by | January 26, 2026
Meet The Creator of Universal’s Epic Universe
Go behind the scenes with Steve Tatham, the theme park designer creating these otherworldly escapes.
The rushing chlorinated waters of a theme park attraction and a crowded tram ride can inspire many things—adrenaline, nausea, the eruption of previously latent familial conflict. For Steve Tatham, they inspired a career.
“There’s a scene that takes place in this little village (on the backlot of Universal Studios in Los Angeles). There’s a flood, and water is roaring toward the tram,” he recalls from a family vacation when he was 9. “I’m sitting there with my parents. And for some reason I thought, ‘Somebody has to make this stuff up. Somebody has to take a blank piece of paper and write down pictures or words or numbers, and then it comes to life.’ I was like, ‘That’s gotta be the coolest job in the world.’ It turns out, it is.”
Tatham is one of the world’s preeminent theme park designers. He’s spent decades sketching, scrapping and creating everything from tiny inscriptions on buildings for eagle-eyed fans to entire experiences, including his latest venture, Universal Epic Universe in Orlando. Since it opened in May, it’s made waves far beyond the realm of theme park designers. It’s the first major theme park to open in the United States this century and is expected to bring $2 billion to Florida in its first year.
Tatham is now a wizard of narrative-based design, but he spent decades honing his craft in theme parks around the world, beginning in the make-believe lands of California. As a young student, first in a set design program at UC Berkeley and then later in an architecture master’s at UCLA, he immersed himself in the theme parks he would eventually bring to life. He worked as a Jungle Cruise skipper in Disneyland and then as a tour guide at Universal Studios. “I would go down to the art department on the lot. I would kind of sneak around, and I would meet production designers. They were really eager to help.”
Legendary production designers, like Henry Bumstead, known for his work with Alfred Hitchcock, gave Tatham advice and even sketches for him to study. After graduating with his master’s in 1987, Tatham became a set designer with the Walt Disney Imagineers—the selective group responsible for bringing Disney’s stories to life as theme parks. But mostly, he spent his days dreaming up lands that never came to be.
“That was the Disney decade, the ’90s. There were a lot of very ambitious things happening. Some of them landed and some of them didn’t,” he says. “And it was awesome, because you just got to brainstorm and make up stuff and work with all these Imagineers.”
Parkgoers weren’t the only ones wowed by how Tatham wielded his architectural wand. After 28 years at Disney, Universal called him to work on their theme park in Osaka, Japan. The new team was smaller, but the ideas were bigger. What would have been a “no” in California was an enthusiastic “yes” in Japan.
When he arrived in July 2015, the team was already planning their version of Halloween Horror Nights. “There was a model of a corpse, and you’d put your hand in there and there’d be live cockroaches. Then they’d chain people together as they walk through this sanitarium,” he says.
“They’re pitching all this stuff, and I’m just sitting there, slack-jawed, next to the chief marketing officer. He looks over and he’s like, ‘Steve-san is shocked, because he comes from Disney, and he can’t believe all the stuff we’re doing.’ It was a very nice introduction that everything (was) going to be different. I ended up making dozens and dozens of projects. All day long we were churning out stuff.”
It took a few years for the Universal Orlando team to convince him, but in 2019, he made the move to Florida. “It’s the theme park mecca,” he says. “If you’re in the business, you’re going to end up in Orlando at some point.”
Invigorated by his stint in Japan, Tatham became the executive creative director of Epic Universe, where he led a team of 500 builders, designers and dreamers all dedicated to bringing fictional places to life.
The result is a totally immersive experience: five worlds connected through 30-feet-tall semicircular gates. Visitors can explore The Wizarding World of Harry Potter-Ministry of Magic, then hop through a glowing portal to Super Nintendo World or How to Train Your Dragon-Isle of Berk. Or they can venture into uniquely Universal domains like Celestial Park and Dark Universe.
To Tatham, it’s truly epic—not in the colloquial sense, but like “The Odyssey.” These lands tell a story filled with heroes that create legends. “If you think about these epic tales that take place in these expansive environments, Epic Universe does exactly that. In fact, ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ is based on ‘Beowulf.’ So there really is a solid foundation for why these particular stories work. If all of a sudden you put Minions in the middle of Celestial Park, people would be like, ‘I don’t understand why this is here.’”
Every detail in the theme park is intentional to shape these narratives, but if you ask Tatham to divulge secrets about esoteric Easter eggs referencing deep Universal lore, he won’t tell you anything that isn’t widely known. But rest assured: There are plenty for diehard theme park fans to find.
And for the theme park ambivalent, Tatham doesn’t need you to care about the minutia of his creation. Instead, forget the details and become immersed—it’s not hard in a Tatham-designed park.
For now, the 65-year-old architect is moving on to his next adventure. He’ll leave behind Universal for a role as the chief creative officer of MDSX, an Orlando-based experience design group, and as a professor of themed entertainment design at the University of Southern California.
But his core design tenets will remain true, no matter what’s next. “I like to encourage architects to think of their buildings in terms of narrative, because I think all buildings have a story,” he says. “Think about the Isle of Berk. You’re at the point of the story between the second and third movie where dragons and Vikings are at their optimum point of collaboration. That story is told to you in the design: You see a giant statue of a Viking and a giant statue of the dragon. They’re equal heights. They’re next to each other—they’re parallel, they’re friends. We translate emotions through design … It is different than building any other type of architecture, but it all derives from the story. There’s a lot of possibilities for narratives (in other buildings).”
To him, it all comes down to etching moments and memories, like the family trip he took with his parents that sparked a career. Whether it’s a hospital or a theme park, good design with strong narratives allows a visitor to get lost and focus on who they’re sharing moments with. “You ask people about their experiences, and before they say what rides they went on, they’ll tell you who they went with. I hope we create an environment that allows those emotions to come to the surface, and the best way to do that is to create stories that they love.”
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About the Author
Helen has an aptitude for finding alligators and a passion for covering the weird and wonderful of Florida. The Tallahassee native graduated with her bachelor's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. At Flamingo, she helps organize advertising and write stories (usually about Florida's fantastic fauna).
