It took a village to get the ball rolling.

In 1950, Hotel Last Frontier owner William Moore created an old west town called Last Frontier Village to draw tourists to his resort. Located on the north side of the long-gone Strip property that would later be known simply as the Frontier, Last Frontier Village boasted shops, dining, a jail, a museum, a rifle range, a Chinese house of worship and—according to Jeff Burbank’s book Lost Las Vegas—some 900 tons of Nevada frontier town artifacts, including a real mining train. For a time, the village was nearly as popular a local tourist attraction as Hoover Dam, even appearing with Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret in 1964’s Viva Las Vegas.

Vegas historian Frank Wright called Last Frontier Village “a direct forerunner” to modern-day themed retail centers like the Forum Shops at Caesars and Grand Canal Shoppes at Venetian. It’s an easy connection to make, and a strong one. But Moore’s fake Nevada mining town, which closed in the late 1960s, represents more than that: It was, arguably, the first large-scale tourist spot in Vegas that wasn’t strictly devoted to gaming, the first place in Vegas where you could bring the kids.

It was arguably Vegas’ first true non-gaming, man-made attraction, an idea that would later spawn Disney-like animatronic shows, one-of-a-kind roller coasters and, eventually, Sphere, set to open this week not just as a concert venue for superstar residencies, but as a family-friendly attraction, both inside and out.

It’s hard not to look at an immense ball with a fully programmable LED skin and not wonder, just how did this happen? Even in a tourist corridor that is, arguably, one massive attraction—a river of artificial light flowing through the center of a desert valley—the Sphere stands out. From the day its exterior was lit up, both tourists and locals alike have gone out of their way to photograph it, gawk at it, even admire it. Sphere has already become a main attraction in a city filled with them.

So, let’s attempt to draw a line from Last Frontier Village to Sphere. It’ll be a tricky and convoluted connection, and since we’re trying to cover this ground in less than the full-on book this topic deserves, we’ll need to stick to the main tourist corridors and conversation-changing attractions, which means we’ll also skip some sentimental favorites such as the Wet ‘n’ Wild on the Strip, the original MGM Grand screening room, and casino-floor photo opportunities like the Golden Nugget’s Hand of Faith and the Crazy Girls’ bronze “no ifs, ands or butts” statue.

Instead, we’ll try to group our Vegas attractions by era, beginning with the analog attractions of the 1950s and continuing through to today’s interactive stuff. We may need to take some detours, but we’ll get to that big ball.

SIGNS & FIRE, 1959-1989

Nearly 10 years after Last Frontier Village, Las Vegas debuted one of its longest-lived and perhaps most beloved attractions: The Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign, designed by the great Betty Willis and installed at 5100 Las Vegas Boulevard South in 1959. This 25-foot tall, internally-lit sign—a squashed diamond shape ringed with chaser bulbs, accented by circular “coins” and topped with a neon starburst—is admired by millions every year.

“It’s certainly an attraction that a lot of people take advantage of when they come to Vegas,” says Las Vegas Advisor publisher Anthony Curtis, who relentlessly tracks Vegas hospitality trends. “It’s on the itinerary to go take a picture there.”

Even people who have never been to Vegas could probably draw a rough version of the sign from memory. It appears in pretty much every movie and TV show made in Vegas, and due to Willis’ deliberate choice not to copyright the work, it’s been reproduced in art, in advertising campaigns and in avalanche of cheap souvenirs. Even people who’ve never been to Vegas could probably draw it from memory. The sign is a visual shorthand not just for Las Vegas the place, but for the feelings the town evokes. It makes sense that people line up by the thousands daily to get a selfie.

In October 1968, Stanley Mallin and Caesars Palace developer Jay Sarno opened a different kind of tourist draw, Circus Circus. It was, and still is, an odd hybrid: Its multilevel casino has a second-story carnival-style midway, and live circus acts—aerialists, clowns—perform in an overhead “big top” every single day. (Its early years were even weirder, with an elephant “hostess” who could pull slot machine handles and throw dice, and a sideshow that featured a woman transforming into a gorilla.)

