Treasure Island Pirate Battle Show

In the past decade, one of the most visited icon attractions in Las Vegas has been the Treasure Island Pirate Battle Show. This is a complex operation that broke new ground in so many new ways. The Pirate Show is free, it features a full range of live stunts and EFX, and much of it's workings are under water. The Show took a great risk in that typically such a complicated attraction would expect to periodically suffer breakdowns. Such a show usually is built in a staged area, or otherwise hidden from sight so that when anything failed, just pull the curtains until it's fixed. Not so for the Pirates. The whole deal is right out next to the sidewalk with hundreds of thousands of visitors passing by every day. A breakdown would be seen by all.

The Show is unique in that rather than have the usual Porte Cochere neon glitz Las Vegas style casino front, Treasure Island put the main hotel/casino entrance on a side street. The Treasure Island front is a complete themed village featuring a large harbor and two period sailing vessels. During the day, this place looks as great as any Disney Fantasy set up. But come nightfall, a wild stunt show commenced complete with big fires, loud explosions, cannonballs blasting both ships in a classic duel to the death. Death not for the Pirates....death for the intercepting British Man O' War. The Brit Ship rolled over and sank out of sight....with the captain going down with the ship.

Who on earth would even try such a risky idea? In the late 1980s, Las Vegas mogul Steve Wynn, after re-doing the Golden Nugget into a downtown showplace, startled Las Vegas with his new Mirage Hotel and Casino.

Beautifully themed in a tropical decor, Steve built a gorgeous front yard complete with palm trees and an erupting volcano. No conventional Porte Cochere for Steve. How to top this? A big showy live action Pirate Battle Show, something that would really stun the neighbors....and do it all thoroughly just like Walt Disney would do it. As it turned out, there were to be lots of Disney threads woven thru this spectacle.

In January 1992, I was doing conceptual design work for WDI's R&D lab in Glendale. Bruce Gordon called..."Get up to Las Vegas first thing tomorrow morning, join Rock Hall and Monte Lunde of Technifex. for a meeting with Steve Wynn at Atlandia Design". I had been hearing of a crazy Las Vegas job being shopped around with no takers. A job where a ship was going to sink right next to Las Vegas Boulevard. What poor sucker was going to get stuck with this nutty job. Oh Oh. The next morning, January 24th, Rock, Monte, and I found ourselves in a major announcement meeting at Atlandia Design, Steve Wynn's personal version of Walt Disney Imagineering. The whole Treasure Island Hotel Casino Pirate Battle Show deal was revealed to all. But without a show contractor aboard yet?

Seems that as Wynn ran out of time trying to find someone to sink his ship, he asked his brother Kenny, Atlandia President, to call WDI's Tony Baxter and ask for help. "Yeah, we got an old WED retiree over at R&D, we'll send him up along with two former WED guys". Atlandia and Disney folks had long been friends.

As the meeting got around to the sinking ship part of the deal, Steve asked "Who's gonna sink the ship?" Rock, Monte and I put our hands up. The guys explained who they and Technifex were, introducing me as an associate consultant. "Hey, I know you" Steve exclaimed. (Atlandia had contacted Sequoia Creative (where I was a co-founder) years earlier on the Mirage job.

We suggested that there were several ways to sink a ship. The meeting concluded and the three of us joined Steve, Kenny, and Project Architect Joel Bergman in an idea session in the Atlandia Model Shop. After about two hours of sketching and doodling some ideas, Steve said "OK, you guys go start work and give us a quick price by Friday."