The Great Maze, Wanaka, New Zealand
Stuart Landsborough
I am actually English by birth. I lived all of the first nineteen years of my life within sound of - not Bow Bells, but Hampton Court! It didn't give me any desire to build a maze but certainly in future years I was aware of how my family used to take visitors to the Palace and the Maze.  travelled to Australia for three years of moving around from job to job, just being young and fancy free. I then moved to have a look at nearby, beautiful, New Zealand. It was there that I met my wife to be and slowed to a stop. It couldn't be a nicer part of the world. The South Island of New Zealand where I live is not much smaller than the size of England, yet only has a population of some eight hundred thousand people. It is one of the few beautiful places left in the world that doesn't suffer from overcrowding. I stopped in Wanaka, a tourist town of only one thousand people. The nearest "big" city was two hundred and seventy kilometres away and that only had a population of one hundred thousand people. The town was on the scenic route through the most magnificent scenery and in those days, nineteen years ago, there were only very small numbers of international tourists.
So why did I start my own maze? My wife and I were a young couple, newly married and with a long life ahead of us. I had to make a living and a future. Firstly, we wanted a business of our own. Secondly, we wanted a business in tourism because tourists are happy people and happiness should rub off. Thirdly we wanted to do something different, to use our imagination. For months we searched for our own special idea. Finally, one day, as a joke I suggested we build a maze. She took me seriously and I started to think about it. So we immediately thought about growing a hedge maze. Very quickly we cast the idea out. No young couple wants to spend all their money and more on buying land, plants, etc., and then waiting years before opening to the public to see if you were a success or failure. In the last nineteen years many other people have told me how they too thought about starting a maze and how they came to the same conclusion. The one difference was that it occurred to me to try building the maze out of non-traditional materials. Timber was the most readily available and also more sympathetic to the surrounding scenery.
Opening in December 1973, the Wanaka Maze had a kilometre of passageways using two metre high wooden fences as divides. After months and months of trying to study maze psychology I found that the result was not much different from a random design maze. The average time taken to solve the puzzle was about ten minutes. For the next three years I spent as much time as possible standing on a lookout tower watching the behaviour of my customers in the maze. Gradually I learnt some quite remarkable things. Bit by bit I altered the maze so that eventually for the same length of passageways the time was doubled to twenty minutes. The customers were happier with the puzzle, but some got quite angry (with themselves) because they could not believe that they could be out-thought! The advantage of building the maze with wooden fences became very apparent - perhaps I was the first person in the world who could easily learn my mistakes and improve from them. A unique advantage.
As the years went by, people started to copy my idea. At one time there were six or seven other mazes in New Zealand and a couple in Australia. Most of the these have ceased to exist now. It is very easy for people to copy the basic idea but usually they located the business in the wrong position, construct it too small to save money (a half-size maze is maybe one tenth as time consuming and so becomes so easy it is only suitable for children) or they did not have the imagination required. Never the less, I wanted to continually improve my product and keep ahead of my rivals.
In 1982 the Wanaka Maze went three dimensional. I extended the original maze by 40% and included two hundred metres of overhead passageways. This created a whole new set of problems to solve. The art of two dimensional maze design is totally different from that of three dimensional. I had to learn all over again. Also I wanted to make another improvement. My maze was my sole income, it had to be commercial. That probably sounds a dirty word to many traditional maze enthusiasts but really what it means is making the best possible attraction for the greatest number of people. To do this it HAS to be the best puzzle, the most interesting, satisfying, intriguing and value for money. A poor maze will die very quickly.
