Westworld is a luxury theme park where guests go to live out their wildest fantasies. So, we decided to replicate that experience by recreating Westworld at a secret location during South by Southwest (SXSW). Our promotional campaign promoted the event not as an HBO activation but as a real-life trip to Westworld. Guests booked their reservations at DiscoverWestworld.com and completed a personality assessment to determine their character archetypes prior to visiting the park.

After a thirty minute drive from downtown Austin on luxury buses, guests were free to explore SXSWestworld and interact with the artificially intelligent hosts played by over 60 actors. A 444-page script drove the narrative of SXSWestworld and brought the park to life. No two guests had identical experiences. Fans scoured the park for hidden season two clues, while guests provided social media reach at a global scale.

Recreating Westworld was no small feat. It took four months of planning, five weeks of on-site construction, and nearly 60 vendors to bring the activation to life. SXSWestworld was not a recreation within a building or other infrastructure; rather, we physically built the entire town the series centers around from the ground up.

Transported away from the chaos of SXSW, guests arrived at a plot of land that we completely transformed into SXSWestworld. They entered the park through the actual train from the series and could explore 16 structures—including iconic establishments from the show––across 90,000 square feet of space.