Once upon a time, circa 1997, I played a video game called Theme Park for the original PlayStation. The goal of the game was to build a profitable amusement park, but being young and not understanding business at all, I spent most of my time designing the most insane roller coasters I could come up with.
Eventually, as I neglected to clean up, the park would become covered with garbage, patrons would throw up after riding anything I constructed. If maintenance of a ride were neglected, it would eventually explode. For a teenager, it was fun to play around with and imagine what could be if I had unlimited funds in a fantasy world.
As it turns out, building ambitious theme parks is a colossal challenge in real life, and the story of the American Heartland Theme Park proposed for Vinita has gotten as fantastical as anything Electronic Arts could come up with.
If you haven’t read the latest in the lawsuit brought by theme park financier Gene Bicknell, you will want to. In July 2025, Bicknell sued former Mansion Entertainment CEO Larry Wilhite and failed-theme-park-enthusiast Rick Silanskas in federal court, alleging a “pattern of racketeering activity” that conned him out of $60 million through a “predatory conspiracy of psychological manipulation.”
“Silanskas and Wilhite tricked Gene by impersonating God and religious figures purportedly communicating ‘God’s’ directives in hundreds of electronic messages targeted at Gene. Silanskas and Wilhite made Gene believe that God himself was commanding Gene to infuse ever more cash into the project and to trust them completely with its management,” Bicknell’s attorneys allege. “And after years of conning Gene out of more than $60 million and spending all of that money, including on themselves and their family members, defendants constructed nothing more than a fence and a gravel road.”
Now, Silanskas has been accused of submitting legal briefs containing fake case citations that carry the “hallmark” signs of AI hallucinations.
When Bicknell and Wilhite announced the project back in July 2023, it initially fell to my cartoon beat here on NonDoc. In a comic imagining what the patriotic-theme rides might look like, I noted that, “It’s safe to say I’m a bit skeptical about all of this.” I guess it turns out that playing PlayStation in middle school was good for something.
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