Scott Boren is bringing his haptic vests and headsets to RiNo.
The investor and financial analyst will open a franchise of Sandbox VR at 2737 Larimer St. by summer. The business features three game rooms where visitors can suit up in virtual reality gear to go face to face with dinosaurs or save the planet from alien invasions.
“You essentially become a first-person shooter in a first-person shooter. We have everything from shooting games to kids games to strategy to education,” Boren said.
The Denver native has spent most of his professional career overseas in Hong Kong, where he became acquainted with the CEO of Sandbox VR, which started in Hong Kong in 2016. That led him to open two Virginia locations in the past year, and now he’s returning home to bring one to the Mile High City.
Sandbox VR has dozens of locations, from Switzerland to Singapore and Seattle to Miami.
Up to six people can play together inside one room, at a rate of $55 to $60 per person. Most of the games are made by Sandbox VR, but a few, like a “Squid Games”- or “Stranger Things”-themed game, were developed with a licensing agreement from Netflix.
Players are suited up with sensors on the ankles and wrists, along with a haptic vest and headset to track movement. People can walk around the room freely and explore their virtual world on foot. Gameplay is recorded and spliced into three videos for participants to take home with them after their session.
Boren said one important line of business for him is corporate outings and events because they offer something unique and different. One of his other locations, in Virginia Beach, has an internal sales team dedicated to getting parties and groups to come through the space.
“One of the things that makes us incredibly attractive is itap not just a young kids type of thing. We’ve had people in Virginia Beach come through that are as old as 75,” Boren said.
The business has one other Colorado location, at Park Meadows Mall in Lone Tree, owned by a separate franchisee. Boren’s new landlord, Bahman Shafa, visited that spot to get a feel for the business before leasing the RiNo space.
“There was a bunch of zombies that were out to get us, and we had to shoot them down before they got us,” Shafa said.
The local real estate investor and developer who owns Focus Property Group bought the 19,000-square-foot Larimer Street building in 1999 for $350,000, before RiNo existed.
“There were drug dealers on the corner, there were tumbleweeds and vagabonds,” he said. “It was the slums of Denver. It was not a neighborhood you’d want to walk around.”
But he knew that being close to downtown would pay off, and over time the neighborhood around him changed. His tenants went from industrial to office to retail. Today, a cocktail bar operates in the building’s other storefront.
Boren said Larimer Street would be the only place in RiNo he’d open a business.
“There’s a lot of capital thatap still pouring into that area, so it seems like an attractive area to build a business,” he said, a nod to the redevelopment project happening a block away by Edens, a national real estate firm.
“To be honest, I was really torn between downtown Denver and RiNo,” Boren added. “When I left Denver in 2006, the 16th Street Mall was the cool place to be. And it seems like the cool place has changed four or five times.”
The landlord and tenant were both represented by Zall Company.
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