Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser – The Blockbuster to End All Blockbusters

Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.

The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, popularly known as the “Star Wars hotel”, was a live action experience in Walt Disney World, Florida. Over the course of 40 hours, hundreds of guests (Disney’s term for visitors or players) picked sides between the heroic Resistance and the evil First Order, taking on missions from spies, smugglers, and soldiers. Basically, it’s a romantic drama – Casablanca in space.

The Starcruiser opened to great fanfare in March 2022 as one of the most ambitious permanent “immersive” experiences ever made. Initial reviews were generally positive, but coverage was dominated by its price – as much as $6000 for a cabin holding up to four or five people, far more than traditional cruises or theme park stays. Many people couldn’t understand how it could justify such a high price. Eighteen months later, the Starcruiser closed for reasons that are still not fully known. In 2024, after the closure, YouTuber Jenny Nicholson described her poor experience in a four hour video^[1]Jenny Nicholson, “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” May 19, 2024, Jenny Nicholson, YouTube, 4:05:38, https://youtu.be/T0CpOYZZZW4. that attracted over ten million views. The video and the closure established a widespread narrative of the Starcruiser as a cynical, unmitigated disaster.

When I learned of the Starcruiser’s impending closure, I rushed to book a ticket for one of the final “sailings” in the summer of 2023. As an augmented reality and alternate reality game designer, I was keen to see it with my own eyes. Based on that visit and my subsequent research, I believe the Starcruiser is more interesting than a simple folly. It has many parallels to larps – especially high price, deeply immersive 360º^[2]Johanna Koljonen, “eye-witness to the illusion: an essay on the impossibility of 360° role-playing,” in Lifelike (Knudepunkt 2007), ed. Jesper Donnis, Morten Gade, Line Thorup (Knudepunkt 2007, 2007), 175. blockbuster larps such as Odysseus (inspired by Battlestar Galactica), Conscience (Westworld), and Eclipse (Arrival/Interstellar) – with many innovative and impressive aspects that are worth studying. At the same time, its confusing marketing raised unrealistic expectations and exacerbated flaws like poor onboarding.

This article explores the contrasts between the Starcruiser and larps, such as its lack of workshops and training; highly realistic player tasks; spaces for relaxation and guest-to-guest interaction; app-based NPC interactions; and its profit-based commercial nature. This will include observations of the experience, its technical achievements, and my encounters with other players. Finally, it will explore the Starcruiser’s financials, confusing marketing, and the circumstances surrounding its closure. The Starcruiser represents a harbinger of the future for all blockbuster larps, whether made by volunteers or billion dollar corporations.

Disney has long experimented with role playing. Early Disneyland rides were designed from the perspective of protagonists, meaning guests on the Snow White attraction or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride saw neither Snow White nor Mr. Toad – they were the characters.^[3]Leslie Iwerks, “Chapter 2: The Happiest Place on Earth,” in The Imagineering Story: The Official Biography of Walt Disney Imagineering (Disney Editions, 2022). This was later changed due to the confusion it caused, but the interest in role play remained. The cancelled Disney’s America theme park, intended to open in 1998, would have included Civil War battle re-enactments;^[4]Iwerks, “Chapter 16: The Battle of Disney’s America,” The Imagineering Story. Bob Weis, Senior Vice President, said, “We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave or what it was like to escape through the Underground Railroad,” arguing the park couldn’t present a rose-tinted view of America.

Less controversially, guests would later be chosen to play roles in a re-enactment of Beauty and the Beast, and new Star Wars and Marvel attractions in the parks have emphasised making guests “part of the stories being told, to give them a role other than passive view”, such as using web slingers to fight alongside Spider-Man. These examples afford comparatively little agency to guests, but the direction of travel is clear.

