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LBX Collective
The LBX Show #44 - Mall Entertainment, Pinstripes BK, Kiddleton growth, and more!
Sponsored by Intercard!
On this week's LBX Show, BW starts with News You Should Know and shares his experience at the International Adventure and Trampoline Park Association Annual Convention and IntelliPlay's reception of the Innovation Excellence Award. Then Kevin Williams dives into the latest openings and closings in the industry.
• FastTrax opens Florida's largest indoor go-kart facility with 2,000 feet of track across three different racing experiences
• Nine Below in Milwaukee launches their third annual haunted mini golf experience with themed decor, characters, and Halloween-inspired food and beverage
• Shopping malls are increasingly becoming entertainment hubs with concepts like Fun Hub offering staffless arcade experiences
• DreamPark, Sandbox VR, and Emoji Planet continue expanding into mall locations across North America
• Kiddleton partners with Walmart to install unattended prize machines in seven locations
• Pinstripes files for bankruptcy while maintaining operations at their 18 locations
• Several arcade and entertainment venues announce closures, including High Score Arcade and Battle Racing
Halloween represents a perfect opportunity for LBEs to implement seasonal theming and drive repeat visitation before the October rush.
All right, well, welcome everybody to the LBX show for September 14th 2025. We are just a couple of weeks away a couple, I mean, it's like eight weeks away from IAAPA, but I'm already getting excited getting ready for Big Expo. But anyway, we have a compact show lined up for you today. It's pretty, pretty compact. I think that's the best word for it. So today we'll start off with the news you should know, got a couple of things we want to talk about there, and then we'll roll right into an opening shot with Kevin Williams and we're going to review all the latest openings and closings and trends from the last week, and you'll notice there might be a little bit of a pattern of, like shopping mall locations announcing their openings and that's it. Then we'll wrap up.
Speaker 1:So, uh, that being said, let's dive into some news you should know all right.
Speaker 2:Well, I was, uh, you know, had a fun time at the international adventure and trampoline park association, and their little tagline is more than just trampolines. Yes, they have evolved. They started with just trampolines. Yes, they have evolved. They started with just trampoline parks originally and then have evolved into adventure parks as these trampoline parks began to diversify their attraction mix and move beyond just trampolines to adding ropes, courses and zip lines and ninja courses and parkour and active play and everything else that you could imagine in there now mixed in. Well, not everything you can imagine. I can imagine quite a bit of things, but you know what I mean. Anyway, so we had the conferences last week. I was down in Maricopa, arizona, so not too far from where I live, and we were at the auction casino and resort and it was a lot of fun. So we had some cool things. So the guys from Attraction Pros, josh and Matt, they came and they did a podcast live. So I was happy to be on a panel talking about tech trends in the trampoline park and adventure park industry, and so Josh and Matt had a bunch of different questions for us and the panel went on for about an hour and it's going to be great, so it will actually go live on the Attraction Pros website. They'll push it out as an official podcast of theirs In a few weeks they'll let us know, but it should be the last week of September, maybe first week of October. But it was a great discussion across all different trends in tech happening in the trampoline park and just in general the location-based entertainment industry and where some of those things are going based entertainment industry and where some of those things are going. And then I was also excited because IntelliPlay, a company that I am this EO for, we got an award. So there's another picture of me talking with Matt. I had to get Matt in there, right, because this one just had Josh, so I had to get Matt in a picture, but we won an award. So the award was the Innovation Excellence Award. It's given to one company every year, or not necessarily every year, but this year it's on companies that are leading the way in innovation in technology or just in general in the trampoline park industry, and IntelliPlay has a really cool product Not going to use this platform as a way to pitch that, but I was very excited to have won this award and looking forward to seeing if we get any more awards, especially the Brass Ring Awards. So we'll see how that thing goes. But anyway, great time. Got to see a lot of great friends in the industry and this is the first IATP I'd visited since 2019. And it is a different conference than it used to be and they all the organizers, the board members did such a phenomenal job putting on a great conference and it was a great trade show and I had a good time that week. So, anyway, that is it for the IATP annual conference.
