Walkabout Mini Golf is one of VR’s strongest games with a growing list of both licensed and original courses. Back when it launched in late 2020, though, the title had just four courses with the serene landscape of the southwestern U.S. desert being one of them in Arizona Modern.
Arizona Modern joined Tourist Trap, Cherry Blossom, and Seagull Stacks, as Walkabout Mini Golf’s launch lineup. Since then, developer Mighty Coconut has added four more free courses — Original Gothic, Bogey’s Bonanza, Tethys Station, and Quixote Valley. The studio continues building out a collection of paid DLC add-ons as well including licensed courses for Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and Cyan’s Myst, plus course collections themed after infamous Lost Cities and Jules Vernes’s iconic science fiction works. We’re getting ready for the release of Atlantis next and looking forward to Journey To The Center Of The Earth as the developers explore partnerships for future properties and finish work on 2023’s course slate. According to Mighty Coconut, work is already beginning on courses that won’t launch until 2024 and, as work ramps up, the studio has raised the price of future courses to $3.99 each to keep pace.
Arizona Modern Walkabout Mini Golf Course Tour
We’ve been touring through each of Walkabout’s courses with studio head Lucas Martell and other members of the Mighty Coconut team. He recently showed us the game’s first course, Tourist Trap, and we also learned about the game’s Zen garden-inspired Cherry Blossom course. Now we’ve got a full walkthrough of the 18 hole path of Arizona Modern at night.
The course’s modern architecture and skate park-inspired half pipes are a frequent home to fan-organized tournaments, Martell explained. We’ve got the full path covered in the tour video embedded above as we progress to the brutal night version of the final hole which Martell says some players have figured trick shots that deliver a hole-in-one. Along the way he shares how architecture inspires the developers in their designs, even if VR allows them to do things that would be either too costly or entirely impossible in the physical world.
“It’s hard for me to say exactly what it is about architecture stuff that’s always captured me,” Martell says. “I know a few architects…I have zero desire to be an architect cuz this is sort of like the fun version where you don’t have to worry about building codes and materials and cost of materials and how you’re gonna get to the site and everything. You just kind of get to construct these things and then they exist.”
We’re building a full collection of tours of every Walkabout course with its designers. The playlist embedded below will grow as we add more courses in what amounts to an in-depth overview of design progression in one of VR’s best games.
