Puma Flagship, Las Vegas

One of the world’s biggest sportswear brands, and a repeat Recursive client.

Puma is one of the world’s biggest sportswear brands, designing athletic footwear, apparel and accessories worn in almost every country on earth. Its Las Vegas flagship sits in the heart of the Strip, trading long hours for an audience that expects to be entertained before it expects to shop. After the success of the first Puma Arcade at the New York flagship in 2023, Puma invited Recursive back to go bigger: three floors of interactive and immersive space in Las Vegas, delivered in 2024.

Expand the Puma Arcade concept across three floors of the Las Vegas flagship.

Vegas was a significant expansion of everything we built in New York. Across three floors, we designed and delivered a connected set of experiences that turn a store visit into a night out. On the ground floor, the Vegas Zone: a giant one-armed bandit that shoppers pull for a randomised spin, with real prizes for the winners. Upstairs, a hidden room called Club 48, entered through the Puma app, where a Raspberry Pi unlocks the door to a private space of reactive lighting and screens. And at the heart of the store, the new Puma Arcade: custom-built arcade machines, three playable games, neon DMX lighting, soundscapes, interactive floors and motion tracking throughout, with an anteroom of live data tickers where players log in before stepping into the main space. The whole world runs on Unreal Engine and TouchDesigner. Players enter a shrunk-down 3D Vegas, complete with its own Fremont Street canopy, choose their game, and watch the room change around them as they play.

Twelve machines, two engines, sixteen hours a day, and nobody on site to fix it.

The Arcade runs across twelve machines, many running Unreal Engine and TouchDesigner side by side on the same hardware, so resource management had to be engineered and tested, not hoped for. Every signal in the building flows between the two engines: centralised Art-Net lighting driven from Touch, game content in Unreal with OSC back into Touch so the room reacts to every player, webcams bridged over NDI, QR scanners and joysticks over serial, and a Postgres database keeping score behind it all. Then there was the venue. A Strip flagship trades sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, with no technical staff on site, for an audience that arrives expecting a show. Nothing could depend on a developer being in the building. So we tested like opening night depended on it. We built the experience in VR and tested it with the real sensors before the store existed, built a physical replica in our Eastbourne studio, and had seven months of testing behind us by the time the site was ready for us.

A three-floor destination that runs itself, watched over from London.

The Puma Arcade opened in 2024 as the signature of the Las Vegas flagship: three floors of play, spectacle and discovery that give visitors a reason to cross the threshold, and a reason to come back. Coming back matters, because the store remembers you. Every game produces a digital takeaway: moments from your gameplay, stamped with the game's logo and delivered to your inbox as an animated GIF via a QR code and microsite. Scan that code on your next visit and the Arcade welcomes you back, shows your previous scores and challenges you to beat them. Even the queue is part of the game, with waiting friends recording messages and sending bonuses that appear inside the gameplay itself. And the system looks after itself. TouchDesigner acts as the building's watchdog: monitoring machine health, restarting a crashed engine within seconds, emailing our team when anything needs attention, and feeding cameras into a central monitoring system we run from London. Sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, with no one on site. Delivered alongside Solotech as appointed hardware integrator, and supported by Recursive under an ongoing maintenance agreement.

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