It's not typical that you get news breaking to you via an '80s video game on your phone. But that's Meow Wolf for you. In a little pixelated game that looks like the old arcade game Double Dragon, gangs and police officers come after you. But if you survive, you'll discover the actual message: Meow Wolf, a bizarre immersive multimedia collective that makes real-world art playgrounds, is expanding to New York City. It's a weird way to deliver the message, but I'm thrilled -- because I live in New Jersey and I've been hoping for Meow Wolf to come east for years. But we'll all have to wait – possibly until 2028, although Meow Wolf hasn't specified any specific opening date.
Beyond how hallucinogenic and captivating I found Meow Wolf's previous locations to be, it looks like New York's South Street Seaport site will push the territories of things I'm deeply into: video games, mixed reality and layers of tech that will blend the virtual and the physical in ways that AR-aspirational tech companies have been dreaming of, but still haven't quite pulled off.
Meow Wolf, in case you've never been to one, is a series of massive art installations mixed with interactive games and secrets. Imagine if Sleep No More and an escape room had a supernova and turned into an interdimensional rave. Every Meow Wolf location has a different theme, and the destinations have all been located in the west so far: Las Vegas, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and a Los Angeles one coming in a year or two. New York is the first eastern Meow Wolf, and it will be studded with tech.
"The major markets like LA and New York, they've always been on our radar; they've always been a dream of ours," Meow Wolf founder and Chief Vision Officer Vince Kadlubek told me in a phone call. The New York location is going to focus on video gaming and arcades, it seems (among other things), involving the storyline of "Plotzo," an interdimensional rat king that sprouts up in other Meow Wolf locations, and is involved in strange arcade spaces. When I visited Meow Wolf's Grapevine, Texas location in 2023, one weird little arcade room -- full of playable art games -- was one of my favorite places to linger in. I can't imagine what a fuller-scale explosion of that might be across a space that could be dozens of rooms and multiple stories tall. Meow Wolf locations aren't really ever any specific thing -- local artists get recruited at each location to blend different ideas together, so expect lots of the unexpected -- but if gaming's a big part of this one, I'm very into it.
Plotzo was created as a mascot for Meow Wolf's early arcade experiments, as explained to me by Benji Geary, Meow Wolf co-founder and senior art director. But the New York space will be Plotzo's headquarters, as "the place where, like, the homeboy actually lives or resides," he says, calling Plotzo's appearances "this crazy plague that's like spreading throughout the multiverse in all these iterations."
It'll also be a big experience -- according to Kadlubek, the relative square footage will be on the level of the Las Vegas Omega Mart and Denver Convergence Station experiences, which feel massive and mazelike. Convergence Station in Denver is 90,000 square feet: These are places full of mysteries to dig up and little secrets that you'll likely miss the first (or fifth) time.
Meow Wolf's locations already feel like they're melting reality (seen here, a room in Convergence Station, Denver). But the walls between real and virtual might bleed further.
Scott Stein/CNETMixed reality playground?
Meow Wolf looks to be using the New York location to further push what Kadlubek calls a true "mixed reality" vision, something the company has been playing with in various forms for a while. Meow Wolf made its own VR minigolf course experience and has had augmented reality phone apps. But a different level of virtual-to-real interconnect looks like it's on tap for when the New York location finally opens, possibly late 2027 or early 2028.
"The New York Project is going to be pushing the boundaries of technology and cross-reality connectivity between the exhibition itself and experiences beyond the walls of the exhibition – there's a connectivity that makes it by far the most ambitious project that we've that we've attempted," says Kadlubek. "The opportunities for creating a real mixed reality ecosystem – we're just further along now when it comes to the possibilities of that, we've always dreamed of it."
It's hard to tell what exactly that means, but according to Kadlubek, it could involve holographic display technology, beacon-connected meshing of phones and particular spots in the exhibit, AR on phones or even VR.
Kadlubek refers to Magic Leap's headquarters in 2018, a space I visited too, as an early sign of how promises of a blend of real and virtual could have been. Magic Leap's vision for AR ended up being flawed, but the Willy Wonka-like blend of ideas and interaction sounds like an area that inspires the team even now.
The team admits it's stuff that's still a bit of a leap to pull off. "I can tell you right now that the things that we are aspiring to do here in New York are not even possible to be done today," says Jose Tolosa, Meow Wolf's CEO, who's also a New York resident.
Trippy art arcade games live in Meow Wolf locations already; this one's at The Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas.
Meow WolfVideo games, reality bleed and phones in the mix
Development for the New York project is just kicking off, and the nature of how Meow Wolf develops its locations is emergent, using lots of local artists who help bend the spaces into things the in-house team improvises around. In that sense, it sounds like it's still a mystery, even to Meow Wolf.
Meow Wolf's phone app, which already has some weird stuff buried inside it, will be a big part of it. "There's a lot of plans in terms of how the app will be at the center," says Tolosa. "It's going to be the connective tissue." Meow Wolf's already been exploring location-based quest prototypes using the app, and those sound like deeper parts of whatever's coming. Some of Meow Wolf's places already use tappable cards to log into screens hidden around the spaces.
Meow Wolf could also dabble in publishing its own video games, something hinted at by the playable tease of the New York announcement, and acknowledged by CEO Tolosa and founders Kadlubek and Geary. Meow Wolf already partnered with VR minigolf game developers Mighty Coconut, and the indie gaming scene already seems like a perfect match for explorations (my recent gaming addiction, UFO 50, already feels like something that crawled out of Meow Wolf, and so does the Panic Playdate).
However, video games that live in and even outside of the physical space could push the whole thing to territories reminiscent of ARGs (alternate reality games), a genre of real world interactive game that sprawls across places and media and often feels like it's an alternate plane of reality – a genre Meow Wolf is already playing in to some degree.
"The dominant medium of storytelling right now is video games. Thinking about how that extends into IRL, you know, what does video gaming look like if you move it off the couch and off the smartphone, and connect it back to that, too," Kadlubek says of the goal for the whole experience.
It's already a trend in theme parks: Super Nintendo World, which is opening an extended version in Orlando's new Epic Universe theme park later this spring, explores some of these ideas already with wearable bands and physical interaction with the environment. You can hit blocks and do stuff. Disney's Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge has some phone-connected games, too. Disney hoped to succeed in this living video game idea for the now-closed Star Wars-themed hotel experience known as Galactic Starcruiser.
Meow Wolf's proposition could get a lot weirder and more intriguingly unleashed. Kadlubek says of Disney and Universal's efforts "we see them as sort of scratching the surface. And when you have a dedicated indoor space, you have far more possibilities than when you're in an outdoor theme park land. We're really honing in on the capabilities that are now possible when you have a fixed indoor space in bringing this mixed reality experience forward." Geary talks to me about his obsessions with the graphic styles of the Sega Dreamcast, or Katamari Damacy when it came out. There are already a lot of games around other Meow Wolf locations, and they're pretty slipstream and strange.
I was impressed that Meow Wolf's previous locations managed to mix chaotic sensory overload, interactive quests, photo ops and chill zones in a way that seemed to allow myself and everyone else to go at everything at their own level and not feel interrupted by others. But as far as Meow Wolf coming up with game ideas or mixed reality concepts that could dream of a world that AR glasses can't quite reach yet? That's happened in art experiences before, and I can't wait to see what becomes of it in New York.
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