From Topgolf to Pottery, Electric Mix, TOCA Social, Two Touch Circus, and more, North Texas might be America’s most excellent high-tech playground. Check out this roundup of who’s enjoying what where. (And sure, you may even roll a bulldozer in Sachse.)
Engineering can shift hills, affect industries, and change the world. It can be an overall total blast—and businesses are proving that over Dallas-Fort Worth. North Texas is becoming among the world’s leading showplaces of high-tech leisure concepts in recent decades.
Welcome to ground zero for getting your sport on—with reimagined methods to play tennis, football, shuffleboard, video games, label, and more. From the newest cutting-edge Ferris wheel engineering to an inside “circus” of tech-enabled games, here is a roundup of how North Texas is reinventing fun:
Reimagining Tennis in Dallas
North Texas has become a “Tennis Mecca” for many reasons. The PGA of America is creating a “Plastic Area of golf” by moving its HQ from California to Frisco. Dallas is the house of ClubCorp, the largest operator and driver of tennis features in the U.S., and Arcis Tennis, America’s second-largest.
But we sparkle by creating tennis more fun. Dallas is the house of Topgolf, Push Shack, BigShots, and Pottery—all of which have made standard tennis into high-tech leisure concepts.
Topgolf (above) leads the pack with 65 locations in the U.S. and more in the U.K., Australia, Mexico, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates. As we wrote last summertime, it’s pursuing an objective of continued expansion and innovation.
Puttery’s Illusion course at its location north of Dallas [Photo: Puttery]
Push Shack is a Topgolf competitor that debuted an entirely new principle last summer—Pottery, a high-tech, totally reimagined variation of miniature tennis combined with cocktails and food in an adults-only playground. It opened one of its first locations at Grandscape in The Colony only north of Dallas and will soon start its ninth in New York City’s trendy Meatpacking District.
Meanwhile, Dallas-based ClubCorp is moving out more of their BigShots tennis leisure locations, with one in Fort Worth and five more spread out from Bryan, Texas, to as a long way away as Northwick Park, U.K.
And Dallas businesses Flite Tennis and Century Tennis have joined to bring gamification tech to tennis stages and tennis leisure locations across the U.S.—with help from Elderly Advisor Ken May, former CEO of Topgolf, Push Shack, and FedEx Office.
Baseball Gets a New Activate Large N
In a TOCA box, a ball is launched at a player with targets waiting on the video screen. [Photo: TOCA Social]
Everyone understands football is huge in England—however. It got a straight more superb pop lifestyle stop when TOCA Social opened this past year in The O2, London’s live leisure and retail destination. The area has attracted stars from top British football groups and celebrities, influencers, and even cast customers from “Ted Lasso.”
Today a TOCA Social is visiting the Dallas Design Region near downtown, providing “world-class” cuisine, bars with sweeping views, and immersive target-game “TOCA boxes.” In the Dallas location’s 34 TOCA boxes, teams will be able to eat, drink, and get converts, fielding and kicking football balls at gamified video screens.
Slated to start in early 2024, TOCA Social would have been a three-level, industrial-style showplace created atop a current factory at 1313 Riverfront Blvd.
Rendering of exterior view of TOCA Social, coming to the Design District in early 2024. [Image: TOCA Social]
TOCA is a soccer expression from the Spanish word for “touch.” It means having excellent touch on the baseball, especially your first touch in a play. So why did the organization touch down in Dallas for its first U.S. area?
Zach Shor, SVP of TOCA Social U.S., informed Dallas Innovates the solution is easy: “Dallas is the true deal.”
Its first stage can maintain 27 TOCA boxes, combined with the main bar and a treat bar named Sweet Finish. The next floor can have eight TOCA boxes and an “actually wonderful, 5,000-square-foot outdoor patio with bonkers views of downtown.” The 3rd floor would have been a climate-controlled bar, with accordion glass opportunities that start in great temperature, providing what Shor calls “the best place to truly see downtown with a great mixture in your hand in the town of Dallas.”
Two Touch Circus is Coming to Town
[Photo: Two Bit Circus]
Two Touch Circus, a “micro-amusement park” principle first presented in Los Angeles, is increasing this fall to their second U.S. site in Dallas’The Shops at Park Lane, near NorthPark.
The newest area can provide 35,000 sq feet of tech-enhanced leisure that fuses the most recent interactive engineering with the “wonder and spectacle of common circus and carnival.”
The leisure can contain custom-designed arcade games; VR, AR, and “extensive reality” experiences; “history rooms” that function like escape rooms; scientifically reimagined carnival games, an interactive sport display movie; cabanas with personal gaming lounges; and more. (And yes—” more” contains software bartenders.)