Speaker 2:And the next thing I want to talk about I'm actually excited. We've talked about this on both SoundOff as well as Open and Shut on the LBX show a few times before, but that's not that. But it's a place called fast tracks and they're opening a go a new indoor, massively large indoor go-karting track in Fort Mars, florida, but that's just opened September 5th. So it is just opened and I'm actually going to get a chance to go out there and check it out because I'm going to be down there next week for the grand opening slash. Soft opening for do the beach. See what I did there soft and soft play. Soft opening for do the beach. And so it is a massive indoor inflatable uh layout all designed and themed around you know, the beach boardwalk and going into the beach, and so very, very excited about going and checking these guys out. Uh, this is done by a, you know the, the group behind galaxy multi rides, and I'm very excited to see and checking these guys out. This is done by a, you know the, the group behind galaxy multi rides, and I'm very excited to see what it is. And while I'm there, I'm going to be doing a recording for behind our doors. So not only will we obviously see a few pictures that I'll present when we come back on the next show, but but I'll also do a formal behind our doors podcast and session with Mike wind cup. Behind our doors podcast and session with Mike Wincup, one of the founders of do the beach, and so you know very excited to go check that out.
Speaker 2:But you know, naturally while I'm down there, I've got to see some other attractions and so um want to go and see fast tracks. So they are a new FEC that opened and they, you know, cost about 20 million or so to develop and it has duck pin bowling as an arcade, with a 50 game arcade, and then the go-kart track is 2,000 feet in length and they actually have three different tracks. They have a 200 foot mini track for ages four to eight and then they've got two 1,000 foot tracks. The blue track is for older kids but also less experienced casual go-kart racers, and then they have their red track, which is for adults and more experienced racers high speeds, higher speeds, different turns, different drops, that kind of thing but when you put together the 2,000-foot tracks it actually becomes the largest indoor go track go-kart track in the state of Florida. So I'm excited to go try it out, go race. I'll do both the blue track and the red track. When I'm there and you know what, they'll probably come back with some photos and we'll be able to do a little bit of a dig in there about those guys.
Speaker 2:I'm also really excited to try out the neapolitan pizza. So they have a lounge called nemo's trackside lounge and it has just a range of different f&b options, but like chicken wings, pasta, ribs, cheesecake and their neapolitan style pizzas. Now, okay, what's great about that? Well, they're cooked in this Mara Forney brand commercial brick oven. I've had pizza from these ovens before. What's really unique is they can get temperatures up to a thousand degrees on the inside on this rotating pizza stone, so the crust just comes out nice and crisp and it's excellent and it is. You know, they're going to cook them around 800 degrees but they can crank out 120 pizzas an hour, which I just thought was amazing. But that's partly because the heat of these ovens can cook this pizza so fast. It only cooks about. It takes about 90 seconds to two minutes to cook a pie and so, yeah, I've got to try one of those.
Speaker 2:So definitely report on my time at Fast Tracks, but felt like, if I'm going to go down there for Do the beach opening, is there a new customer from teleplay? I've got to get down and see fast tracks because I was excited about going the longest go-kart track in florida. All right, so next we've got a halloween experience. So this is a we I've talked about nine below before. They are a milwaukee mini golf installation and they're based there below beans and barley, which is a like a bar restaurant thing in in Milwaukee, and it's this in the basement. They've got this little mini goal mini golf course and they do different theming and they change theming around, but this will now be the third year that they are hosting their haunted mini golf. So it's going to go from October 3rd to November 1st.