Along with researching escape rooms and immersive theatre, senior Disney Imagineers – the workers responsible for the company’s theme parks and attractions – have been playing Nordic Larp for years. A number of Imagineers were on the Monitor Celestra in 2013, and Sara Thacher, a senior Imagineer who worked on the Starcruiser, attended the College of Wizardry twice. “A big ‘Aha!’ moment for me there was just being in a castle, in a wizard robe, having a cup of tea, and having this alibi, this reason to be there,” she told The New Yorker.^[5]Neima Jahromi, “LARPing Goes to Disney World,” New Yorker, May 23, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/30/larping-goes-to-disney-world. In the Starcruiser, guests have a full schedule of classes and activities and optional quests, but the Sublight Lounge bar also provides an alibi to relax with a card game of Sabacc.

Playing Sabacc in the Sublight lounge bar, photo by Adrian Hon

These explicit links make it possible to view the Starcruiser through the lens of larp. Given the Starcruiser’s use of schedules and NPCs and its lack of boffer-style combat, the best parallel may be Eastern European larp like the College of Wizardry. Scott Trowbridge, another senior Imagineer, noted that some larps “can be intense experiences, and that is probably not what we want to offer to our mainstream audience,” indicating a reluctance to give players the intense emotional experiences that often characterise Nordic larp.

The biggest argument against the Starcruiser being a larp, let alone a Nordic Larp, is that it provides precisely zero training or workshops for guests in how to role play. Guests are not given or suggested characters or character archetypes to play; instead, they arrive on the Starcruiser – a cruise ship for interstellar tourists – as naive passengers from Earth, playing themselves, with their own alibi to ask basic questions about the Star Wars universe. Some guests did create their own characters and backstory, and performers would play along, within reason: claiming to be Darth Vader wouldn’t work.

Rather than train guests how to participate, I’ve been told that the Starcruiser’s professional “NPC” performers were trained to “meet people where they are”, which is to say, interact with guests and encourage them to participate to the extent they appear comfortable to do so, whether simply through eye contact or by dialogue. No doubt there are financial and practical reasons behind this, too: workshops were not automatically welcomed in Nordic Larp and it’s safe to assume the Starcruiser’s guests would be similarly sceptical toward a multi-hour introductory workshop.

During my visit to the Starcruiser in July 2023, I noticed two problems with the zero-training philosophy. The first was that for some guests, “where they are” was in their cabin, away from any opportunity for anyone to engage them. The second was that despite the impressive number of performers, there were too few to engage every guest in the first few hours.

While loitering in the lobby shortly after boarding on the first day, I saw two young guests watching as others talked to a First Order performer. They were wearing impressive, custom-made costumes and were clearly keen to participate, but didn’t know how. Even a brief workshop might have given them the confidence, but their approach to the dark side would have to wait.

Given how its designers evidently steered away from Nordic Larp’s fundamental tenets, it’s wrong to view the Starcruiser as a literal larp. Rather, it’s better to view it as a hybrid form, at the far end of larp, not merely at the far (less involved) end of role playing, but also at the far end of physical scale and technological complexity. No imagination was necessary on the Starcruiser: the engineering bay was packed with ducts and pipes and cables to be fixed, the bridge bordered by a vast panoramic view of space, and the Sublight Lounge’s bar atmosphere was suffused in the perfect combination of luxury and intrigue. All views of outer space on the bridge and through cabin “portholes” were synchronised in real time. In formal terms, every effort was made to make appearances and tasks indexical^[6]Jaakko Stenros, Eleanor Saitta, Markus Montola, “The General Problem of Indexicality in Larp Design,” in Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, ed. Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, Ruska Kevätkoski (Ropecon ry, 2024), 64. rather than iconic or symbolic.

