The VOID put Star Wars in a warehouse — then lost every room it rented

The VOID, co-founded by Ken Bretschneider in Pleasant Grove, Utah, opened its first location in 2015 with a promise it called hyper-reality: headsets and haptic vests inside physical stages with walls, heat and wind, so players walked through a real space that mapped onto a bigger virtual one. Ghostbusters: Dimension debuted at Madame Tussauds in Times Square on 1 July 2016, and in 2017 The VOID joined the Disney Accelerator; that December, Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, built with ILMxLAB, opened at Disney Springs and Downtown Disney.

Expansion was fast and leased. By late 2018 there were locations from London and Dubai to Toronto, Kuala Lumpur and Las Vegas — Mall of America, The Venetian, shopping malls and tourist districts. The model needed those rooms full. The company put its assets up as loan collateral in August 2019, and when pandemic shutdowns arrived in March 2020 every location closed at once; revenue went to zero overnight and the loan went into default.

The evictions followed: The VOID was pushed out of roughly 12 leased locations, and in June 2020 Disney terminated its licensing agreements and leases, citing breach. By late October 2020 filings showed the intellectual property had moved to a holding company, VR Exit, LLC. The pioneer of location VR ended with no locations at all — the rooms belonged to landlords, and the magic needed them.