Well, the official announcement has come from Cineplex’s The Rec Room which has been actively seeking a location in Winnipeg for some time. For a while, it looked like they might moving into the Polo Park Target location across from the ScotiaBank Theatre site. However, the complication of the site design made it less than ideal. The other rumour was St. Vital Centre in perhaps the old Sears location but the site was too large and had further complication of two floors and questionable parking.
Ideally, the Rec Room wanted a building tailor made for them covering one floor at about 40,000 square feet. In a perfect world it would be very close to a Cineplex movie theatre. Since Polo Park and St. Vital Centre did not work out the next best choice was a mall and in Winnipeg the newest mall is still actively building. The VIP Odeon and ScotiaBank Theatre are somewhere in the middle along a straight like down Kenaston for those seeking pre and post movie entertainment.
There are four anchor spots listed on Seasons of Tuxedo’s map. The one they seem to be referring to is immediately beside IHOP. Work is to begin soon but the opening will wait to 2019 as million and millions goes into these gaming centers.
The Rec Room will feature restaurants, performance spaces, 110 amusement games, axe throwing, luxury bowling and virtual reality games. At present there are four locations of Rec Rooms across Canada with an expectation of maybe 12-15 nation-wide.
Winnipeg has had gaming centers before but nothing of this scale has ever been attempted. It remains to be seen whether the Rec Room will successful with young adults or not but the investment seems to suggest that Cineplex believes they have a winner.
