Travel
A Canadian success story on its way to a global phenomenon, Activate Games is a futuristic experience where you become the player
On a stopover in Winnipeg on our way to see the belugas in Churchill, MB., my eight-year-old and I discovered a unique indoor attraction and had ourselves a whale of a time. Recognized by the Financial Times as one of the fastest-growing leisure companies in the Americas, Activate Games is a homegrown Winnipeg success story, and yet it’s somewhat difficult to describe.
Picture a dozen small, dark rooms, each containing LED-lit and laser-infused elements that require you to jump, run, think, twist, throw, shoot, compete or collaborate in a series of increasingly difficult games. Players are automatically tracked for scores across the fast-moving games, and players flow through a fully automated and seamless gaming experience. With strobe lights, bright colours and booming sound effects, an experience with Activate Games will have you feeling like you have entered a video game. Along with anyone who ever loved the classic film Tron, Activate has an instant and wide demographic appeal. The company is continuing to expand across North America, Europe and the Middle East; there’s nothing else quite like it.
Activate is the vision of founders Adam and Megan Schmidt. Originally from Ontario, the young couple landed in Winnipeg when Adam got a job as a bush pilot for the RCMP. Visiting family in Toronto, they experienced their first escape room, sparking an idea to introduce this popular indoor concept to Winnipeg. In a city starved for indoor entertainment, their cleverly constructed escape room quickly took off. Inspired by this success, the couple brainstormed more indoor, all-ages concepts, building on their knowledge to create something centralized, in-house, easily maintained and efficiently scalable. In January 2019, Activate Games opened for business, and despite an initial setback during the pandemic, the scale of its growth has been staggering. Much like IMAX, insulin, peanut butter and pacemakers, it is another Canadian innovation taking the world by storm.
“As a pilot, you have a lot of time to think,” says Activate’s CEO, Adam Schmidt, from their Winnipeg headquarters. “I was always coming up with ideas for small businesses, but it was Megan who saw the potential of an escape room. After it became a booming business, we wanted to invent something that would hit the mark from a business model perspective, but allow people to have fun on their own, playing games we could upload and update with the click of a button.”
Checking into Activate’s Coquitlam location, my kids and I receive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) wristbands that serve as both our tickets and scorekeepers. To access each room, we scan the wristband beneath a screen, which checks us in, and the door automatically opens when the room is free, ushering out previous gamers through a separate exit. Even when locations are busy, line-ups move quickly, and it’s all impeccably efficient. All the design, software, and engineering for each location are created in-house, including components printed on over 100 three-dimensional printers.
Much like IMAX, insulin, peanut butter and pacemakers, it is another Canadian innovation taking the world by storm.
Activate opened its first location in Winnipeg just a year before the pandemic; I asked Adam how the company had managed to survive. “We had to close, but we kept our development team, beefing up our systems, creating and testing new games. It gave us time to learn,” he says. Ironing out the kinks, the result was a more exciting and polished gamer experience when Activate reopened for business. Gamers could now tackle 12 challenging rooms, chasing variety or working through harder levels on their favourite games. Time flies when you’re throwing balls at asteroids, jumping on LED-grids, or crawling beneath laser beams like spies in Mission Impossible.
Often overlooked in Canadian success stories, Winnipeg proved to be the perfect birthplace. “Toronto is so big that a new concept wouldn’t necessarily get the attention or traffic it needs to succeed. Nobody is driving from Scarborough to Mississauga to try something new. But in Winnipeg, word quickly got out and the city supported us,” says Adam. With more than 500 employees, Activate has been good to Winnipeg, too. The company recently won a Tourism Winnipeg Award for Best Large Business, and the Schmidts embody the creative, can-do spirit that flows through the Prairies.
Demographically, Activate also enjoys a perfect alignment. My generation, who grew up with Atari and early Nintendo, wants to socialize outside of bars and nightclubs. It activated in me an almost nostalgic sense of old-school, collaborative, early computer game play. Younger generations are also ditching bars for healthy, active and weather-proof fun. The collaborative nature of the games is a bull’s-eye for corporate team-building events, and as for younger kids, my own insisted their birthday parties take place at Activate this year, with the enthusiastic approval of their friends.
The bold vision and rapid success of Activate strikes me as a story usually told south of the border, where entrepreneurs are hard-wired to take bigger risks. Adam assures me the company’s development and growth have always been measured and calculated, leveraging the couple’s secure jobs, savings, and the support of a home community. “We didn’t take on debt, so we asked ourselves: ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’”
From engineering circuits to printing grid boards and laser guns, the enterprise is proudly made in Canada. “We’re making thousands of different parts all under one roof, which is kinda cool,” says Adam. “The Canadian way is the Activate way and the Activate way is the Canadian way,” he adds.
Today, the couple continue to work across all facets of the business, from legal and real estate to creating new games to roll out across their locations. For all the demands of running an exploding international business, Adam is most excited by the fun stuff: designing and tweaking games that challenge, engage and ultimately delight his customers.
While imitators have already sprung up, Activate has patented and trademarked its concept and games. With all the engineering and design behind the scenes, the company is confident that consumers won’t stand for a cheap knock-off. With Canadian locations in Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg, Halifax, Edmonton, and Greater Vancouver, Activate Games is on track to double in size over the next year, expanding to more than 80 locations in the United States, France, Germany, Austria, Mexico, Dubai, the UK, and Scandinavia. Game on!
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