When Don Carson was hired by Lucas Martell in September 2021 to work as an artist on Walkabout Mini Golf, the former theme park designer mentioned a name and place he wanted to see in virtual reality.

Carson’s dream space opens to the public in VR this week. In Walkabout Mini Golf, the final paid add-on course of 2025 from studio Mighty Coconut finds visitors at the bottom of a rabbit hole following Alice on a journey growing curiouser and curiouser.

When he was a child, Carson loved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll with illustrations by John Tenniel. First published in 1865, Alice’s series of encounters with strange creatures has seen every kind of adaptation from those original words and images. From release on December 4, 2025, Carson’s course design for Martell’s Walkabout with holes by Henning Koczy will see people leaning in to look through the keyhole at a royal garden beyond. Then they’ll follow Alice’s trail of dropped bottles, growing small and large along the way in a mad laughing party of their own.

As the course opens, Walkabout’s core design team convenes at Carson’s home studio in the Pacific Northwest to rough out ideas for the game that will open in 2027. Below is an image of the Walkabout Path for Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland drawn by Carson as an early concept in 2024.

Pen and ink drawing by Don Carson of an early draft of the “walkabout path” through Alice’s Adventure’s In Wonderland.

First shown publicly in our coverage of the game’s 36th course, the Mother Goose-inspired Forgotten Fairyland, the “Walkabout Path” for each course starts as a continuous circuitous block carved in virtual reality with Gravity Sketch. At the same time visitors follow Alice’s finalized path for the first time, Walkabout’s designers meet in the physical world to wear VR headsets together in the same space as they rough out places as a kind of team-building exercise of pure spatial creation.

You can watch our full 27-minute tour of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with Carson and Koczy taking us along Alice’s adventure from the Cheshire Cat to the Jabberwocky and Queen, and find all of our coverage of Walkabout at UploadVR.com/Walkabout.

Walkabout Mini Golf Creator Lucas Martell Makes A Sandbox For Artists To Play Inside

Walkabout Mini Golf follows Alice down the rabbit hole into Wonderland this week. We sat down with game director Lucas Martell for an in-depth Q&A about the game.

Each new course from Walkabout features 36 new hole designs, 18 each in easy and hard modes. I only briefly glimpsed the eye-catching new visual effect shown in Wonderland’s hard mode, but in my tour video above you can see Koczy himself – the designer of all the holes – putting right into a Mad Tea Party. I won’t spoil what happens in that video if you’re waiting to experience it for yourself.

There are well beyond 1,000 unique hole designs in Walkabout now, many of them designed by Koczy. At the Mad Tea Party he’s a wizard in Wonderland channeling something into Walkabout I first experienced almost a decade ago.

I enjoy sitting on Amalthea around Jupiter and Pistol Whip’s levels are still dreamy, but to my personal taste a Walkabout Mad Tea Party with friends played like Alice in Wonderland may be the best experience in all of virtual reality now.