Northstar Show Systems is a small Orlando-based hardware and software company. We make the technology that runs themed-entertainment venues — and we make it the way we'd want it if we were the ones running the show every Friday night.
Northstar started as an internal toolset at a haunted attraction in Orlando. Every season the show ran on a stack of repurposed lighting consoles, ad-hoc media servers, and one specific iPad that couldn't be replaced because nobody could remember which version of the app actually worked.
After one too many opening nights spent troubleshooting the show instead of running it, we started over. The goal: a stack where the first night a venue uses it is the same as the hundredth night. Where the operator on shift one — hired Friday, running the show Saturday — can do their job from five buttons and six lights.
A few seasons later, other venues started asking if they could buy what we'd built. Northstar Show Systems was incorporated to answer "yes" to those questions, and to keep building the platform with the same operational rigor we'd needed for ourselves.
We are still in Orlando. We still install our own gear at venues most weekends in season. Every product we make ships only after we've used it in production ourselves.
These aren't aspirational. They're the constraints we apply to every design decision, even when they make our lives harder.
The show network never depends on the Internet. We ship hardware that runs the same in a haunted maze with no cell coverage as it does in a museum with fiber.
A show authored against Polaris today will run against Polaris in 2031. New endpoints, never breaking changes. The cost is a slower roadmap. The benefit is venues that don't have to be re-engineered every two years.
We assume the person at the Bridge was hired yesterday. The controls are physical. The lights are colored. The fail-states are obvious. We don't ship anything an operator could break by pushing a wrong button.
Everything a venue does lives in a single nodes.json. Version it. Diff it. Restore it after a mistake. Hand it to the next designer in three years.
Field time is the most expensive time in our business. Every kit ships from Orlando configured, soak-tested, and ready to boot. We pay the cost in the office, not on the venue floor.
If it isn't documented, it doesn't exist. Every feature ships with a docs page, a training module, and an example in the sample nodes.json. The docs site is on the same release cadence as the firmware.
The Northstar team is intentionally small. Most of us came out of operating haunted attractions, working escape rooms, or running cues at theme parks. Several of us have built and rebuilt the same kinds of systems Northstar replaces.
We hire the way we ship: slowly, carefully, after a real-world working trial. Everyone on the engineering team also rotates through install shifts at customer venues — there is no "we don't go to the floor" tier of engineer at Northstar.
The themed-entertainment capital of the world is the place to build for themed entertainment. We can install a venue in the morning and be home for dinner — and we are within a day's drive of more haunts and escape rooms than anywhere else on the continent.
Orlando, Florida USA
Need to reach us? Head to Support — we route everything through one queue so nothing falls through.
We host walkthroughs at our Orlando workshop for venue owners and integrators. Bring questions, leave with a feeling for whether the platform fits your venue.