BRANDON GARRETT
The Architect of Immersive Fun
Brandon Garrett is a man on a mission. His goal? To turn abandoned department stores into immersive fun houses. The CEO and co-founder of Electric Playhouse is a former architect who once explored boundless virtual realms. Now he creates IRL worlds that fuse technology with social interaction. While the goal is, first and foremost, that all guests lose themselves in the joy of the immersive experiences, Electric Playhouse was also designed to help alleviate digital-induced isolation. With a background in design tech leadership at New Mexico’s top architectural firm, Dekker/Perich/Sabatini, Brandon’s imaginative journey from Legos and video games to Electric Playhouse’s two locations (Albuquerque and Las Vegas) is fueled by his childlike curiosity and willingness to fail. “Failure is actually the only way I’ve learned,” he told The Albuquerque Journal.
Projects
Describing Electric Playhouse to the uninitiated can be a complicated ask. There are immersive dinners, like the space-themed Cosmic Odyssey which combines celestial visuals with other-worldly courses, as well as interactive games that put strangers together in a shootout against alien invaders. The company has also partnered with the Georgia O’Keefe Museum and New Mexico-based artist Lea Anderson on immersive art installations. Music for the Eyes was the first large-scale digital exploration of O’Keefe’s body of work, while Anderson’s Biomorphia is a sort of psychedelic nature walk. The company recently opened a second location on the Vegas strip and is in negotiations for another site near Dallas.