Speaker 2:They've redone a number of things, but you know, basically it's like they say, it's like one part cocktail and snack lounge, one part playful golf outing, and you know, but it's got the whole Halloween vibe. So they can, you know, the lights are dimmed down, they're surrounded by, like this eerie ambience. I'll give you some photos here. So, like, they've got different things. There's, you know, surprises. There's golf challenges that are changed up specifically to be Halloween focused, and they actually will have like characters and stuff milling around. So you don't know when somebody is like going to pop out of a corner or come up and say something to you, and so you know, I think that's pretty cool. You know, it's just again like kind of a party vibe down there in the basement, but all themed around Halloween. They then change up their F&B as well. So, like you can see these two guests here, they're drinking these blood bags and these are things that you can get, just you know, you can order them online and from different F&B vendors, but they're the blood bags where, like you know, you're drinking this cocktail out of this bag that looks like it's a bag that's dripping, you know, blood into your, into your veins. So, anyway, they've done a great job. They do this as another third year and you know this is just a.
Speaker 2:This is where you know we talk about the news you should know, and the reason we're talking about this here is that this if you haven't started your Halloween plans, like now is the time you still can do it.
Speaker 2:Right, like their Halloween plans, you know, they launched theirs, they're launching theirs October 3, right, so it's not October yet, it is the end of September, but you're already beginning to see especially a lot of the theme parks beginning to roll out their decor and their fall festival things and their different haunts and everything else, and so this is a perfect opportunity to implement some sort of haunt experience, or just even themed decor experience, to get people to come back in and have a unique experience that is different than the normal one.
Speaker 2:Right, like this, everything is about driving that repeat visitation as much as you possibly can get it from 1.4, 1.8 visits per year to 2.5 or 3.2 or four visits per year, because you've done different theming along the way. It's still time, you can still run to the store, you can still go to HomeGoods. You still go to Spirit, or well, you can't go to Party City anymore, but you can go to all these different places and get some decor, get things and figure out what you can do to change things up. You've got a couple of weeks before October comes around, so now it isn't too late. But if you're going to do it, you've got to start your planning now and get rolling. So that, my friends, is news you should know.
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Speaker 3:All right, well, coming up now we've got Open and Shut with Kevin Williams. Hey, a big hello to everyone and welcome to this latest open and shut. Nice to have you back, brendan. Yeah, it's good to be back in my regular hovel, okay all right.
Speaker 2:Well, that was the wrong open and shut, so that was the one from last week. So let's get the right open and shut going on here and, um, yeah, in the meantime we're going to just take a quick pause until we come back into the next open.
Speaker 3:Hey, a big hello to everyone to this latest open show. You're not in a hotel room, Brent.
Speaker 2:No, I'm not. I'm not in a hotel room, although you know what? Next week I'll probably be in a hotel room or I will be live at a brand new opening. So I'm excited. It's a whole new franchise, whole new concept coming out called Do the Beach. So we'll talk a little bit about it next week after I've had a chance to be out there Excellent.
Speaker 3:Well, we still got a large number of openings to deal with, so we'll jump straight in, as always. You know where to pause if you want to know more details. So the first one that I think we should touch upon is, for me, an interesting new concept, though I am slightly concerned by it. Our friends at Fun sorry, our friends within the shopping mall entertainment sector have developed something called Fun Hub. Let's get it the right way around. Fun Hub is fundamentally a staffless amusement space. What has been defined by the company behind this is a leisure entertainment rollout. The venue has about 14 to 15 amusement pieces in there. It's run by a payment app system which you download and then you can play the machines and then you can bounce out the door. But this is a concept that is looked at to be going into empty shopping mall and and retail center unit space.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is interesting. So it is fully unattended. There's no staff.
Speaker 3:Fully unattended.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow, okay interesting, and so I'm assuming I mean there's redemption. I'm trying to look in there. It looks like it's just merchandise and some video games. It doesn't look like there's much redemption in there. Prize machines yeah so it's just merchandise and some video games.
Speaker 3:It doesn't look like there's much redemption in there. Prize machines yeah, so there's. Yeah, so it's yeah. No, no ticket. Ticket redemption systems.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, okay, got it Interesting. Do we know? Is this going to be like just pop-ups? So maybe they have a period of time where this lease signed and so then they move this to another empty space and another empty space. Is it intended to be?
