Thanks to innovation, mini golf is on the upswing again.

A hundred years ago, an innovation catapulted miniature golf into a national pastime in which most anyone could partake. Now two years after a global pandemic drove people inside alone and outside at a safe distance, mini golf is on the upswing and innovation is driving that participation once again. Like me, you may be wondering why this casual and fun-loving sport is such a big part of the cultural zeitgeist once again. 

In 1922, a golf fanatic named Thomas McCullogh Fairbairn revolutionized the game with his formulation of a suitable artificial green: a mixture of cottonseed hulls, sand, oil, and dye. With this technological advancement, miniature golf no longer required a massive investment to build or to play, and by the late 1920s there were tens of thousands of mini golf courses across the US. 

That’s the power of a technological innovation (most people wouldn’t have understood or cared about) brought about a social essential just about everyone quickly came to love. 

I suspect part of the appeal is that mini golf makes everyone the protagonist in fun and often fantastical location-based stories. Everyone plays, everyone is on a quest, sometimes you keep score, and sometimes it doesn’t matter.

I am a storyteller by trade. I’ve communicated for brands big and small across industries and continents… most often for creators. A year ago, I joined the independent entertainment studio Mighty Coconut behind animated shorts that become Hollywood feature films (SPIES IN DISGUISE), animated series (Kings of Atlantis), branching narratives and augmented reality games (57 North, Lazer Mazer). But what brought me here was the surprising rise of the virtual reality mini golf game that became a surprise global hit during the pandemic lockdown. That, and the allure of working with The Jim Henson Company. 

As it turns out, the technological innovation of the Meta Quest headset made this leap possible. Everything from the graphics to the performance to the ability for multiple people to play together made for immersive and very convincing mini golf simulation.

Launched two years ago this week, “Walkabout Mini Golf'' is today the most popular multiplayer virtual reality game on both Meta Quest and Steam platforms. Every week, hundreds of thousands of players across over forty nations play our fourteen and counting courses together and alone. Our most recent course Walkabout Mini Golf: Labyrinth which we created in partnership with The Jim Henson Company was our best selling course to date.

With the “metaverse” such a hot topic of conversation from boardrooms to coffeeshops, I often get asked why mini golf is the VR game that took off. We obsess over the impossibly dynamic environments and ultra-realistic physics, but the truth is that mini golf works in VR for the same reason it works IRL: anyone can do it, players enjoy developing a skill, and people have fun hanging out. 

We get our fair share of kudos for the social features in the game, but the surge in popularity got me looking around at mini golf elsewhere to see if there is something larger at play with this moment. In fact, there is.

I got in touch with Wittek Golf Supply—a lead supplier of mini golf course products—which reported a 42% increase in sales from 2015 to 2021; 70% increase in mini golf sales from 2020 to 2021; and projected percentage increase in mini golf sales from 2021 – 2022. League play is also on the rise. The World Minigolf Sport Federation—the umbrella organization of mini golf sports associations worldwide and continental associations in Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania says the surge in participation in the sport is "indeed a market that’s on the risen. We have increased our revenue each of the latest years and 2022 is no exception." 

I’ve also noticed businesses like Puttshack (a “leading concept in the emerging and growing market of competitive socializing”) which has been rapidly expanding their presence across the UK and North America with eleven new locations planned to open through 2023. Incidentally, these locations are outfitted with lots of screens which transform the IRL gameplay. And there’s a Pixar themed mini golf course touring the country now. 

It also hasn’t escaped my attention that Mila Kunis’ Orchard Farm Productions recently sold its comedy The Masters of Mini-Golf to Warner Bros. for HBO Max. Ashton Kutcher will star in the film, which is currently in development. And you’ve probably seen ABC’s Holey Moley, which closed out Season 4 with 2.2 million viewers. 

Like me, you and all of these businesses must be wondering the same thing: a hundred years after the mini golf craze took hold in America, why is it experiencing such a resurgence? Based on our observations and the anonymized data we monitor in Walkabout Mini Golf, I can say that it’s because mini golf—long loved for its approachability and fun course designs—offers something for every age, skill level, budget, and locale. And yet again, technological innovation has made it accessible to the masses.

With all the talk about what the “metaverse” might be in the next year or ten or twenty five, I humbly suggest that consumers and the technological architects take a step back and look at what a vast cross section of people are showing they want: fun, comfortable, accessible, escape with each other. And given the distressing factors of the world we live in, it is no wonder why!

With International Mini Golf Day coming up this week on September 21, I urge you to rediscover the renaissance of America’s favorite fantasy sport and invite a group of friends, family, colleagues, volunteers, whomever to play a couple of rounds of mini golf at your local course or virtually if you like. 

In doing so, you’ll be participating in a once-in-a-century moment of technological innovation while saying that with all the divisions we experience in this country, there’s still something that we all have in common.

Head of communication and business strategy at Mighty Coconut, David Wyatt is a storyteller, partnership-maker, and mini golf enthusiast. When he’s not in Walkabout Mini Golf or at the studio’s central Austin headquarters, you can find him camping, rocking, or sipping a finer brew of coffee with a furrowed brow. www.mightycoconut.com