The Starcruiser was presented to guests as an interstellar luxury cruise. The idea of a cruise felt discordant with how the Star Wars universe has been popularly depicted – we don’t see Luke Skywalker embark on a cruise, but we do see Harry Potter going to classes in Hogwarts – but it provided a reason to structure guests’ time like a real cruise; one hour might be dedicated to lightsaber training, and another to Sabacc lessons. This is not unusual amongst Nordic Larp; Odysseus has been described as a “clockwork larp”, running on a strict schedule of hyperspace jumps, and the College of Wizardry and various magic schools have scheduled classes. The Content Larp Manifesto^[7]“Content larp manifesto”, accessed December 19, 2024, https://manifest.larpy.cz/en/ also describes Czech larps (e.g. Legion)^[8]“Legion: Siberian Story – LARP by Rolling,” accessed December 19, 2024, https://legion.rolling.cz. that use timed and pre-written scenes in the service of dramatic stories. Indeed, a planned and predictable experience is what some larpers desire,^[9]Anni Tolvanen, “A Full House Trumps a Dance Card,” lecture, September 9, 2022, posted September 11, 2022, by Nordic Larp Talks, YouTube, 24:01, https://youtu.be/SPWCXf_LrSs. perhaps at the cost of openness and serendipity.

Performer movements were, if anything, even more tightly scheduled. Earpieces conveyed timing cues so they knew when to move on for an “accidental” confrontation in a hallway. In retrospect, performers’ ability to improvise dialogue with guests to fill the precise amount of time before their next move was remarkable.

Where the Starcruiser appears to depart from Nordic Larp is that guests were incapable of influencing the major beats and ultimate outcome of the story. No matter what guests did, there was always a confrontation between the ship’s captain and a First Order officer during dinner. Chewbacca always escaped from confinement, and Rey always made it on board – and yet guests felt crucial to the story because we were actively relaying secret messages and distracting Stormtroopers.

Caught up in the excitement, it was easy to forget our lack of agency to dramatically change events. This was not surprising given the source material’s spectacular nature. Odysseus’ play instructions also elevated discipline over agency: the larp was “designed to be a tunnel not a sandbox… this is not a game to be hacked, won or overachieved.” However, the absence of meaningful deliberation was most notable during the conclusion, which reminded everyone that in the final analysis, the Star Wars universe remains dominated by superpowered Force users – in this case, Rey and Kylo Ren battling on a balcony – rather than one where passengers gets a vote.

Talking to other guests wasn’t a necessary part of the Starcruiser experience. It was encouraged, but the endless scheduled activities and optional quests (see below) meant it was less of a priority in terms of creating entertainment and drama. I quickly abandoned my attempts at role playing a morally ambiguous scientist after a couple of conversations went nowhere. However, NPC performers worked hard to engage guests. A lovelorn musician who needed relationship advice would ask children for help writing songs, while a Han Solo-esque scoundrel NPC recounted his exploits to guests in the bar. Some guests played along, talking about their own exploits or poking holes in his stories. One guest demonstrated his homemade droid collection in the lobby. Many had become friends on previous voyages or via forums, which inevitably felt a touch exclusionary, but their costuming and role playing-adjacent attitude helped enrich the Starcruiser’s atmosphere.

None of these activities “mattered” in terms of changing the plot or ultimate fate of characters, but they were enjoyable and gave meaning to guests’ own stories. It was as if the sheer quantity of performers and length of the experience partly made up for the lack of workshops – most guests who didn’t know how to interact at the beginning could learn by watching, their initial discomfort long forgotten by the end. Since performers were trained to memorise guests’ names, it was common to be asked for an update on your activities by Resistance or First Order agents while on your way to dinner.

What many accounts fail to convey is how much of the Starcruiser experience was driven digitally. Every guest had access to a Datapad smartphone app with which they could talk to NPCs – the very same NPCs walking around the ship. In classic video game RPG fashion, guests could respond to messages with 1-3 prewritten options of varying levels of curiosity and enthusiasm. More unusually, not only could you lie to NPCs by giving them incorrect information, you could outright betray them.

Lt. Croy, flanked by stormtroopers, photo by Adrian Hon

On my first mission for Lt. Croy, a First Order officer, I was tasked with hacking into a physical console to find the ship’s logs. I discovered the Starcruiser had diverted its itinerary on previous cruises to supply Resistance bases with weapons; I was able to copy the logs to my Datapad, but I could have deleted or overwritten them. Because I am a boring role player, I sent the logs to Croy, but I don’t doubt that betraying him would’ve had lasting consequences through the branching story, perhaps introducing me to Resistance members.