Speaker 3:moved around? Or is this somebody coming in taking these small spaces, but for long-term leases? Long-term lease for the first venue at least, pardon the pun. The issue is so far that the company involved in this has experience placing those kiddie ride clusters within shopping malls on the broad walk of these facilities, and so they've migrated now into a dedicated facility of their own. Uh, first site open. We're keeping a close eye on this to see what the reaction is and how much vandalism can take place between the cctv capturing them and a member of staff having to deal with them.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm, mm-hmm all right.
Speaker 3:Moving on and we have the next opening of Dream Park, again in a mall location. Here they're taking a certain amount of space, as it were, and operating their augmented reality entertainment experience. They're not bringing the karting experience over, I think, to this venue. It will just be the walking around adventure experience. It'll be fascinating to see how the New York audience takes to augmented reality entertainment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting too, just because when I'm looking you know you've got a picture there on the left and you look over to their website as well. Visit dreamparkcom slash Long Island and it is really truly just an empty space. It doesn't seem to be walled off either, so that means you could have just guests or, like you know, other visitors of the mall walking right through in the middle of everything else, and maybe that's part of the allure, but it does. I feel like you'd still want to have some sort of like delineation between your dream park and just an empty area in the mall.
Speaker 3:I think they're going to have to have some level of signage and themality for the transition between the virtual environment and the actual physical experience that you're offering. Again, I know this is a learning process for the operation, as they're trying to find the right mix. The lessons that they've learned at their previous Californian facility will hopefully be migrated across to this one.
Speaker 3:But we have a second facility now opening yeah moving on and our friends at sandbox uh have opened their latest german facility. Now it's important, obviously, that this is a franchise uh owned facility, um and uh. You know the royal and the Royal Casino operation has deployed their third German facility here. I'm fascinated to know how they have been doing business now that they're three facilities in. Everybody seems very tight-lipped at the moment, but we know that there's some announcements coming from Sandbox VR in the next couple of days that may give us a better idea of their feasibility.
Speaker 3:Then we move over to really South Carolina's had. You know we were touching upon the South Carolina area in a recent sound off and you know we're now at that point where we're seeing a number of entertainment facilities that were planned actually throwing open their doors. I hadn't actually come across Interactive Experience Unleashed until it was pointed to me, and you know it has a bit of everything. It has a lot of VR laser tag, it has escape rooms, it has adventure rooms or what I would call mission rooms. So it is an interactive experience, as it says on the tin, but again, it is a brand new offering. It seems, from the video I was watching, to have had quite a high level of build quality put into the operation. So we wish them a lot of luck and the next time we're in that area we're going to have to go in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd like to go actually check this place out. I mean, I do appreciate that they didn't just go all digital, that there is some physical theming as well in here. If you do go to their web, they have a decent website and you go check that out and you can see what some of the theming and experiences are while you're there. But you know, sometimes these places just go for the interactive, the interactivity via VR, via the actual attractions, but they actually put in some physical, some good physical theming as well.
Speaker 3:Moving on and our friends at Top, at top golf, no matter the situation back at home, they're still rolling out their franchise facility operation. And so ohio gets uh, um, the latest, I think. There's been a few uh in that neck of the woods, well the fifth I think, if my memory is serving me right in Ohio. Anyway, 100-chain facility, standardized format. No changes here. No addition of mini golf, no arcade, no swing suite operation, just your bare-bones shooting range. Interactive experience.
Speaker 2:I'll say your numbers are right on. So they have four current open locations. This is now their fifth.
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely Well. Our database is doing its work well, it's just now I need to plug my brain into it. It's a labor of love keeping this thing up to date, especially in the current conditions. Chuck E Cheese quite an interesting announcement. They opened what they called their first Australian facility in Perth and it is, you know, a little bit more than what we would know in the US Chuck E Cheese operation. It's a much larger space and it combines both an enlarged adventure zone as well as quite a large arcade hall, and from the video of the opening, the arcade hall is very different to what we would normally see with a Chuck E Cheese of the current generation.