Circus Circus was the first Vegas attraction I experienced personally, back in the early 1980s. My parents would give me $20 in quarters—enough to keep a 12-year-old occupied for an hour—and I’d blow it all on arcade games, bypassing the midway skill challenges. On those occasions when I ran out of money prematurely (Asteroids, you bastar-oid), I’d watch the aerialists soar through Circus Circus’ big top, just as James Bond had in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever.

But you can only keep a kid placated with quarters and spandex-clad trapeze artists for so long, and eventually we’d go to Vegas’ other family-friendly attraction of the period: The OmniMax Theatre at Caesars Palace, which opened in 1979 and closed in 2000. If we’re looking for the ancestry of Sphere, you can hardly get more specific than this large-format, domed screen movie theater, which screened short films created for museums and planetariums. Inside was a massive, curved screen which filled your entire field of vision, and a surround sound system loud enough to power a nightclub; outside, it looked a bit like EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth, with a face of glowing triangles.

Returning to Circus Circus’ free acts for the moment: By Curtis’ reckoning, they planted the seeds for what he calls “the free spectacle.” Though he doesn’t exactly draw a straight line from one to the other, he considers Circus Circus as a likely antecedent to another true Vegas original: The Mirage, which opened on the Strip in November 1989. Erupted there, really.

“Steve Wynn did lot of things with the Mirage,” Curtis says. “He had the volcano, he had the indoor rainforest, the lobby aquarium—all these things were attractions. He created multiple ways to draw people in.”

Wynn conceived of the Mirage’s volcano as an antidote to neon signage: “I’m burned out on neon … I think it’s cheap,” he said to an Associated Press reporter in 1989. The volcano, which shoots up pillars of flame, blazes with hot-hued theatrical lighting and emits a low-end rumble that you can feel in your chest, pretty much remade the Strip in its image for a time, triggering an arms race of streetside set pieces: The MGM Grand’s lion, the Luxor’s Sphinx and spotlight-topped pyramid, the Venetian’s canals, Paris Las Vegas’ half-scale Eiffel Tower, and the pirate battle and dancing fountains of Wynn’s own Treasure Island and Bellagio. Neon was outmatched, at least for a while.

Some aspects of Las Vegas are so fiercely admired that even after they’re lost or destroyed, we act as if they still exist. Elvis Presley, the Sands, the Stardust’s space-age sign—all these things are gone, but their images endure. The Mirage’s volcano, targeted to be leveled and replaced with a new casino tower as the property converts to a Hard Rock resort, will soon belong to that ghostly set of icons. Its influence won’t be easily erased, considering what came next.

FOR THE KIDS, 1990-2009

The era that we’ll call “Family Vegas” began quietly in 1990 with the opening of the King Arthur-themed Excalibur, and went full power in 1993, when Circus Circus opened an indoor amusement park called Grand Slam Canyon, and Luxor, Treasure Island and the new MGM Grand opened within a two-month span. These properties weren’t just family-friendly, but family-forward. Non-gaming attractions were built into the backbone of these resorts, to such a large degree that it would later cost millions to remove them

The Family Vegas era is distinguished by thrill rides and “free spectacles,” and the Luxor and MGM Grand went big on both. The Luxor had not one, but three attractions with a shared storyline—a Star Tours-like motion ride, a 3D movie and an IMAX movie, all created by Academy Award-winning visual effects artist Douglas Trumbull—as well as a short-lived canal boat ride, a replica of King Tutankhamen’s tomb and a massive, Sega-branded arcade. And the MGM Grand had a Wizard of Oz set piece, a lion habitat, a bar with a slurring Foster Brooks animatronic and, oh yeah, an entire theme park in its backyard.

