Unlocking a World of Pure Imagination: How the Willy Wonka Event Turned Into Video Game Parody Treasure

If you somehow haven’t heard about the infamous “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” event that was held in Glasgow on February 24 and canceled a day in, the entire saga is wild. The children’s event (tickets cost £35, roughly $44 USD) was promoted as “a place where chocolate dreams become reality,” only for it to be a low-budget, barely decorated warehouse that looked nothing like the AI-rendered images used to promote it. The cops were called because the event was such a disaster, but those of us on the outside can bask in the glow of this dumpster fire. Since Willy’s Chocolate Experience went viral, people have taken to recreating the event in video games—even big brands are jumping on the trend.
One specific shot of a legally distinct Oompa Loompa has gone viral and become the basis of several memes surrounding the event. The photo shows one of the actors standing at a scientific-looking station, looking less than thrilled, while smoke rises in the background. In an interview with Variety, the actor, named Kirsty Paterson, said she finds the whole thing “funny,” but also “embarrassing” for her acting career. But the image has become synonymous with the fiasco and has been recreated in several games, both by fans and by video game companies themselves. Click through to see them all.

X (formerly Twitter) user @Haztecamarera used multiple photos from the event to try and capture its essence in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This includes not only Paterson’s desk that looks like a meth lab, but also the thrown-together decorations and horrifying “Unknown” character that was supposed to be the villain of the whole event. Some of the decorations aren’t 1:1 because Animal Crossing doesn’t have the AI art the event used, so @Haztecamarera makes do with what they’ve got.

The Sims 4

Next up was actor Callum Bowyer (@imcxllumbtw), who made the event in The Sims. Bowyer says in the replies the entire thing took him “30 whole minutes,” and a commenter said that was likely “more time making this than they put into the event.”

If you’re looking to get a sense of the event yourself, you can run around in a Fortnite recreation of it right now. Reddit user PatrickDearden posted a code for a Fortnite creative mode map based on “Willy’s Chocolate Experience,” complete with the not-meth-lab table and its own Unknown villain. The code is 7154-1304-0948.

Now that the whole debacle has become brand-safe to poke fun at, Blizzard has gotten in on the joke by remaking the photo of Paterson in World of Warcraft. While you can’t go there in-game you can at least imagine what the inside of an Azeroth warehouse smells like by looking at this image of an undead character ready to create chocolate for disappointed children who will no doubt have a hilarious story to tell at parties when they’re older.

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The event is over now, but the actors and crew that were hoodwinked into working it have been speaking out in the days that followed. The actor who played the legally distinct Willy Wonka said he was given a likely AI-generated script that was “jibberish,” and everyone involved has yet to be paid for their services.