Speaker 3:A close friend of ours corrected me when I was talking about this recently. This is not the first time that Chuckucky cheese has opened in australia. They actually opened back in 1981, right at the beginning of the story, with a facility in the gold coast area which only lasted 12 months and it was interesting. They had to rename it because the Australian slang word for throwing up is Chuck, and so Charlie's Pizza facility was opened and didn't seem to go down well with the locals. So we're hoping that this new interpretation does much better.
Speaker 2:Okay, great, does much better. Okay great.
Speaker 3:Moving on and the mall experience continues. Yes, that is one of the trends we're touching upon today. It is clear that empty mall units are now being repurposed. I was just in a discussion with some operators about the swings and roundabouts of opening in a shopping mall. I'm sure Adam could have added a lot to that discussion. But our friends at Unis, with their Emoji Planet concept, they've already opened a couple of facilities already. I know there's one in china or in that in that territory. We have one here in the uk, uh, and this will be, I think, the first canadian uh facility, uh, part of part of the five operations that are out there internationally. And interestingly, uh, our friends at player one amusement group actually worked with the installation and development and we'll be talking about them in a minute.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to say Player One Group or Genda, because hmm.
Speaker 3:Well, they haven't changed their branding yet, but I think it's fair to say Genda North America was involved in that process. And talking of Genda North America, we have the beginning of the kittleton rollout. So we've already had about four or five, six or seven uh kittletons uh, which are fundamentally very similar to what I was touching upon with fun hub. It's a a attendant-less leisure entertainment experience that goes into an available unit. They have partnered with Walmart and taken units at seven Walmarts dotted across the country to install with their unique automated crane and price center operation and, of course, installed by our friends at PlayerOne. And I've pulled two out of seven just to give an example of that expansion in the market.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's what's going to be. My question is how entrenched or what does the partnership relationship look like with Walmart and Kittleton Is this going to of the hundreds of Walmart facilities are going to be?
Speaker 3:converted. I don't have that information, yeah.
Speaker 2:This, I think, works. This type of unattended facility works a little bit differently than, obviously, in the mall because there are other staff members walking around. Like this is, I think, just an augmented experience to the overall Walmart experience. So I would expect that there'd be less vandalism, less issues in a situation like this. Also, this is what Kittleton does. I mean they they know how to go and do this type of installation and do it well and run it well and keep it stocked, and so would not be surprised that they have a much more successful time than you know, than the other one we were talking about uh, you know, fun hub is testing the water of a new concept.
Speaker 3:as you say, kittleton has proven their concept, uh, and will roll it out, and I would argue that there is a lot less what I would call interactive entertainment. It is much more of a leisure vending experience or a prize vending experience and from Walmart's position, they've had these type of systems installed. I think, if my memory is serving me right today, they had a relationship with Namco back in the day where they dropped arcade machines and kiddie ride machines into Walmart. So proven ground for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, circling back just real quickly to FunHub. We don't have to go all the way back to the slide. But just talking about FunHub, I think my one concern well, I have many concerns, but I think my big concern with FunHub is that they have VR rides there, so they've got the pull down, I mean the maintenance, the issues there are going to be a problem, I think, for them. I think I would have chosen a different attraction or game selection.
Speaker 3:The pictures that I was shown of the artists' rendering of what Fun Hub was and pictures I have of what the facility looks like now it's open are different, but we can touch upon that when we talk about this in SoundOff Perfect High Score High Score Arcade UK-based. It's not really a retro, it's a reinterpretation of an arcade in a retail unit that is available. You know the operation has rolled out eight facilities based upon this model. You know rinse and reprieve, really, and so going from, yeah, I know, so going from one high score.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the only reason I bring it up is I can keep the segue of saying from one high score we can go to another high score. But you know, yeah, in the openings in the shots, on the shot side, and we have the announcement about pin strikes. I keep wanting to call them pinstrikes. I'm sorry, my brain is, uh, definitely having an issue with pinstripes name over the years they've had three pinstrikes, so that's why,
Speaker 3:they're one in your house, yes, um, the issue seems to be that they're blaming uh, economic deterioration in their business, but we've touched upon this what we feel the real reasons are behind this situation, what they're going to do with their 18 facilities. Everything has gone very quiet since we broke the announcement. We were lucky enough to be one of the first to report this, and it seems that success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan. No one really does want to talk about this at the moment. We will wait and see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've talked about pinstripes fairly exhaustively at this point as to what our view is on why they've had issues, so I do hope that they do some sort of turnaround. I mean, we've seen many brands do a great turnaround after bankruptcy. It is a vehicle to be able to get things straightened out, and so I hope that new leadership comes in and they're able to really figure out how to take these massively overbuilt venues and really make something successful with them.
