▼ Culture May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor The esports behemoth DreamHack returns to its live form in June. BY DANNY GALLAGHER T he first DreamHack tourna- ment scored some serious points with gamers and the city when it moved from Austin to Dallas at the Kay Bailey Hutchi- son Convention Center in 2019. The weekend event packed an impres- sive number of professional and amateur es- ports gaming tournaments and contests, with $2 million in prize money on the line. It covered just about every kind of gaming competition your mind could muster, from classic arcade games to modern team battles like Rocket League and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. DreamHack even got Jeff Freakin’ Goldblum to make a very public ap- pearance at the gathering. Thanks to COVID, DreamHack hasn’t had a chance to top its impressive start in Dallas until now. “We’ve been waiting for this ever since 2019 when we hosted our first DreamHack after moving from Austin,” says Shahin Zar- rabi, DreamHack’s vice president of strategy and growth . DreamHack returns with a three-day gathering of competitive gaming and other interactive events and showcases for all strides of gamers starting on Friday, June 3 at the downtown convention center. The second incarnation of DreamHack in Dallas is happening under the banner of a new corporate merger between several companies and conventions. Last year, DreamHack announced a merger with the esports giant ESL Gaming that will bring huge, prestigious tournaments like the Intel Extreme Masters tour featuring the world’s top CounterStrike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) players, and the finals for the first all-female CS:GO tournament with a combined prize pool of $400,000. Even less tech-heavy forms of gaming 14 like tabletop and board games are getting a massive amount of playtime at the next DreamHack thanks to partnerships with companies such as Wizards of the Coast, the Washington-based game publisher behind massive franchises like Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. “I think that’s really cool,” Zarrabi says. “In a period of time were people are talking about VR and the Metaverse, that is still growing.” More recently, DreamHack also an- nounced a partnership with the long run- ning A-Kon anime cosplay convention, which will run the same weekend at the Ir- ving Convention Center, by offering bundle packages for attendees of both events. “Now we’re a much larger organization with much more backing,” Zarrabi says. “Since DreamHack is a platform that brings a lot of different gaming activities to one place, it’s not just one tournament. It’s not just one convention focusing on one game. We have so many different esports tourna- ments and cosplayers dressing up as their fa- vorite characters. We have musical artists coming. We have tabletop gaming. We have game publishers and everything gaming un- der one roof.” It also makes sense that the next Dream- Hack would be even bigger and more ambi- tious than its first Dallas gathering; they’ve had three years to plan the experience. “Full transparency, we obviously had some scenarios where we thought we could open in 2020 or 2021 and just as everyone else or any event organizer or someone planning their wedding or a birthday party or whatever, we had to push that back and couldn’t host those events,” Zarrabi says. “Now is the first time we’re confident we can host an event starting next month. How we use that time is reorganizing the entire organization behind DreamHack, reevaluat- ing our priorities and how we make sure to bring the gaming community to life in the very best way for all those gamers out there who are planning to come to our event.” DreamHack is also lucrative for the city thanks to the tens of thousands of attendees it brings to Dallas. According to a study con- ducted by DreamHack following the 2019 gathering, the event brought over 30,000 people to the downtown area, who spent $3 million at nearby hotels and restaurants and on services like deliveries and transporta- tion. “Texas in general and Dallas in specific as well as Austin in the past, of course, has a very large gaming community and a lot of content Danny Gallagher Two pro-esports teams face off in a round of Rocket League during the 2019 Dreamhack tournament at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center. creators are out of Dallas,” Zarrabi says. “A lot of professional esports teams, some of the largest in the world and even the smaller ones are based in the region. So for us, that just makes sense because we’re coming to the heart of gaming and esports in the U.S.” ▼ ARTS MONSTER MASH-UP C SOMETHING WEIRD IS COMING TO GRAPEVINE MILLS COURTESY OF STRANGER THINGS AND MEOW WOLF. BY DANNY GALLAGHER an you remember the last time you went to a mall? Thanks to sites like Amazon and apps like Uber Eats, go- ing to the mall these days feels like a visit to a Smithsonian museum of commerce re-cre- ating the way people used to shop. The Grapevine Mills mall owned by Si- mon Property Group is fighting the ravages of age and an evolving economic system by hosting two popular interactive stores and exhibitions that will roll out over the course of the next 12 months or so. First, the official Stranger Things Store experience based on the popular Netflix sci- fi drama announced it will open a branch of its walkthrough experience through the town of Hawkins and the Upside Down. Then, the New Mexico-based art collective Meow Wolf announced that a new surreal exhibition space is planned for the Grape- vine mall, set to open sometime in 2023. The Stranger Things Store concept first opened locations in New York and Los An- geles with plans to open 10 new locations in other cities including Dallas, according to the store’s website. The store is more than just a place to spend money on Stranger Things T-shirts, Pop! dolls and other associ- ated merchandise. It’s a complete experi- ence that creates scenes from the show’s four hit seasons. Guests will be transported back to the 1980s when they can visit places like Hawkins Middle and High School during the annual Snow Ball dance, the famous al- phabet wall in the Byers family living room and even the Upside Down where they’ll come to face to flowering face with a De- mogorgon. Even though this is technically a store, it’s bound to attract a huge crowd, so reserva- tions will be the best way of ensuring a spot for a visit. An opening date hasn’t been set yet, but a Feverup page has been set up so people can reserve their spot for the store and “skip the line” when it opens. Then earlier this week, Meow Wolf announced it would build its fourth walkthrough art exhibition in the Grapevine Mills mall. It’s set to open next year, according to the company’s website. Meow Wolf is a colorful, interactive artis- tic experience that encourages guests to walk through, touch and interact with origi- nal psych art pieces and scenes that all weave through each other to create a cohe- sive story and theme. The New Mexico art company opened its first space in Santa Fe in 2016 with The House of Eternal Return, a gi- ant maze of 70 detailed rooms with secret passageways and displays that seem to defy the laws of physics. Guests encounter a gi- ant, Victorian-style house that branches off into a number of different worlds through seemingly impossible ways, some of which return them to the very spot in which they started. Meow Wolf opened two new permanent installations with the Omega Mart in Las Vegas and Convergence Station in Denver in 2021. The Omega Mart’s façade appears as a typical, big box grocery store but the mask is slowly wiped away the closer and deeper guests get into the space. The Convergence Station is even more random as a series of separate dimensions seems to merge into one space. There aren’t any clues as to what might Meow Wolf might be planning for its Grape- vine Mills installation, but the setting itself may be one. A new teaser website called Texas Portals popped up on the Internet fea- turing a cowboy boot that guests are encour- age to “wake up” by clicking on it. The image only reveals a map of the state that produces a series of colorful stickers with every click. Courtesy of Stranger Things Store A guest of the Stranger Things Store in Los Angeles meets a Demogorgon. 1 dallasobserver.com | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUTZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | DALLAS OBSERVER MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 MAY 19–25, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.com
