THE LAS VEGAS STRIP IS BASICALLY EPCOT FOR ADULTS. AND THAT'S NOT AN ACCIDENT.

From toga-clad cocktail waitresses to indoor Venetian canals, Las Vegas turned the theme park playbook into a multibillion-dollar adult playground. And the Disney connection runs deeper than you might think.

There are very few places on Earth where you can have breakfast in Paris, ride a gondola through Venice, visit ancient Rome, and find yourself in New York City before dinner. At EPCOT, that's called the World Showcase. In Las Vegas, that's called Tuesday.

The Strip is essentially a giant theme park for grown-ups, where the attractions come with cocktail menus, the hotels have slot machines, and nobody asks whether you're tall enough to ride (as long as you're over 21, that is). You can wander beneath artificial skies, admire recreated landmarks, and eat your way around the world without ever leaving a few miles of Nevada desert. For Disney adults, the resemblance is almost impossible to ignore.

But here's the twist: Las Vegas was selling elaborately staged fantasies long before EPCOT opened. And when the Strip evolved into the immersive playground we know today, some of the very people who helped create Disney's imaginary worlds were involved. To understand how we got here, we need to meet two men who changed Las Vegas forever: one dressed his waitresses in togas, and the other built a volcano.

When Caesars Palace opened in 1966, developer Jay Sarno wanted guests to feel like Roman emperors—or, more accurately, like a 1960s American fantasy of what being a Roman emperor might have been like. He wasn't interested in creating a historically faithful reconstruction of ancient Rome. He was selling luxury, decadence, and the opportunity to escape ordinary life.

The resort featured fountains, statues, elaborate interiors, and cocktail waitresses wearing decidedly abbreviated versions of ancient Roman attire. The costumes, designed by Jo Harris, were part of Sarno's vision of a luxurious adult fantasyland. Historical accuracy wasn't exactly the priority. Nobody was coming to Las Vegas for a graduate seminar on the Roman Empire. They were coming to feel rich, important, and perhaps just a little naughty.

Sarno followed Caesars with Circus Circus in 1968, applying the same exuberant philosophy to a different fantasy. Instead of Roman decadence, guests got circus acts, a big-top atmosphere, and an adult edge that feels almost unimaginable at the family-friendly Circus Circus many visitors remember. For a wonderfully campy glimpse of that earlier era, watch the Circus Circus sequence in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever.

Sarno understood the power of theatrical escapism, but his resorts were still fundamentally casinos dressed in elaborate costumes. The next generation of developers would take the idea much further, transforming entire properties into attractions.

On November 22, 1989, Steve Wynn opened The Mirage, a $630 million tropical fantasy that fundamentally changed expectations for a Las Vegas resort. There was a lush indoor atrium, an enormous aquarium behind the registration desk, lavish accommodations, major entertainment, and a spectacular artificial volcano erupting along Las Vegas Boulevard.

The volcano was free, which might sound like a strange business decision for a city built around separating visitors from their money. But the attraction drew crowds to the property, creating a destination before anyone had placed a bet, ordered a drink, or booked a room. The Mirage wasn't the first themed resort in Las Vegas, nor was it the first large casino hotel. What it demonstrated was how a carefully staged environment could become a major attraction in its own right, with dining, shopping, entertainment, and hospitality all contributing to the experience.

The 1990s brought an explosion of themed resorts. Excalibur opened in 1990 with medieval castles and battles with mechanical dragons. Luxor followed in 1993 with a pyramid and sphinx. New York-New York arrived in 1997 with a condensed Manhattan skyline and an actual roller coaster. By 1999, The Venetian was inviting visitors to ride gondolas through a canal inside the hotel itself, while Paris Las Vegas offered an Eiffel Tower and a little slice of France. It was EPCOT's World Showcase after several cocktails and a very generous construction budget.

For established resorts such as Caesars Palace, the new competition made reinvention increasingly important. Sarno's original Roman fantasy had helped define an earlier era of Las Vegas, but the Strip was rapidly becoming a place where spectacle, entertainment, and shopping mattered as much as the casino floor.

If you've ever visited EPCOT's Mexico pavilion, you probably remember the moment. You enter an enormous pyramid in the Florida sunshine, walk farther inside, and somehow emerge into nighttime. A marketplace glows beneath a simulated evening sky, while a restaurant overlooks a lagoon and an illuminated pyramid in the distance. It's all indoors, yet the experience feels like stepping into an outdoor Mexican village.

Now walk through The Forum Shops at Caesars Palace. Roman statues stand beneath an impossibly blue Mediterranean sky, surrounded by ornate fountains and classical architecture. The lighting changes throughout the day, animated statues perform, and shoppers wander through an environment designed to evoke the streets of ancient Rome. The resemblance to Disney's approach to immersive environments is striking, but the connection goes beyond appearances.

Eddie Martinez, who worked as a production designer on EPCOT's Mexico pavilion, later became involved in The Forum Shops at Caesars Palace. Gary Goddard, a themed-entertainment designer who helped develop The Forum Shops concept, identified Martinez as an original art director on the project. There was, in other words, a genuine crossover of creative talent between Disney's themed environments and the development of modern Las Vegas.