MGM Grand Adventures (1993-2002) deserves a mention here, though with its Disney-but-not-quite aesthetic and feel, it’s an outlier in the evolution of Vegas attractions. It wasn’t Nevada-themed, like Last Frontier Village; it wasn’t visually spectacular, like the Mirage’s volcano; and it wasn’t free, like Circus Circus’ aerial acts. It warrants mention here for its ambition and scale, both so far-reaching that MGM Grand didn’t fully reclaim its footprint until 2016, with the opening of Topgolf.

A flood of family attractions followed, though only a few remain today. Circus Circus’ Grand Slam Canyon, now called Adventuredome, is still going strong. Buffalo Bill’s, at the California/Nevada state line, debuted one of the world’s tallest roller coasters in 1994, the 209-foot-tall Desperado. In 1997, New York-New York opened with a 203-foot-tall roller coaster—formerly the Manhattan Express, today the Big Apple Coaster—built directly into its façade. Even the Sahara found room for a launched roller coaster on its property, with the NASCAR-themed Speed: The Ride (2000-2011).

Animal habitats also proved popular. The Mirage had a glass-walled enclosure where visitors could view the white tigers who appeared in Siegfried & Roy’s show, and in 1990 debuted a dolphin habitat; both closed in 2022, and their animals were relocated. In 1995, the Flamingo fittingly introduced the Flamingo Wildlife Habitat, where visitors can still admire its namesake wading birds. Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef Aquarium opened in June 2000 with a massive 1.3 million-gallon tank, and it showcases a picturesque variety of sharks, rays and other aquatic life to this day.

“Free spectacles” also proliferated. The Rio offered a “parade,” the Masquerade Show in the Sky (1997-2013), with giant illuminated floats suspended from the casino ceiling that visitors paid to ride in. Caesars Palace, which introduced a free animatronic show in 1992 with the opening of the Forum Shops, debuted an even more spectacular, Atlantis-themed animatronic show in 1997. It served as the overture to a paid IMAX motion simulator ride called Race for Atlantis (1997-2004).

Though both were abundantly cheesy, the motion simulator rides of Luxor and Caesars Palace are fondly remembered, when they’re remembered at all. (Shout out to actor and slam poet S.A. Griffin, whose performance at the villainous Dr. Osiris invested the Luxor rides with real menace, and to the late, great Michael Jeter, a journeyman character actor you’d recognize from The Fisher King and The Green Mile. His Race for Atlantis safety spiel was antic genius, particularly the bit where he warned pregnant mothers not to ride while sporting a massive baby bump.) But they’re dim lights when viewed alongside another simulator attraction that deserves another chance to exist.

In the realm of immersive attractions, Star Trek: The Experience, which opened at the Las Vegas Hilton (now Westgate) in January 1998, was as close to the complete package as you’d find outside of a Disney or Universal theme park. The sheer audacity of the thing was unmatched then and could stand alone now. You entered through a “history of the future” museum, a collection of Star Trek artifacts and were “transported” up to a perfect replica of the Enterprise D’s bridge, via a misdirection effect that still dazzles today.

After a short video briefing from Riker and LaForge—Jonathan Frakes and LeVar Burton, in their prime—guests took a rollicking motion simulator ride through a Klingon/Enterprise space battle, finally landing at Quark’s on the Deep Space Nine station, a proper intergalactic bar populated by expensively-costumed Trek personalities who would stay in character no matter what.

The Experience was the pinnacle of Family Vegas, a savvy combination of beloved intellectual property, visual and mechanical effects, set pieces and good old-fashioned Vegas hospitality. But nothing in this city is forever, and following a failure in negotiations between the Hilton and management company Cedar Fair, the Experience closed in September 2009, just a few months after a new Star Trek movie reignited interest in the franchise. Family Vegas was pretty much done by then, but the Experience closure shoveled the last bit of dirt onto the grave.

“That whole family thing was a quickie diversion. I think they were sorry they ever started it,” says Curtis.“And where did they go, right from there? They went to ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,’ and a return to those adult themes. … The whole (family) attraction thing got taken over by a Strip that had been taken over by nightlife. Their attractions became, ‘Come to our pool party, come to our nightclub.’

