Las Vegas immersive entertainment hub AREA15 is turning five in a big way, celebrating the arrival of its second phase of development on September 17. Zone 2’s main attraction, Universal Horror Unleashed, opened its doors over the summer to attract seasonal tourists, but the rest of the offerings are following suit as the year draws out.
After io9’s invited visit to Universal Horror Unleashed, io9 chatted with Mark Stutzman, AREA15’s chief technology officer, about the new way to experience Vegas through futuristic visions of participatory entertainment. And it all really started with rave culture.
“The original idea was, ‘Let’s use it for festival grounds.’” Stutzman shared, “We decided it was too hot, and we put up a warehouse, and we said, ‘Let’s do festivals in the warehouse.’ And then we said, ‘Well, shoot, why don’t we kind of start creating this immersive destination?’ And that’s where it all started, and Zone One has just been insanely successful for us.”
Meow Wolf, the raconteur of interactive art portals that have sprung up across the country, was only the beginning as Zone One’s first anchor.
“Everyone who’s coming to AREA15 is coming [for] immersive experiences, right? Like, that’s their whole goal. And so obviously on the Zone One side, Meow Wolf is our anchor tenant and they’ve done a great job of continuing to drive traffic,” he said.
Zone One features a buffet of AR and VR games and visual walkthroughs among its neon-powered music, dining, and shopping selections. Stutzman continued, “We have 80 acres here to develop, and Universal is our anchor tenant in Zone Two out of a five-phase project. The entire district will be immersive experiences—it’ll be sports and entertainment; it’ll be great restaurants and all that good stuff. The thing that we’ve been leading into most recently is these kinds of IP-based immersive experiences because you get kind of the brand recognition—the emotional connection—and then we bring not only the experience of building immersive experiences that are engaging.”
Area15 is carving its own tech-forward frontier that’s more attractive to Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z than big E-ticket-esque major IP hubs. Universal Horror Unleashed, like Meow Wolf, leans into AREA15’s fun parallel dimension to the Strip’s casino nostalgia. Meow Wolf’s premise is that it’s a portal to other realms beyond its sci-fi-tinged grocery storefront; you have to look beyond for ways to break through and discover its genre-mashing labyrinths of cosmic and fantasy adventure.
Similarly, Universal’s desert warehouse of horrors acts like a storage facility of the studio’s lore that, because it was placed on AREA15’s dimensional rift-inspired land, brings the monsters to life in their wheelhouse of terrors. Stutzman elaborated, “We built a lot of these experiences and we leaned heavily into AR and VR and all this other cool tech but it’s really tech that should be the enabler. What should be most forward are the performances and the experience and the story and the emotional connectivity to the content, which is why we’re leaning more into the IP now. It just really works well and Universal is a testament to that. I mean, [it owns] some of the strongest IP in horror.”
The alternate universe thread is more for those who seek it out with Easter eggs in zone one that speak to it but the retailers within aren’t necessarily going to crossover with each other; it’s just a delightful nugget of lore that brings a sort of otherworldly, futuristic, multi-dimensional edge to the space.
“We’ll have similar in Three and Four and Five, but we’ll have other cool stuff that we launched, like The John Wick Experience, which is a partnership with Lionsgate, another incredibly strong IP owner. John Wick has been insanely successful, kind of beyond our models,” he said of the Continental Las Vegas. You can’t stay there because, well, things get hairy as soon as you try to check in—since you arrive at the same time as John during one of his tiffs against the high table.
“We love kind of doing over the top and Zone Two is going to be crazy with all the different experiences,” Stutzman said of the ongoing development. It will include an interdimensional creature carousel, a drop ride, and a hollowed-out plane with its own fake universe airline concept. But a big thing for the CTO is that at the heart of the tech there are still artists at work.
“Art has obviously always been a big part of who we are so we really wanted to tie into it and we’ll we’ll actually have art tours. And we don’t want to lean into it in a cheesy way. We want to lean into it in a serious way because it’s quite an impressive collection.”
He also noted that AREA15 seeks to cultivate Las Vegas’ art scene through community art events in addition to festival installations surrounding the outdoor plane areas. “We’ll have lots of musicians under there just entertaining and then we’re also going to throw raves but it’s really going to be an amazing space.”
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