The Old Mill

The Old Mill is a dark ride-like attraction developed through CMU’s Theme Park Engineering Group (TPEG) and deployed in Skibo Gymnasium at CMU’s Spring Carnival 2019. The Old Mill project was inspired by the homonymous ride at Kennywood (at the time, Garfield’s Nightmare), and soon became a tribute to the defunct attraction, challenging our team to incorporate nostalgia and light satire into its design. While the majority of design and production occurred throughout the school year, the full fabrication and installation of the project took place over four days, and operated for three, providing tangible constraints on the project’s scope and encouraging us to operate creatively within them. In The Old Mill’s final form, we took guests on an immersive guided tour of the Garfield Steel Works, a steel production facility-turned-museum which inadvertently comes to life during their tour.

The senior members of the team were interviewed to publicize the attraction at the CMU Spring Carnival 2019. Here you can see an overview of the project as well as catch a glimpse some of the test runs performed before opening the attraction to the public.