As more NPCs introduced themselves on the Datapad, barely a moment passed between invitations to sabotage the ship’s systems, hack the computers, search for contraband, or smuggle on board an agent – all of which involved physically walking to the engineering bay or cargo hold to connecting wires and scan codes, with NPCs instantly “knowing” when I’d completed my task. It was deeply impressive technology that worked flawlessly for me, a gold-plated version of the busywork seen in other sci-fi blockbuster larps like Odysseus’ RFID-powered HANSCA^[10]James Bloodworth, “Odysseus 2024 / A Retrospective,” Critical Path, September 2, 2024, https://criticalpathsite.wordpress.com/2024/09/02/odysseus-2024-a-retrospective/. smartphone app. Another digital experience was delivered by the video comm link in my cabin, where droids would periodically call asking for help to aid or stymie the resistance. This worked wholly via voice recognition and was surprisingly funny. It goes without saying that all of these tasks and experiences were fundamentally “single player”, in the sense that co-operating with other guests was unnecessary – a marked difference to Odysseus.

A highly indexical puzzle in the engineering bay, photo by Adrian Hon

The technical complexity of the Starcruiser is likely the reason why some guests suffered major issues around the launch period in early 2022 wherein their Datapad didn’t steer them toward interesting activities. Other accounts suggest these problems were largely fixed within weeks or months, but the damage had been done: critics^[11]Charlie Hall, “Disney’s Star Wars hotel Galactic Starcruiser was torpedoed by bad app design,” Polygon, May 28, 2024, https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/24166456/disney-star-wars-hotel-video-galactic-starcruiser-jenny-nicholson-bad-app. then and now incorrectly believed the technical issues were permanent, like a rollercoaster whose tracks couldn’t be moved rather than a video game that could be updated over time.

The cost of tickets to the Starcruiser also fuelled the notion that it was a cynical ploy to rip off guests. Depending on the timing of a visit, it was possible to spend as much as $6000 (€5500) for single person staying in their own cabin – an astronomical amount compared to other attractions. However, if four people shared a cabin, as is common in larps and on cruises, each person might only $1200 (€1100). There is no way to make €1100 sound cheap, but it’s comparable to the cost of blockbuster larps; my ticket to Eclipse this year will cost €875 (including a shared room in a 3 star hotel). The fact that I met so many repeat visitors, most of whom were staying three or four to a cabin, indicated they felt it was good value. Caro Murphy, Immersive Experience Director for the Starcruiser, revealed^[12]Caro Murphy, “Reacting to a reaction,” Caro Murphy, May 30, 2024, https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/24166456/disney-star-wars-hotel-video-galactic-starcruiser-jenny-nicholson-bad-app. it achieved a 91% guest satisfaction score, supposedly the highest rating in the history of any Disney attraction. Starcruiser fans have organised conventions,^[13]“Halcy-Con | A 2-Day Galactic Starcruiser Superfans Event,” Halcy-Con, archived September 12, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20240912154545/https://halcy-con.com/. created podcasts, and made movies.

The closure of the Starcruiser may seem to contradict this argument, or at least suggest it was not popular or profitable enough. It’s too soon to know Disney’s real reasons, but Kathryn Yu has noted that most analyses fail to take into account wider corporate circumstances. In 2023, Disney faced an activist shareholder battle; in a bid to raise free cash, returning CEO Bob Iger promised to cut $5.5 billion in costs, quickly selling off TV shows and eliminating 7000 jobs.^[14]“Disney Completes 7,000 Job Cuts,” Variety, May 31, 2023, https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/disney-layoffs-end-7000-1235629809/. Closing the Starcruiser effectively unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars via accelerated depreciation,^[15]Suzanne Rowan Kelleher, “The High-Flying Death Of Disney’s Star Wars Hotel,” Forbes, May 28, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/05/28/why-disney-closed-star-wars-hotel-galactic-starcruiser/. a move that may have been hastened by the imminent phasing out of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s “bonus depreciation”.

