Captain America, Spider Man, the Hulk. You might have seen them on the big screen, or maybe in comic book panels, delivering heroic punches and witty puns.
Ever wish you could jump in and join them? KJZZ’s Annika Cline stepped inside the Marvel Experience, a traveling exhibition making its debut in Phoenix that puts you at the center of a Marvel story.
I’m with a large group of people, walking into the Marvel universe, where we’re greeted by a bunch of familiar faces– Thor, Wolverine, Black Widow - and they need our help for a change. Our mission: take down a villainous organization called Hydra.
Now we’re agents in training. There’s a 3-D shooting game and an Avengers Encounter. Here’s one of my fellow trainees, Katie Peterson, explaining it.
“You do the pose and it summons the super hero next to you. And my favorite is the Hulk,” Peterson said.
Once we complete our training, it’s on to the next phase, the Shield Simularium, a cutting edge virtual reality environment. The only problem is the virtual reality simulation isn’t working quite right today. It’s in 2-D, not 3-D.
Early visitors to the Marvel Experience have taken to Yelp and other social media to complain about glitches like this, and long waits.
Doug Schaer is the co-founder of Hero Ventures, a company that helped develop the experience. He says the glitches are now fixed and the Marvel Experience is still improving.
“This is a preview. But I don’t want people to feel like guinea pigs. Virtually everything is still up and running and a great experience, it’s simply better when everything is the way we intended it to be,” Schaer said.
At the end of the day, despite the malfunctions, we did defeat Hydra, in a 4-D motion theatre. And I became a full-fledged Marvel agent.
You can have your own Marvel Experience through Jan. 3 before the event moves on.