With a taste-making crowd touching down in Austin every SXSW, the festival has quickly become synonymous with some of the most ingenious brand experiences around. While previous years have seen a mini-theme park for Mr. Robot, escape rooms for HBO’s Veep, Silicon Valley and Game of Thrones, and AMC flooding the streets with red-hooded handmaids, this year HBO won the festival again with an immersive, real-life recreation of Westworld’s Sweetwater town.
Meeting at a bar on the east side of the town for orienteering – and to pick up our Westworld hats – we were amongst the lucky first batch of guests to take the short bus ride out to Sweetwater town. Stepping off the bus, through the Delos reception and into the steam train we’ve seen Teddy take into town time, and time, and time again, out the other side, Sweetwater lay waiting for us all to explore.
Employing more than 60 local actors, acting out over 450 pages of dialogue to cover every interaction with other hosts and visiting guests, it was like walking into the real life park from the show. Welcomed into the saloon for a cocktail and a game of cards, for beans and jerky at the downtrodden restaurant, to hanging out at the local square while someone played the skiffle board, no part of the town was out of bounds.
With remarkable attention to detail, there were plenty of easter eggs to be found. Talking with hosts, we were given little tasks to find other hosts, get some information and report back. It led to us opening a secret door in a room at the back of the town, where inside a tecnician worked on an unfinished host. You could also drop by the local post office to pick up your hand-written mail; we found one of Maeve’s sketches of the white-suited techs inside. Show this to the hosts – or anything from the real world – and you’ll get the iconic Westworld line, “it doesn’t look like anything to me”, sending shivers down your spine.
Aside from a moody, solo samurai wandering the park looking for trouble, the best thing that happened inside the park was a set-piece involving some 15-20 characters. Where a mini-scuffle started at the side of the square, things quickly escalated into a shootout with a gang on one side, the sheriff on the other. With blood quickly spilt, a bunch of techs ran into scene to clear it up, “freeze all motor functions” they yelled, and with every host frozen in place, the audience stood back in awe at the incredible set play.
To attempt to recreate the central conceit of such a high-concept show as Westworld, must have taken a huge amount of courage (and budget) from HBO, and all credit to them for pulling this off. The whole experience was a remarkable real-life recreation of the show, and a real show of confidence in season 2, which hits screens late April. No doubt every guest left Sweetwater with their anticipation heightened for what’s to come, certainly that included us too.