DISNEY SET TO GO INTERACTIVE; INDOOR PARKS PLANNED.

Byline: Dave McNary Daily News Staff Writer

Walt Disney Co., aiming to offer smaller, high-tech versions of its hugely successful theme parks, announced Wednesday it will open a new chain of indoor, interactive attractions in Orlando next year, Chicago in 1999 and undetermined locations in years to come.

DisneyQuest will be marketed as an afternoon's or evening's worth of high-tech entertainment. Participants will be able to paddle on an air-supported, four-person river raft through a dinosaur-infested world and ride a gravity-defying roller coaster, with each ride designed by customers.

``We call it Cyber-Space Mountain,'' spokeswoman Denise Villanueva said of the latter.

``Within a two- to three-hour visit, guests can embark on adventures that let them actually enter the story and become part of it,'' said Art Levitt, president of Disney Regional Entertainment.

Walt Disney Imagineering is designing four areas for each site - the Explore Zone for adventure, the Score Zone for competition, the Create Zone for customer invention and the Replay Zone featuring ``classic'' rides.

The Burbank-based entertainment giant will open its first DisneyQuest site, covering 100,000 square feet, next summer at Walt Disney World. The facility, already under construction, is adjacent to the Pleasure Island and Downtown Disney attractions.

``What we're doing is taking the richness of the theme-park experience,'' Villanueva said. ``Because of technology, we no longer need all the acreage.''

Disney did not disclose admission charges but plans to operate the attractions on a ``pay for play'' basis with a smart card developed by American Express. Villanueva said DisneyQuest will be ``accessible and affordable.''

As for expansion beyond the first two sites, Disney plans to open other facilities at ``major domestic and international destinations,'' with 20 to 30 operating within a decade, Villanueva said.

Retail consultant Mark Kissel of Rockville, Md., said the DisneyQuest concept could be a breakthrough in developing new shopping centers with an ``anchor'' operated by a tried-and-true entity like Disney.

``Developers have been looking for entertainment anchors, but they haven't been sure if the concept will work,'' Kissel said. ``DisneyQuest could be a catalyst.''

DisneyQuest is the latest attempt by the company to expand its lucrative brand name into new ventures, starting a decade ago when it launched the Disney Stores chain - now at more than 600 locations. It rolled out its Club Disney play-park chain, targeting children and families, in Thousand Oaks earlier this year and plans to debut its ESPN store in Glendale next month.

The announcement also underscores the trend in bringing successful theme-park concepts away from resorts and into major cities. In this case, Disney will be playing catch-up with Sega GameWorks, which launched in March as a chain of super-arcade nightclubs with the backing of entertainment czar Steven Spielberg.

GameWorks, a joint venture of Universal, Spielberg's DreamWorks SKG and Sega Enterprises, plans to have 100 sites open by the year 2002. Several GameWorks executives had been working at Disney on the DisneyQuest concept, which has been in development for three years, before bolting to GameWorks.

``My view is that there's a tremendous shift going on with the intensity of destination sites transferred to local sites,'' said Kevin Skislock, an analyst with L.H. Friend, Weinress, Frankson & Presson. ``Main Street at Disneyland is coming to Maple Street.''

Skislock said the moves by Disney and Sega are part of a larger entertainment industry trend to compete with the improvements in home entertainment. That has led to the construction of lavish movie multiplexes, giant-screen Imax theaters and restaurant-arcades such as Dave & Buster's.

Skislock noted that smaller sites do not require the investment on the scale of a Disney World and that the indoor locations mean DisneyQuest can be opened in cold-weather locales far from Florida and Southern California.

Linda Bannister, an analyst with Edward Jones, said Disney's relatively slow approach makes sense because it will enable fine-tuning DisneyQuest before committing to an expansion. ``Disney will want to see how this idea takes hold, to see how much of a public appetite there is,'' she said.

Bannister also said the first DisneyQuest site will serve to help boost attendance at Walt Disney World, which is also adding an Animal Kingdom attraction early next year. ``Disney is trying to get people to prolong their visit for another day,'' she said.

Besides American Express, other partners on DisneyQuest include Hughes-JVC for projection systems, Silicon Graphics for workstations and Tandem Computers for servers. Food will be sold at Wired Wonderland and FoodQuest, to be operated as an express concept by Calabasas-based Cheesecake Factory.