Traditionally it has been thought that the maximum length of time happily spent in the maze was about twenty minutes. I realised that a person paying money to enter a maze felt that this length of time wasn't quite value. I therefore worked on creating a maze with an average time of forty minutes. To do this, I had to work out a way of lowering the frustration of people in a maze having difficulty solving the problem. If you have one destination to find in a maze and on average it takes twenty minutes - then frustration is going to build up to a point where people want to give up. I felt that to keep people in a maze - happily for much longer, one has to give them multiple points of satisfaction, or frequent release of frustration. I therefore made it so that the aim of the maze was to find each of the four corners of the maze. In this case they were four towers marked by a yellow, green, blue and red flag. The maze was actually divided into two with a path running right through the middle so that the overhead bridges were a must to succeed with the whole maze.
  The Wanaka Maze, New Zealand, designed and built by Stuart Landsborough
  Wanaka Maze advert
Once the three dimensional maze was constructed, I then had to spend more time studying my customers behaviour again. More and more alterations resulted - another unique advantage of using wooden fences. The maze now takes an average of forty minutes to complete. I can feel - and questions to my customers prove - that they well and truly believe that they have value for money with this length and time.
About 1985 I was approached by a Japanese business concerning the possibility of designing mazes for them. They saw the potential in Japan with their vast population. They felt that if a maze could prosper in remote Wanaka, then surely they could do well in Japan. During the next four years I designed twenty that were constructed in Japan. The company I worked for - called Maze Products - were determined to put their mazes in the best locations, and built of quality materials, the mazes were built to be there for the long term.
It was a wonderful experience. Each maze I designed was the result of learning from the other mazes. The success of the mazes in Japan was phenomenal. Such huge numbers of people were going to the mazes at peak times that each of my new commissions had to discover ways of increasing the capacity so that more people could enter at one time, yet it had to remain an entertaining, fun puzzle.
I would say that the maximum working capacity of Hampton Court Maze would be no more than ten or fifteen people at one time (it can take many more, but the puzzle gets easier). My maze at Wanaka was developed to a good working capacity of about one hundred people, which was quite adequate for its needs. My earlier Japanese mazes struggled with a capacity, frequently obtained, of one thousand people. The later mazes could take an incredible 1500 people and yet still remain equally challenging. This increased capacity had to be obtained by understanding flow patterns rather than just increasing the maze size. I compare it with planning traffic flows in congested cities. The aim is to get as many people as possible to flow as quickly as possible through the area and away. My challenge was to keep them flowing as smoothly as possible, yet keep them IN the area! I also had to develop points in the maze where "change points" could be installed so that very quickly a pattern with a big difference could be created. This would be easy if the maze was a random design, but when each junction is designed to depend on the direction of people flow and its relation to other junctions, then a major change could make the whole pattern useless. By my twentieth maze I had it down to a fine art.
But as usual, when somebody is seen to create a new idea that seems to be a raging success (and thus very profitable) many people copy the act. Within a short time there were almost two hundred mazes throughout Japan! When the Japanese have a craze they really go overboard with it! Where we built one maze, often there would be three or four others built in the region. Japan became wall to wall mazes. Most of the new mazes were built to fail. Sometimes the locations were crazy or the mazes were the wrong size. Some were built with amazing visual appearances but the puzzles themselves were pathetic and very quickly many mazes closed, but the good ones survived. This has been seized upon gleefully by some British maze purists as a sign that commercial wooden mazes were just a short interlude in the history of mazes. In fact, if two hundred mazes were commercially built in Britain the result would probably be the same, although in Britain mazes are often installed in the grounds of stately manors and other such gardens and as such don't necessarily have to be financially sound to survive. My own maze in Wanaka shows no sign of failing after twenty years of operation.
For the hedge maze enthusiasts, there are two traditional mazes in this country. A small, rather battered example way up in the north of North Island at Whangarei and another nicer one, a circular hedge maze located in the middle of North Island at Rotorua.
  The Fairbank Maze, situated near the airport at Rotorua, New Zealand.
The Great Maze & Puzzling Place is located on the Main Highway, Wanaka, South Island. Puzzle centre, hologram & illusions gallery. Open daily 8.30 a.m.-5.30 p.m.
Stuart Landsborough, Wanaka, New Zealand