Regardless, it’s undeniable that the Starcruiser had an uneven launch and was poorly understood. I can’t help but think the Starcruiser would have been more successful, or at least made more sense as an expensive multi-day attraction, had the setup been that guests were secret agents merely pretending to be guests on an interstellar cruise. As much as the conceit of being naive cruise passengers provided structure and alibi in the absence of a workshop, it also made the entire experience appear deeply boring from the outside – a sample “itinerary”^[16]Shannen Ace, “Disney Releases Sample 3-Day Itinerary of Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser Hotel Experience,” WDW News Today, August 4, 2021, https://wdwnt.com/2021/08/disney-releases-sample-itinerary-for-star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-experience/. revealed in 2021 suggested that these opportunities to sabotage the ship would be few and far between, rather than the bulk of the experience. It’s tantamount to marketing malpractice that these more adventurous aspects were omitted in favour of a focus on “luxury” – misleading, since the Starcruiser’s cabins and amenities were not luxurious in a conventional sense.

Disney’s position at the top of the entertainment world comes with increased expectations and a lack of willingness for customers to accept problems. Larps, as largely co-created, volunteer-run, non-profit experiences with little to no marketing budgets, attract players who are more experienced and tolerant of problems, creating a reservoir of goodwill understandably absent for a multi-billion dollar corporation. Larp promotion also tends to be more transparent about the details of player experience, helping avoid problems. This is no doubt borne out of decades of experience throughout the larp community – something the Starcruiser’s marketers and customers lacked.

Goodwill is essential with larp-like experiences becoming as technically complex as video games – and growing the chances for things to go catastrophically wrong. Game developers have adapted by instituting lengthy beta testing and “early access” periods. A similar strategy may have helped the Starcruiser’s launch; failing that, proactively offering full refunds for major technical issues would have restored some goodwill. Other blockbuster larps could manage technical risk by pooling resources on open source projects, as Odysseus did with the open source EmptyEpsilon “bridge simulator” game engine. This was probably not an option for Disney given the highly specific needs of a Star Wars-based experience and their desire to maintain a technical advantage over competitors.

An undercover agent beside Chewbacca, photo by Adrian Hon

The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser was an admirable foray into creating a larp-like experience for mass audiences on a gargantuan scale. It was not perfect, but it was far from a disaster.

One can imagine a different outcome. If the Starcruiser had been marketed better and had launched with more robust technology, it could have attracted more guests; if Disney hadn’t been subject to a shareholder battle, there would have been less incentive to close it. The Starcruiser might be expanding around the world, employing hundreds of people to entertain hundreds of thousands of guests per year. It almost got there. Regardless, the Starcruiser highlights a growing appetite for larp, and a growing willingness to pay for blockbuster experiences. Some of its fans have moved on to larping as a way to continue their hobby.

It’s impossible to say when Disney or other theme parks will create another blockbuster larp-like experience given the negative sentiment now surrounding the Starcruiser. But this demonstrates the strength of the decentralised, non-profit, volunteer-run international larp community – it can withstand failures and misunderstandings, learn from them, and keep going.

Further Reading

Nick Fortugno has written a detailed response to Jenny Nicholson’s popular four hour video on the Starcruiser, referencing larps: https://nicholasfortugno.substack.com/p/a-response-to-the-spectacular-failure

I wrote an extended report of my experience on the Starcruiser in 2023: https://mssv.net/2023/08/07/star-wars-galactic-starcruiser/

Kathryn Yu’s article on the experience design and story flow: https://kathrynyu.medium.com/the-experience-design-of-star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-immersive-and-interactive-personalized-d8b2ad8a1f03

This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Hon, Adrian. 2025. “Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser – The Blockbuster to End All Blockbusters.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.

Cover image: The bridge of the Starcruiser, photo by Adrian Hon