Level99 Announces Summer Opening at Disney World!

Walt Disney World’s newest interactive experience, Level99, has announced that it’ll open its doors in Summer 2026! The replacement for the defunct NBA Experience and DisneyQuest venue at Disney Springs is finally getting a replacement, and it sounds fantastic! This covers the latest announcement, along with our commentary about why this could be a great fit.

Gamers and job seekers, power up! Level99, the interactive social gaming venue coming to Disney Springs West Side at Walt Disney World will open in Summer 2026. The sprawling playground designed for adults and teens will provide an exciting new experience at Disney Springs.

Housed in more than 45,000 square feet of space, featuring a two-story bar and craft food offerings, guests will enjoy more than 60 life-sized mini-games where they will dodge axes, crack puzzles, and outsmart challenges. The Disney Springs venue will be the fourth and largest Level99 location, including sites in Natick, Mass., Providence, R.I. and Tysons, Va. This newest venue will be located at Disney Springs West Side, near the Drawn to Life Cirque du Soleil theater.

Upon opening, the location at Walt Disney World will be the largest Level99 venue, featuring 63 total mini-games and challenges. Other Level99 locations currently have approximately 50 games.

Known for its larger-than-life and visually stunning artwork, Level99 at Disney Springs will feature the company’s biggest art installations to date with more than 40 original pieces of art.

The interactive social gaming venue aimed at adults and teens will also include a two-story bar in the central atrium, encircled by glowing rings of neon light visible throughout the venue. Level99 released the above concept art of the bar with the opening announcement. Below is how this same space looked at DisneyQuest.

Level99 will bring its signature craft food and beverage program featuring a selection of award-winning Detroit-style pizza, wagyu burgers, craveable snacks, handcrafted cocktails, and rotating beers on tap. Ingredients are made from scratch daily.

Led by entertainment innovator Matt DuPlessie and backed by Act III Holdings, the investment vehicle led by Panera founder and current CAVA Chair Ron Shaich, Level99 is an unmatched destination for real-world, challenge-based social entertainment. Beyond the games themselves, Level99 features best-in-class design, award-winning culinary offerings, and handcrafted beverages that are worth the trip.

According to its website, Level99 combines a variety of activities–interactive games, virtual reality experiences, escape rooms, arcades, and social spaces—all designed to engage visitors in unique and adventurous ways. Its spaces blend technology, creativity, and social interaction in a single place, with a variety of rooms offering a mixture of family fun, group activities, and adult entertainment.

Highlights include Rooms with Themed Challenges and Player vs. Player Duels. If competition is more your style, face off against your friends in a variety of player-vs-player competitions for glory and bragging rights.

If you’d prefer the collaborative route, gamers can work together in dozens of unique challenge rooms with your team of 2-6 players to test your body and mind. Your team has each room to yourself, but only 1-4 minutes to complete each challenge, so act quick!

Beyond the games themselves, Level99 features best-in-class design, an award-winning culinary offering, and craft beverages that are worth the trip. “It’s a video game come to life,” said Level99 CEO Matt DuPlessie, an MIT-trained engineer and Harvard Business School graduate who previously worked with Disney and Universal and leads the production team behind the Level99 experience. “This is where you can be the hero in your own entertainment.”

Walt Disney World selected Level99 for the defunct NBA Experience space after a comprehensive review of the location-based entertainment industry. Level99’s location at Walt Disney World will add to the growing list of dining, shopping and entertainment options at Disney Springs, which features more than 150 shops, restaurants and family-friendly leisure activities.

In preparation for the summer opening of Level99, hiring is officially underway. The opening team hiring has begun for 150 entertainment and food and beverage roles at competitive wages (according to Level99). Job seekers can apply for current openings at level99.com/careers.

This isn’t Level99’s first rodeo taking over defunct spaces like the former NBA Experience/DisneyQuest venue.

In Providence, the company worked with dozens of regional Rhode Island artists to transform an empty JC Penny into the open world of entertainment and discovery you can step into today. This bodes well for the repurposing of the NBA Experience building.

Level99 has established a footprint in New England where it has experienced industry-leading guest traffic fueled by players driving on average over half an hour to visit. A typical experience at Level99 includes at least 2-3 hours of entertainment play, followed by drinks and food at its scratch kitchen and bar, with some players staying all day.