“I think the casinos got to the point where they said, ‘We’re kind of like attraction’d out,” he continues. “Wynn was doing everything on such a big level—the volcano was a big deal, the pirate show was a bigger deal and the Bellagio fountains a bigger deal than that. And it was tough to compete. … I think they said, ‘We don’t really need to do this. We’re not making any money on this.’”

That said, Las Vegas never fully buries its ideas, even if they fail. Yesterday’s “ride on this suspended parade float” is today’s “try out this zipline.” The next, and current, era of Vegas attractions would follow in the footsteps of Star Trek: The Experience, but also Last Frontier Village. Soon, interactivity would step to the fore, even as the attractions moved out of the resorts.

SCREEN CRUSH, 2012-TODAY

Vegas went quiet for a few years after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, dealing with upside-down mortgages on the home front and a visitor base that simply couldn’t afford to gamble, much less hop on roller coasters when they weren’t gambling.

The first new resort to arrive on the Strip following that recession, the Cosmopolitan, opened in 2010 with a sleek, modern façade, a variety of restaurants and clubs, and absolutely no volcanoes, motion rides or “free spectacles.” Strip resorts have largely followed suit, though the newest, Resorts World, has dabbled a bit in temporary family attractions such as the Burning Man-inspired interactive art fair Transfix.

But the fun didn’t end; it just shifted to the fringes. The High Roller, a 550-foot-tall observation wheel—the second tallest in the world, as of this writing—opened in March 2014, nestled at the rear of an outdoor dining and retail complex between the Flamingo and Linq hotels. FlyOver, a theater ride inspired by Disney’s Soarin’ attraction, opened in September 2021 at the Strip’s Showcase Mall; it evokes memories of both Luxor’s motion rides and the enveloping grandeur of OmniMax.

Several specialty museums—including the Mob Museum (opened February 2012), the Neon Museum (October 2012) the National Atomic Testing Museum (March 2005) and the Burlesque Hall of Fame (April 2018)—are now open daily in various off-Strip locations. Two mind-wrinkling attractions filled with interactive illusions, the Paradox Museum and the Museum of Illusions, opened just this year. And there are numerous smaller attractions, too many to name here—escape rooms, immersive projection rooms, museum-like displays of everything from Titanic artifacts to human remains—located here and there.

And then there’s the curious case of Area15. A self-described “immersive entertainment and events district,” this sprawling complex of charcoal-colored concrete slab buildings houses all manner of cool stuff, including a Willy Wonka-like distillery tour; an axe-throwing bar; several simulators, both flying and earthbound; a glow-in-the-dark art installation designed by a co-founder of Blue Man Group; a handful of venues tailor-made for music events and more. A planned expansion will add a Universal Parks & Resorts-run horror attraction to the mix, and its marquee tenant, Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart, still has room to grow.

So much has been said about Meow Wolf that I have little to add here, save for this: In creating Omega Mart in Las Vegas, with the help of local artists, the Santa Fe-based interactive entertainment producer has tied together several dangling threads. It draws on the same wild, weird western mythology as Last Frontier Village, only it does so from the perspective of the Nuwuvi people whose lives were upended by those mining towns. It employs a level of technological innovation equal to Star Trek: The Experience. And it delivers an audio-visual wow that’s nearly equivalent to the Mirage’s volcano.

That puts us, at last, in Sphere’s neighborhood. It’s a concert venue, but it’s also an attraction, one that wouldn’t be possible if not for what came before. We needed OmniMax to prime us for the large-format Darren Aronofsky production, Postcard from Earth, that will screen when U2’s not rocking the joint. We needed the Luxor, a goofy-shaped building with a light on top, to prepare us for this alien shape on our skyline. And even Circus Circus, with its aerialists and midway, played a sizable role in making a place for Sphere. It established that the Strip can be more than gambling, drinking, dining, shows and sunbathing. Like Sphere, our modern-day Vegas is a planet in miniature, onto which we can project whatever strange and wonderful things we can imagine.

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