When the Strip Tried to Be the Whole World

It started with a volcano. When Steve Wynn opened The Mirage in 1989, he put an erupting volcano out front, white tigers and dolphins inside, and a tropical fantasy wrapped around the whole property. The Mirage proved that a casino could be a full immersive spectacle, a destination people traveled to experience rather than just a place to gamble, and it made enough money to make every other operator on the Strip jealous.

The lesson the industry took was simple and intoxicating. Theme plus spectacle equals crowds, and crowds equal money. If a volcano and white tigers could do that, what could a pyramid do? A castle? An entire city? The race was on, and through the early 1990s the Strip filled with developers competing to build the most immersive, most outrageous themed environment they could imagine.

There was also a strategic logic underneath the spectacle. The early 1990s were the moment Las Vegas flirted hardest with becoming a family destination. The theme parks and fantasy worlds were partly aimed at parents, at the idea that you could bring the kids to see a pirate battle and a medieval castle and not feel like you had dragged them to a den of vice. The whole-world fantasy and the family pitch grew up together.

The peak of the madness hit in 1993, when three giant themed resorts opened in a single astonishing year. The Excalibur had actually opened a couple of years earlier, in 1990, a literal medieval castle with bright turrets, jousting dinner shows, and a fantasy theme aimed squarely at families. It was huge, cheap, and packed, the castle made real on the edge of the desert.

Then came 1993 and the Strip lost its mind in the best way. The Luxor opened as a thirty-story pyramid of black glass, complete with a sphinx out front and a beam of light blasting from its peak, an Egyptian fantasy so literal it bordered on the absurd. Treasure Island opened next door to The Mirage with a full pirate village and a staged sea battle, the Buccaneer Bay show, in which a pirate ship and a British navy frigate fought it out in a lagoon right on the Strip, several times a night, for free.

And the MGM Grand reopened that same year as an enormous Wizard of Oz themed resort with an actual theme park out back, complete with rides and attractions, leaning all the way into the family destination idea. In the span of a single year, the Strip had added a castle, a pyramid, a pirate battle, and a theme park. There has never been another stretch of building quite like it.

The fantasy did not stop in 1993. As the decade rolled on, the Strip kept reaching for bigger and stranger versions of the whole-world idea. New York New York opened in 1997, a cluster of skyscrapers recreating the Manhattan skyline at roughly a third scale, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge all crammed onto one casino, with a roller coaster threading through and around the buildings.

It was the theme park era taken to its logical extreme, an entire iconic city rebuilt as a single resort. You could stand in the Nevada desert and look up at a skyline that said New York, ride a coaster past the fake skyscrapers, and wander streetscapes built to feel like Greenwich Village. The ambition was breathtaking and a little insane, which was exactly the point.

By the end of the 1990s the Strip had become a strange compressed atlas. You could walk past Egypt, medieval England, a pirate cove, the New York skyline, and a tropical island in the space of an afternoon. The city had genuinely tried to become the whole world, and for a moment it almost felt like it had succeeded.

And then Las Vegas changed its mind. The family experiment never paid off the way operators hoped. Children do not gamble, and families on a budget did not spend the way the casinos needed them to. Meanwhile, in 1998, Steve Wynn opened the Bellagio and pointed the city in a completely different direction, toward elegance, luxury, fine dining, and adults with money to spend. The future, it turned out, was sophistication, not theme parks.

Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, the Strip quietly walked back much of the theme park era. The MGM Grand's outdoor theme park closed. Las Vegas leaned back into its adults-only brand, the famous slogan that what happens here stays here, the high-end clubs and restaurants and shows. The whole-world fantasy started to feel like a phase the city had outgrown.

But it never fully vanished, and that is what makes the era worth remembering. The pyramid still stands. The castle still has its turrets. The New York skyline still rises over the south Strip, and for years the pirate battle still raged in the Treasure Island lagoon before it too was finally retired. The bones of the fantasy are everywhere, even after the family pitch faded.

I love this decade because of how unguarded it was. For a few years, Las Vegas was not cool or sophisticated or restrained. It was a kid with a box of crayons and a billion dollars, drawing the whole world as big and loud as it could. The city grew up and got classier and learned to charge more, and most of that was smart. But there is a part of me that misses the version of Vegas that looked at the empty desert and decided to build Egypt, England, and Manhattan, all in a row, just because it could.