In recent years, there have been a few guaranteed sights at Austin’s genre-friendly SXSW film festival: tacos, local beers, luxurious beards, and, in some form or another, increasingly elaborate and interactive promotion for HBO’s fantasy juggernaut Game of Thrones. Iron Throne pedicabs, a holographic Hall of Faces, or, one year, an alarmingly realistic V.R. trip up the Wall all signaled the arrival of a Westerosi winter with the next season’s premiere always just right around the corner from SXSW’s March dates.

This year Thrones fans will have to wait until 2019, which means that instead of Westeros, HBO publicity put all its chips in on wild, wild Westworld. An elaborately constructed interactive experience set in the dusty streets of Austin’s real-life ghost town transported fans of murderous robots and A.I. intrigue into their favorite show in a way no high-tech V.R. experience ever could. According to HBO’s marketing, the park designed and executed by Giant Spoon is brimming with “60 actors, six stunt people, and five bands, scouted primarily from the local Austin area, in addition to six local horses.” As Game of Thrones prepares to bow out, HBO is wise to pour as many of these bells and whistles as it can into trying to turn Westworld—which debuts its second season on April 22—into a dragon-sized hit.

Courtesy of Matt Lief Anderson/HBO

Just 20 minutes outside of downtown Austin (or, more accurately, an hour thanks to rush-hour and festival traffic), there sits a sprawling, two-acre ramshackle attraction called the J. Lorraine Ghost Town Manor where tourists and locals alike, eager for some old-timey flavor, can visit ramshackle facades of old. In a perfect marriage of marketing and location, HBO spent the last four months transforming the town into the familiar sights of its popular sci-fi Western town of Sweetwater, complete with, yes, the Mariposa Saloon. And though HBO had previously put on “immersive” Westworld experiences at the San Diego and New York Comic Cons, this was the first time the network had access to a location that so perfectly complemented its elaborately constructed robot fantasy.