That doesn't establish that The Forum Shops directly copied the Mexico pavilion, but it does reveal how designers carried their experience creating theatrical environments into new kinds of commercial spaces. Both projects understood the appeal of transforming an ordinary shopping or dining experience into an opportunity for exploration.

The Forum Shops opened in 1992, although Caesars had announced plans for the development in 1987, before The Mirage opened. Its conception therefore predates Wynn's volcano, even if the competitive environment had changed dramatically by the time the shops welcomed their first visitors.

The concept proved remarkably adaptable. At The Venetian's Grand Canal Shoppes, gondoliers navigate indoor waterways beneath a painted sky. At Miracle Mile Shops, another elaborate indoor streetscape features a simulated rainstorm. Rather than simply providing stores and restaurants, these destinations turn shopping into an attraction, offering visitors the feeling of wandering through another place while remaining comfortably sheltered from the desert heat.

By the end of the 1990s, the Strip had become a collection of recognizable destinations, each compressed into a version that could be experienced in an afternoon. The Venetian offered the romance of Venice, Paris Las Vegas delivered the Eiffel Tower, and New York-New York assembled an improbable Manhattan skyline along Las Vegas Boulevard. Luxor went even further, borrowing the imagery of ancient Egypt to create one of the city's most recognizable buildings.

Like EPCOT's World Showcase, these resorts use architecture and cultural references to create accessible, idealized versions of distant places. They're not meant to replace international travel, nor do they offer especially nuanced interpretations of the cultures they represent. Entire histories are often reduced to familiar landmarks and decorative motifs. But their appeal lies in the experience of moving between distinctive environments, each offering its own attractions, restaurants, and atmosphere.

And unlike EPCOT, where the individual pavilions belong to a single carefully managed destination, Las Vegas's imaginary worlds are competing businesses. Each resort has to persuade visitors to step inside, stay awhile, and spend money. The architecture is part of that invitation, but the experiences inside ultimately determine whether guests return.

That competition helped transform the Strip from a collection of casinos into an entertainment destination where gambling was only one of many reasons to visit.

Ask a Disney adult about drinking around the world, and you'll probably hear about EPCOT's unofficial tradition of sampling beverages from different World Showcase countries. Las Vegas looked at that concept and essentially said, hold my yard-long margarita.

The Strip's themed environments provide the setting for an extraordinary variety of international restaurants, bars, and culinary experiences. You can enjoy Italian cooking at The Venetian, Mediterranean flavors at Caesars Palace, and Korean-Mexican food at Park MGM, all while moving between wildly different interpretations of place. The architecture might provide the initial attraction, but food and drink have become essential parts of the experience.

That evolution has its own history. In 1992, the same year The Forum Shops opened, Wolfgang Puck brought Spago to Caesars Palace, helping establish a new model for destination dining on the Strip. Over the following decades, acclaimed chefs and restaurateurs increasingly became attractions in their own right, while Las Vegas developed a culinary identity that extended far beyond its old reputation for inexpensive buffets and casino steakhouses.

Today, visitors plan entire trips around restaurants, tasting menus, cocktail bars, and culinary experiences. The city's dining scene has become both an attraction and a way of exploring different cultures, even when the surrounding architecture offers a decidedly theatrical interpretation of them.

The result is a destination where a gondola ride might get you through the doors, but a memorable meal can be what brings you back.

The Las Vegas Strip has changed enormously since the themed-resort boom of the 1990s. Some properties have moved away from overt fantasy toward contemporary luxury, while others have embraced new forms of spectacle through immersive technology, entertainment, and elaborate dining experiences. The architecture may be evolving, but the underlying business remains remarkably familiar: create something extraordinary enough that people will travel to experience it.

The Mirage closed in 2024, taking its famous volcano with it. For a generation of visitors, those eruptions were as much a part of Las Vegas as the neon lights and casino floors. Yet the influence of Wynn's tropical fantasy remains visible throughout the Strip, from the emphasis on attractions and entertainment to the expectation that a resort should offer far more than a place to gamble.

Jay Sarno understood the appeal of playing make-believe. Steve Wynn demonstrated how spectacle could transform the modern resort, and designers with Disney experience helped bring new levels of theatrical immersion to Las Vegas's shopping and entertainment spaces. Together, these developments helped create a destination that is equal parts architecture, performance, hospitality, and unapologetic fantasy.

So yes, Las Vegas really is a little like EPCOT for adults. The drinks are stronger, the hotels are bigger, and instead of a cheerful mouse reminding you to have a magical day, there's a casino hoping you'll stay for one more round.

From the canals of The Venetian to the Roman-inspired Forum Shops at Caesars Palace, discover the stories, spectacular settings, and global flavors that make Las Vegas unlike anywhere else. Join Tasteblazers for Culinary Crossroads, a three-hour guided food and culture tour featuring nine globally inspired tastings along the Strip.