Speaker 3:It's a business mentality. If you're looking at this as a failure that needs to be saved, you're coming with the wrong perception. This is an opportunity, so you need to learn from your lessons and then move forward. But again, we can go into a little bit more about that kind of approach later on. And then high score, uh, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the highest higher yeah.
Speaker 3:It's lower now. So, uh, you know talking about three strikes, you're out. Well, they've had their three strikes. Uh, they claim, you know, whoever their publicist is, uh, has been working overtime to say we're going. Publicist is has been working overtime to say we're going, we're saved. Now they're going again and I think this one's going to stick.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they've tried a lot to keep this thing going and you know, basically they had what was the equivalent of donations to keep them alive for a period of time, and they even admitted that that was the case on their website when they first launched that initiative. But yeah, sometimes inevitability takes hold.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, one that I hadn't come across before, and I would have been interested to have seen it while it was still open. Battle Racing uses those electric carts in an unusual driving experience that had a level of interactivity. They also had some VR there and some amusement machines, all supported by beer, snacks and the usual kind of older entertainment. Audience experience opened up in Miami, florida, and it seems that it's, you know, found it in the last couple of months difficult to continue, and so they announced on their social media that they would be closing their doors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, now it's playing some of their other. There we go. Super interesting facility and I would have very much liked to have gone to this and tried it out. I mean, it looks like custom carts as well. I mean, I haven't seen this cart.
Speaker 3:I have. It's a Chinese manufacturer cart and the illuminated system on top is unique to them.
Speaker 2:So I was talking about is the thing on top and, you know, even some of their auxiliary attractions seem interesting as well, like a little bit custom developed. So yeah, you know they were trying to do something. It looks like just clearly. You know, who knows what the economic issues were for them, or business related issues, but um, definitely would have liked to have tried this I, I, I hope that, uh, the team involved with this, uh, you know, keep at it.
Speaker 3:I think that the the market out there could be interested in the black light, uh, interactive racing experience, but again, it does need Saina Head and Business Acumen to achieve that. That's really it from my point of view. You know, though autumn we are now in, I am noticing that we are easing back a little bit on new openings being announced in the near term, and they're now talking more about 2026 openings and 2027 openings, and, sadly, the momentum on closing information is beginning to grow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, this at least felt a little bit more baseline, more level as far as you know so anyway was not quite the whirlwind that we had, although we had two weeks to cover last week.
Speaker 3:So let's, let's hope that we can find a level of normality that we can deal with.
Speaker 1:Anyway, that's it for me. I wish you all a good one. If you run a location-based entertainment brand and want to attract more visitors, check out Radius. They use real-time location data and customized marketing strategies to help brands like yours stand out. Radius can boost your foot traffic and build a loyal customer base. Plus, they're offering a complimentary local market analysis to show you exactly how they can help you grow Curious, visit Radiusco and ask about your free market analysis. That's R-A-Y-D-I-U-S dot C-O.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, now that we got the actual correct open and shut to run, so a little bit of a glitch there, but that's all right. Look, we got sound off number 90 with Kevin Williams on Tuesday September 16th, so just coming up in two days. And you know what I said? It was a compact LBX show today. That is a wrap for today's show. I am Brandon Wiley signing off. Stay tuned and keep kicking.
