New ‘Walkabout Mini Golf’ Course ‘8-Bit Lair’ Takes On Retro Eighties Evildoer
No supervillain ever asked James Bond to get the high-score in Atari’s Breakout, lest he meet his doom—but maybe they should’ve. I doubt Bond would’ve put up much of a fight.
Today, Walkabout Mini Golf releases 8-Bit Lair, the latest in its Lair series. While Laser Lair and Ice Lair featured familiar supervillain archetypes, 8-Bit Lair pits us against a very different type of evildoer. The year is 1983, and your foe is Vincent Vector, a billionaire hacker with a penchant for retro games. It’s a fun and unexpected direction, and allows Walkabout Mini Golf to play around with collectable coins, Breakout-style bricks, and more.
We sat down with Chase Shields, Senior Technical Artist at Mighty Coconut, to discuss the story behind 8-Bit Lair, some of the unique design and development challenges the team encountered, and a cool crossover with the run-your-own-arcade sim Arcade Legend.
Read the full interview below, or head on over to the Meta Horizon Store and pick up 8-Bit Lair for Walkabout Mini Golf today.
Chase Shields: Both of the previous villains (and their hideouts) were based on certain archetypes and set in different time periods earlier in the 20th century. With this third Evil Lair, we knew we wanted to do something unexpected that would challenge both us and our player community.
The story takes place in 1983, inside a wicked corporate skyscraper, global headquarters of Vincent Vector, hacker billionaire and spoiled genius. Now that he’s made his fortune hacking into the stock exchange, he’s hatched a plot to shred the physical world and bring it all into his vast virtual realm. The course takes players from an ‘80s office setting to an employee arcade floor to a Research & Development lab, which leads them to a whole new vector…
CS: Laser Lair had, well, lasers to cut golf balls in half. Ice Lair had freeze rays and heating pads to cubify and then melt golf balls, respectively.
8-Bit Lair is packed with an appropriate level of retro-style technical hackery, including a new brick-breaking mechanic, collectible coins, and a holographic implementation of the Discourse System we introduced with Mars Gardens—and that’s just the gameplay. There are also tons of aesthetic advances that should surprise players.
CS: Generally, we pride ourselves on packing in a lot of elegant but seemingly simple art and tech into every one of our courses. It’s all about optimization, so players are free to explore big open worlds together in a way that Meta Quest headsets can reliably render.
8-Bit Lair really pushes the boundaries of what we've put into these courses previously. The amount of effects and custom shaders in this course is almost 4x the amount of any regular course and easily double that of the Wallace & Gromit course we released just a few months ago—and that course pushed the boundaries then.
To give folks a sense, we packed in over 700 breaker bricks in the Easy version of the course and almost 900 breaker bricks in Hard mode, so there’s a lot going on!
CS: Hole 13 features what we call a “real-time portal” that players must putt through, combining skill, faith, and a little luck. Given an already robust level with FX and shaders to optimize, this portal almost did not make the cut, but I'm especially glad that it did!
CS: Edward Felix, our lead modeler, had this idea for April Fool’s 2023 to tell players we were porting Walkabout Mini Golf to the best selling computer of all time—which, of course, is actually the Commodore 64. So he went and made a version of that over a weekend, featuring spot-on graphics and music while still emulating the hole designs of Walkabout as we know it today. It was so awesome, that we all agreed we should hold it for 8-Bit Lair.
As 8-Bit Lair takes people into different realities, we thought it would be fun for players to visit another arcade in the metaverse. We connected with our friends from ArcadeXR and they jumped on the challenge, taking Edward’s flat game and putting it in a custom arcade cabinet with working controls, just like the rest of Arcade Legend. We also put some other Easter eggs and achievements in there to entice their players and to reward our players who go to check it out.
We’re looking forward to seeing who makes high score!
CS: Hard to say. Our players have funded this studio completely by supporting the DLCs and telling their friends, so as long as they are playing and sharing, we’ll keep creating experiences for them.
We’ve still got one more course out this year and then Viva Las Elvis early next (which we think people are really going to shake, rattle, and roll with), and there’s a full roster of courses, modes, features, and collaborations coming in 2025.
CS: People bring a lot of different expectations to a platform like Quest and to an experience like Walkabout Mini Golf. Pop culture and their imaginations have led many to assume that the possibilities are endless. While that’s fun in some ways, it can lead to frustrations in others.
What we try to do—and I know a lot of other studios do the same—is to lead with elegance, simplicity, comfort, and (most importantly) fun. But there’s a ton of tech and creative problem-solving that goes into making multiplayer open worlds that perform accurately and reliably enough to warrant near-infinite replayability.
I guess we’d like players to know that while Walkabout Mini Golf does a lot more than their local course, it’s still mini golf and should retain a sense of kooky. And just because we can pull something off in any given course, we have to ask ourselves “at what cost” for players and the whole of the experience.
Regardless, we’re just grateful to get to keep doing it!
Ready to shoot for the high score? You can find Walkabout Mini Golf and the 8-Bit Lair add-on on the Meta Horizon Store today—and Arcade Legend as well, if you want to check out that crossover cabinet!
