Look Past the Scale

When I visit a new LBE venue in the States, floor area and attendance are not the first things I check. I look first for the design principles it runs on.

Atlas9 is an immersive entertainment venue that opened in Kansas City in September 2025. At 46,000 square meters, yes, it is enormous. But scale is just context. What matters is the thinking inside it.

Three principles caught my attention here: casting visitors in a role, the chassis concept, and operating the venue as a seasonal drama. Let me take them in order.

Three Layers — Your Role Is Assigned Before You Enter

The Atlas9 experience starts in the parking lot. Literally.

The first layer is the parking area, built as a containment zone — the break from the outside world happens here. The second layer recreates a 1990s movie theater, where visitors slip into the role of moviegoers. The third layer is the main event: the world of a fictional film itself.

What matters is that visitors are handed a role before they ever step inside. “You are an audience member at a movie theater” — that premise frames the entire experience. It is what gives everything that follows its meaning.

Immersion without a role is just sightseeing. People only truly immerse when they know who they are supposed to be in the space.

The Chassis — A Swappable Foundation

At the core of Atlas9 sits a 240-seat theater. CCO Ethan Fletcher calls it the “chassis.”

A chassis is the frame of a car — the skeleton that carries the engine, the driveshaft, the wheels. Bodies can be swapped; the frame stays. Atlas9 designed its theater the same way, as a foundation for content. Themes can be replaced. The structure of the experience never changes.

This goes straight to a venue's survival. One of the leading causes of death in LBE is content gone stale: give people the same experience twice and they stop coming. With a chassis, you can refresh the theme while the foundation keeps working. The hardware investment is never wasted, and the content never stops evolving.

Whenever NYX works on a venue, I ask one question without fail: “Can this space run a different theme five years from now?” If the answer is no, we redesign.

Running the Venue as a Seasonal Drama

Ethan Fletcher, Atlas9's CCO, puts it this way:

We want plot twists, story arcs,
character growth, sequels.
A venue people come back to because they want to know what happens next.

This upends the standard logic of LBE. Conventional theme parks deliver the same experience on every visit — attractions are fixed, quality is consistent. But “your second visit equals your first” is precisely what blocks repeat attendance.

Atlas9 runs on the logic of a drama series. The story advances each season. Returning guests know the previous chapters; first-timers experience the beginning. Both share the same space at different depths.

It is the difference between a film and a television series. A film ends; a series continues. Atlas9 is trying to turn LBE into a series.

What NYX Takes From This

Not the scale, not the budget — the essence of Atlas9 is that it redesigned how the audience spends its time.

A role turns visitors into participants. The chassis turns the venue into a living thing that keeps growing. The seasonal format turns the audience into readers of an ongoing story. None of this is mere entertainment.

Every experience NYX designs from here on carries three questions: Have we told the audience who they are? Will this foundation still work in five years? Do people leave wanting the next chapter?

— Shoichiro Tsuno · CCO, NYX