I’m bullish on Level99 and think it’s exactly the type of cost-effective and crowd-pleasing fix this space could use.

I’m impressed with what I’ve read thus far about Level99 and its CEO Matt DuPlessie, which includes this MIT Alumni interview detailing some of his experiences with Disney and desire to work in the themed design and entertainment spaces.

I’m also impressed that Level99 is relatively reasonably priced, with tickets costing as little as $29.99 for 2-hour blocks and $49.99 for all-day experiences. It should go without saying that pricing will be higher at Walt Disney World, but hopefully the value proposition is still workable for families. And it very well might benefit from scale and increased foot traffic, which could keep ticket prices down on higher volume.

Level99 looks flat out fun, interesting and engaging. While I love the idea of something like a Meow Wolf or TeamLab, this strikes me as meatier and more substantive, where there’s more of an esoteric quality to those.

That’s just my gut-level reaction to Level99. I’ve never visited it and am going solely off their own description and (overwhelmingly positive) reviews. But this sounds to me like something pitch-perfect for Walt Disney World’s guest demographics.

Obviously, I would prefer something purpose-built by Disney for this location. However, I’m also a realist. This venue probably isn’t the best use of their time or talents, and Imagineering cannot deliver anything efficiently. Every project is expensive, and here that would translate to higher ticket prices to recoup costs.

This has been an ongoing and recurrent problem, and is probably one of the big reasons why DisneyQuest was never updated and ultimately failed. For something like this, it’s key to keep startup costs and operating expenses down so that ticket prices can follow suit. Otherwise, it’s doomed to fail before it ever opens. (See also, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser.)

NBA Experience had its own problems, being a synergy move as part of Disney’s bigger picture relationship with the NBA. During the brief period it was open, NBA Experience struggled to draw guests and offered aggressive Cast Member deals and free admission.

Obviously, the closure of Walt Disney World and subsequent slowdown during the phased reopening didn’t help. However, business had been booming at Disney Springs for over a year at the point when Walt Disney World announced in 2021 that the NBA Experience would permanently close.

The closure of NBA Experience was inevitable. Tickets were too expensive, the concept was too niche, and didn’t appeal to enough of Walt Disney World’s core demographics. It would’ve closed regardless of COVID. That was not what killed the NBA Experience–it’s what gave a convenient face-saving cover to close the incredibly unpopular attraction. (Even so, I hesitate to call it an unequivocal failure, because it might’ve strengthened the relationship between the NBA and Disney, leading indirectly to the NBA Bubble at Walt Disney World. So maybe the investment was worth it, after all!)

Point being, Walt Disney World needs a cost-effective and crowd-pleasing tenant for this large venue. My hope is that Level99 fits the bill on that front, and has both the capability to build something in this space that’s not prohibitively expensive and is reasonably appealing to a sufficient number of fans.

My hope is that Level99 starts out small, cloning the winning formula from its Rhode Island locations at Walt Disney World. A company that prides itself in creative ambition and transforming dead JCPenny stores sounds like a winning combo to me for this cursed space. Again, just having something fill this massive, abandoned venue will be a win.

Hit the ground running and have that function as proof-of-concept and a foundation for the experience to level up over time. There’s so much potential for growth, and Level99 to get bigger and better over time. Concepts like the Void VR: Star Wars Secrets of the Empire come to mind or, for that matter, some of the tech and gameplay from the shuttered Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser.

We now know that Imagineering does have such projects in the pipeline, as prolific patenter Lanny Smoot created the HoloTile floor. For those who are unfamiliar with it, HoloTile is the world’s first and only multi-person, omni-directional, modular, expandable, treadmill floor. If Level99 proves successful, perhaps there’s an opportunity for future investment in this location leveraging some of that technology.

Suffice to say, I’m optimistic about the possibilities presented by Level99 going into the former DisneyQuest space, and offering a spiritual successor to that gamified experience. As a native Michigander, I also love Detroit-style pizza and find that there are no good places to get it at (or even near) Walt Disney World. That alone is enough to sell me on this concept!

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YOUR THOUGHTS

Excited to experience Level99 when it opens in Summer 2026 at Walt Disney World? What do you think of Level99 replacing the defunct NBA Experience at Disney Springs? Think it could be a fitting spiritual successor to DisneyQuest? Will Level99 be a good fit for Walt Disney World? Do you agree or disagree with our assessment? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback—even when you disagree with us—is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!