‘Walkabout Mini Golf’ Releases Gadget-Filled ‘Wallace & Gromit’ Course Today

Set coordinates for 62 West Wallaby Street! Today, Mighty Coconut, in partnership with Aardman Animations, releases the new Wallace & Gromit course for Walkabout Mini Golf.

For Wallace & Gromit fans, it’s a chance to explore the duo’s home and relive more than 30 years of iconic exploits, from amateur rocketry to techno-trousers to sheep run amok. And for those who are Walkabout Mini Golf fans first and foremost, get ready for one of the most lively and dynamic courses to-date, packed full of gadgets that turn every hole into a unique challenge.

It’s one of Mighty Coconut’s closest collaborations yet—and it happened almost by accident.

“It was very happenstance,” said Lucas Martell, creator of Walkabout Mini Golf. “We were announcing the Meow Wolf course at a South by Southwest event, and Aardman just happened to show up. But that’s also kind-of how the world works.”

“I think it helps that Nick [Park, creator of Wallace & Gromit] is a massive golf fan,” said Dan Efergan, Executive Creative Director at Aardman. “Ever since Wallace & Gromit in The Grand Getaway, I think one of his frustrations is he wanted to play more golf. It was a happy accident, realizing we could scratch that itch for more golf in the world of Wallace & Gromit.”

From the start, Mighty Coconut knew it wanted to set the course in Wallace and Gromit’s home at 62 West Wallaby Street—but that was more of a challenge than you might expect. Try to draw the layout of 62 West Wallaby Street based on the Wallace & Gromit films and you’ll quickly realize that none of it makes logical sense.

“It’s very abstract and it even changes from film to film,” said Martell. “In an animated film, you can just move walls to allow the action to happen, whereas we needed it to all connect together.”

“They’d have to have a really long living room to be traveling at full speed on the back of the train,” Efergan added, laughing. “So, yeah, there’s a lot of lying going on which Mighty Coconut had to unpick and make a reality.”

Wallace & Gromit is also one of the densest courses in Walkabout Mini Golf—or even the densest, according to Martell. “With stop motion, I feel like you want to pack as much as you can into a very, very small physical space,” says Martell. “The footprint [of the Wallace & Gromit course] isn’t as large as some courses, but all that means is that you can have more detail. Then it’s just a big dance to figure out how to get everything that everyone wants to see packed into this one space.”

The Wallace & Gromit course succeeds in that regard. There are jokes, references, and secrets packed into every nook and cranny, waiting to be discovered. Paintings seen in passing in the films have been painstakingly recreated. The books all have silly titles.

“It’s important you feel like you’re in the films,” says Finbar Hawkins, Creative Director at Aardman. “And humor is a really important part of the films because with repeat viewing, you spot gags you hadn’t seen before.” It has a similar function in VR—making you want to revisit 62 West Wallaby Street over and over again, hoping to spot something you missed the first time around.

“I think both at Mighty Coconut and Aardman, we wanted to reward people for exploration,” says Efergan. “The people that want to spend that extra time, get rewarded because they look under that thing or they walk over to that place or they check what’s inside there. It’s just great.”

“And we want them to not just to go, ‘Oh, look, I know that,’ but actually giggle when they do it,” Martell adds.

The house also feels alive, a testament to the amount of animation in the Wallace & Gromit course. “This is the most animation that we have ever done in a course, by an order of magnitude,” says Martell. It’s all in service of bringing Wallace’s inventions (and the larger Wallace & Gromit world) to life.

“The Wrong Trousers, the Autochef—people really want to see these things,” says Hawkins. “People want to get inside the rocket. It’s iconic. These are the lessons we learned from The Grand Getaway, right? There’s the motorbike, there’s the gnomes. It’s a celebration of these contraptions.”

Walkabout Mini Golf could trot out all of Wallace’s inventions in part because they’re building a theme park, not endeavoring to tell a linear story. “We had a lot of conversations around the gadgets,” says Martell. “Aardman has even talked about trying to avoid solving story problems with inventions. But we aren’t telling a linear story by any stretch of the imagination, so we were able to lean into the gadgets.”

And while Wallace’s inventions may look unusual—to say the least—Martell says there’s a lot of nuance to what makes the Wallace & Gromit style. “Wallace is actually a really good inventor with maybe not the most robust resources,” he says, laughing. “His welds are perfect. His machining is fantastic. That was the big thing we tried to capture from our end.”

Aardman’s collaboration was key to finding that balance—in the art, in the mechanics, and (of course) in the writing. Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park even sketched out a few concepts for holes that made it into the final Walkabout Mini Golf course, a first for Mighty Coconut. Martell is also quick to credit Aardman with bringing the “Britishness” to the Wallace & Gromit course, especially Hawkins, who has written in Wallace’s voice for years.

“We would do our bad British version and think ‘Oh, this sounds just like Wallace,’” says Martell, “and then Finbar would just completely rewrite everything, and that’s good because it needed that.”

Hawkins was especially involved in the Fox Hunt—which, if you’ve never played Walkabout Mini Golf, is a scavenger hunt present in the Hard version of each course. Clues direct players to specific items or locations in the course, and reaching the end rewards you with a new course-specific golf club.

In Wallace & Gromit’s Hard Mode, the sheep have gotten loose and basically destroyed 62 West Wallaby Street. Wallace comes up with a solution, an Autoshepherd that will round up all the sheep for him. All he needs is the parts to build it, which is where you come in.

“We loved the whole idea. It’d be natural for Wallace to be building this contraption, so Wallace is sending you messages and you’re essentially playing the Gromit role. He’s talking to you as if you’re Gromit, so we could be a little looser, make it warmer. It played out nicely,” says Hawkins.

“I think Hard Mode is just genius,” Efergan adds. “There’s something about having those two modes that gives you a bit of a narrative structure. Everything that you drink in on the first go-round, you appreciate how it’s been affected and adjusted. You can kind-of make up bits of narrative about how it ended up in that situation, like two very clever frames that paint a lot of narrative in between.”

“We were actually a little nervous when we first started Hard Mode, because sometimes wrecking the place is not what folks want to see,” says Martell. “But then—I mean, when we look back at some of the shots from the film, the gag was just how thoroughly the sheep had destroyed the environment. So then we had that liberty to really get in and wreck the place.”

Martell also points out that this isn’t the first time Walkabout Mini Golf has featured rogue sheep. “We literally did it on Quixote Valley, so the fact that we got to revisit it and dial it up to eleven, I think it was a lot of fun for our team.”

Before we go, I ask everyone what their favorite hole is in the Wallace & Gromit course. Efergan says there’s a “lovely mechanic with splats of jam” that changes how the game plays.

But the Wrong Trousers hole also gets a lot of love. “It’s the only one I managed to get a hole-in-one on,” says Hawkins.

“I knew you were going to mention the hole-in-one,” says Efergan.

“He’s been reminding us,” Martell chimes in.

“I sent him a note about it daily,” Hawkins says, laughing. “And also, it meant we got to hear the recording of Wallace saying ‘Cracking hole in one,” so, you know, a nice reward.”

As for what’s next? “We have a lot of folks that we love and want to work with, but it’s important to find something that’s new and scratches an itch that we might not be able to do on our own,” says Martell. “Every time we do one of these, it pushes us. I definitely feel like our animation and storytelling skills have improved drastically [with Wallace & Gromit].”

“So much of it is just about finding the right place, though,” he adds. “So much of our Walkabout is about place-making, ultimately.”

Walkabout Mini Golf: Wallace & Gromit is available now on Meta Quest 2, 3, and Pro.