The Puma Arcade - NYC

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 Fifth Avenue flagship is one of the most visited sports retail destinations in the world, and every square metre of it has to work hard. Recursive has a long-standing relationship with Puma, delivering interactive experiences for its flagship stores in New York and Las Vegas. When Puma wanted to push its in-store gaming to the next level, they came back to the team who built the original.

Take a proven concept and rebuild it as a fully immersive, real-time gaming destination.

In 2019, Recursive conceived the Skill Cube, an interactive football challenge that became a signature attraction on Puma's shop floor. Five years of technological leaps later, Puma set us a bigger challenge: don't refresh it, reinvent it. The answer is the Puma Arcade, a fully immersive 3D gaming environment built on Unreal Engine, with virtual cameras and real-time rendering at its core. Players are transformed into digital avatars, driven live by full skeletal tracking and dressed head to toe in customisable Puma gear, ready to be shared across online and social channels. Everything in the game world is live. Banners, flags, on-screen content and avatar clothing can be rebranded in real time over NDI network feeds, so the Arcade can carry a product launch in the morning and a campaign takeover by the afternoon. The whole experience streams live to screens across the store, turning every game into theatre for the entire flagship.

Replace every layer of a live retail attraction, without ever going dark.

Reinventing a live installation is very different from building one from scratch. The original Skill Cube was a working attraction in a busy flagship, and Puma needed it transformed, not just refreshed, without losing the footfall it had already earned.The technical challenge was to replace almost every layer of the system while keeping the experience instantly playable. Full skeletal tracking had to perform flawlessly in an uncontrolled retail environment, with changing light levels, reflective surfaces and a constant flow of shoppers at the sensor edge. The Unreal Engine back-end had to render a responsive 3D world, drive avatars from live movement data and accept real-time content changes over NDI, all on hardware that runs unattended, every trading day. Above all, the system had to be ownable. A flagship store can't depend on developers being on site. Diagnostics, content updates, branding changes and the live store feed all needed to be manageable by Puma's own team, with the reliability expected of any other piece of retail infrastructure.

A game people queue for, a data stream Puma acts on, and a souvenir that follows players home.

The Puma Arcade is now live on Fifth Avenue, turning shoppers into players and players into content. Real-time rendering, live avatars and dynamic branding have transformed a retail fixture into a destination, and the NDI store feed turns every session into a live event for the whole flagship. The experience doesn't end at the final whistle. Every player receives a personalised digital souvenir, a collectible card showcasing their scores. A QR code appears on screen at the end of each game; one scan and a rapid registration later, the card lands in their inbox, carrying the Puma brand out of the store and into their world. And because the Arcade was built to be owned, not babysat, Puma's team manages content, branding and diagnostics themselves, while Recursive delivers weekly gameplay metrics that turn every session into insight, measuring engagement and informing what the Arcade does next.

PUMA Newsroom — NYC flagship launch

WWD — Puma launches North American flagship

Vimeo

Unreal Engine

TouchDesigner

Christie Digital