Atari Is Opening 8 Gamer Hotels Across the U.S.
It’s the stuff of childhood fantasy: you never have to turn off your video game to go to bed because you’ll be sleeping in the game itself.
In a statement this week, Atari announced its plans to build eight “immersive” Atari Hotels.
The first location will be in Phoenix, Arizona, expected to break ground in the middle of 2020.
Each hotel will offer an immersive experience to guests, through the use of Augmented and Virtual Realities (AR/VR). While it’s still unclear what the guests will experience at an Atari Hotel, it will be video game-centric. The hotels will likely feature e-sports arenas where competitors can play in front of a live audience. The design scheme will pay homage to the ‘80s graphics that made Atari an iconic global brand.
“When creating this brand-new hotel concept, we knew that Atari would be the perfect way to give guests the ‘nostalgic and retro meets modern’ look and feel we were going for,” Napoleon Smith III, one of the designers of the hotel, said in a statement. “Let’s face it, how cool will it be to stay inside an Atari?!”
After Phoenix, other hotels will open in Las Vegas, Denver, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, and San Jose. Atari has not released a time frame of when the locations are expected to open.
While the Atari Hotel will be the world’s first video game hotel, it will not be the first time a hotel has added some video game perks. The Great Wolf Lodge developed a video game that guests could play as they rode down a waterslide. And the Curtis Denver Hotel has a video game-themed suite where guests can play "Donkey Kong," surrounded by "Mario" memorabilia.