Immersive Sports ‘Eatertainment’
iCompete AR-powered sports bar, coming to Lewisville. [Rendering: iCompete]
Competent Knowledge is an expansive, fully immersive “productive activities eatertainment” principle that opened in Feb in Lewisville. It includes AR-enhanced tennis, batting cage simulators, electronically scored darts, ax-throwing, and immersive tech billiards.
Its main bar features a 20-foot LED TV, a mixology bar, and a 40-tap self-pour alcohol & wine wall. The hybrid sporting area and activities bar is “a convergence of e-sports, increased truth, simulation, and immersive technology.” It comes with a “global menu” offering tacos, flatbreads, wings, and sushi.
Gaming in an ‘Electric Gamebox’
Electric Gamebox’s game, “Alien Aptitude Test: London ‘84.” [Photo: Electric Gamebox]
Why only play video games when you’re able to be inside one? This is the consideration behind Electric Gamebox. The immersive class gaming system has locations in three U.K. towns and one in the Grandscape complicated in The Colony north of Dallas.
Customers who visit Electric Gamebox enter an interactive electronic clever space named a “Gamebox” gaming pod. In a position to number two to six participants at any given time, the Gameboxes function a selection of games applying projection mapping, touch monitors, 3D action monitoring, and encompass noise without headsets.
Shuffling into Serious Ellum
[Photo: Electric Shuffle]
Shuffleboard was once as old-school as it gets: a long, sandy wooden table with material pucks creeping down to click their solution to victory before Electric Mix got ahold of it and made it into some high-tech principle bars.
Like different ideas on this record, Electric Mix got their come from the U.K. before seeking a home in America—and placing their views squarely on Dallas-Fort Worth. Last fall, the initial U.S. site opened at 2615 Elm Street in Serious Ellum.
The bar-eaterie “reimagines” shuffleboard with “unparalleled vision technology” for an immersive, social experience. With several competing parts on tap, clubs with 16 participants can compete in the three presented games.
Grandscape Wheel
Grandscape Wheel and Jurassic World Exhibition at Grandscape in The Colony [Photo via BluSpark]
We hold stating “Grandscape,” and its number chance: the shopping/dining/entertainment complicated in The Colony—situated down Road 121/Sam Rayburn Tollway and only west of North Dallas Tollway—has become a destination for all kinds of leisure experiences.
Grandscape was named “Many Innovative Retail and Entertainment Project” at London’s RLI Prizes last fall.
One new reason: the Grandscape Wheel, which follows the tendency of plus-sized, cutting-edge Ferris wheels worldwide. At 180 feet tall, it opened last September, 2nd in height in Texas, simply to the Texas Star in Dallas’Good Park. It was made by Netherlands-based Dutch Wheels and functions 42 climate-controlled, music-playing gondolas that maintain up to eight persons each. Additionally, it includes a VIP glass-bottom floor gondola with Ferrari-style leather seats for four.
Bulldozing Enjoyment at ExtremeSandbox
[Image: Courtesy Extreme Sandbox]
Bulldozers have gotten far more advanced lately. In most areas on earth, the only path you can enjoy using them is to scoot small design games on the floor. But you are in North Texas now, and we do point different here.
At ExtremeSandbox, situated at The Place in Sachse northeast of Dallas, you can get the regulates and run the actual thing.
Following a successful look on “Shark Tank” in 2016, ExtremeSandbox opened its Sachse site in late 2020. ( It formally opened one at their home bottom in Hastings, Minnesota.)
Serious Sandbox provides visitors the chance to run construction equipment under the guidance of trained instructors. Activities contain dueling bulldozers, crushing vehicles, and planning an obstacle course. The business also presents heavy-equipment education for those pursuing occupations in the construction trades.
Low-Tech Enjoyment: Football Meets Bowling
Yep—at Fowling Warehouse you simply throw a football and knock over those bowling pins. [Video still: Fowling Warehouse]
Fine, let’s say you are not just a techie-type person. If you want your leisure ideas analog and real-world, look no more than Fowling Warehouse, visiting East Plano in summertime 2024.
Fowling (rhymes with “bowling”) is straightforward to explain. You pick up a basketball and put it 48 feet to hit over some bowling pins. Five different locations nationwide are providing this knowledge, with a sixth on your way in Ann Arbor later this year. Like usually the one visiting Plano, all of them feature a whole bar, and alcohol backyard, and live audio performances.
But wait, there’s more.
From the National Videogame Memorial in Frisco and a wide selection of game arcades and bars across DFW to new ideas being baked up today by modern entrepreneurs, there’s almost no limit to new types of fun you can have in Dallas-Fort Worth. Keep updated, and we’ll inform you what’s coming next!