Technologies

Meow Wolf Enters the Mini-Golf Metaverse

Exclusive: Walkabout Mini Golf is adding a new VR course designed by immersive art pioneer Meow Wolf. The designers gave us hints of what’s to come.

Walkabout Mini Golf, one of the best multiplayer apps for VR headsets, is adding a course made by art collective Meow Wolf and based on the group’s real-world experiences. It’s Meow Wolf’s first big dip into virtual reality, and it’s scheduled to arrive later this year.

It’s not as strange a move as you might think for Meow Wolf, the group behind the cult hit House of Eternal Return, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a growing bunch of other in-person destinations (Omega Mart in Las Vegas, Convergence Station in Denver).

Or maybe it is.

But in a VR/AR landscape that still doesn’t really know what a metaverse is supposed to be, this collaboration could point toward creative teams actually trying to figure this out ahead of a wave of new headsets coming later this year.

Let me back up a bit. I find well-built, custom-crafted VR experiences wonderful. I also love immersive physical spaces and theater experiences that take similar care with how groups of people explore strange new worlds together.

VR and AR’s metaverse push of the last couple of years, however, has tried to just create big open social tools with no real guidance or superstructure. These places — VRChat, the soon-to-be-closed AltSpace VR, Meta’s flailing Horizon Worlds, Rec Room — seem to either be spots where fun stuff emerges, or confusing and poorly run experiments that feel empty or alienating unless you know who you’re meeting with and where you’re going.

Sometimes, I find that it’s the in-person experiences that can craft what the virtual ones can’t yet. Meow Wolf’s in-person, multilayered, maximally dense art collective spaces struck me as the sort of way to guide more-elaborate social virtual worlds of the future. The Meow Wolf–Walkabout collaboration sounds like a bizarre and whimsical mirror-world experience that’s also a foot in the door for Meow Wolf’s future explorations in VR and AR.

meow-wolf-walkabout-vr-2 — Meow Wolf’s course will involve an intelligent alien world called Numina that plays with reality.

Meow Wolf

Weird golf

«We’ve been dreaming about making mini-golf forever,» Caity Kennedy, one of Meow Wolf’s co-founders and the group’s senior creative director, said to me during a Zoom chat. «Since a lot of our exhibits are a big thing compartmentalized with a bunch of little things, mini-golf is like a pretty hilarious and very accessible version of that.»

Another Meow Wolf co-founder, Vince Kadlubek, had been playing in VR games and experiences for years, which led to the collaboration with the team at Walkabout Mini Golf. Meow Wolf had made its own AR companion app for the House of Eternal Return installation years ago, but translating some of those designs into a VR mini-golf course is a different type of crossover experience.

Kennedy already uses some VR art tools, including Gravity Sketch, to work on designs for Meow Wolf’s physical installations. Gravity Sketch was also used as a collaborative place to dream up the VR course. «We have VR artists, we have VR developers that are working on things,» Kennedy hinted, suggesting that Walkabout’s relatively contained structure might be a good starting point.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Walkabout Mini Golf has already become one of the best social VR destinations if you have a small group of friends. This game, and Demeo, are where I tend to join a few old friends for a casual game that lasts about an hour, allows us to chat and explore, and then stop. It feels like going for a walk, or getting coffee, or going to a museum. Or playing mini-golf. Unlike more-intense VR games, or way too open social worlds with no real focus, it gives us something to do while we’re talking. It works.

«It aligned a lot with our sense of humor,» Kennedy said of the collaboration. «You can be good at golf, you can be bad at golf, you can just not play golf and go explore.»

Golf as a strange doorway

Walkabout’s golf courses have already been getting a lot more immersive over time, becoming more like walk-through theme parks or stories than just a bunch of golf holes. A course based on the classic Jim Henson film Labyrinth is like a tour of the film’s plot, and even has a side labyrinth to wander around in. There are Jules Verne courses. There’s a Myst course.

The Meow Wolf course, based on the living other-dimensional jungle world of Numina that’s part of Meow Wolf’s in-person Convergence Station experience in Denver, is meant to be a sort of parallel virtual visit, or maybe a golf course that ends up being visited by and mutated by Numina.

Kennedy hints that the way Meow Wolf’s course will work is a lot stranger and more whimsical than even previous Walkabout courses, which of course excites me. Also, the presence of Numina as a character will loom large over the experience, a «living universe that is curious about us simple animals that are wandering around, falling down stairs and things.»

«It’s not just a duplicate,» Kennedy said of the VR version of Numina versus the physical creation in Denver. «There will be a familiar experience that is twisted and freed by the mechanics of virtual reality. People who’ve been to Numina in real life [at Meow Wolf] will see a lot of things that they got to see in real life, but a lot of people who have only seen pictures will get to wander around something akin to the pictures they’ve seen.

«But, lots of differences: I mean, gravity doesn’t exist in VR. We can make things slip. We don’t have to have electrical wires, or speakers or a lot of the things that limit what we’re able to do. And we’re able to have animation that we can’t do. There’s so much fluidity that is really only possible at the moment in VR.»

A massive furry art creature sculpture in a dim jungle world room — One of the areas in Numina at Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station in Denver. The VR experience will refer to the real-world place in strange ways.

Scott Stein/CNET

Virtual and real winking at each other

Disney has explored crossovers of the virtual and real. It’s created a Star Wars Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge VR game that’s set in the outer realms of the same planet Batuu as the real-life Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge parks. In theory, visiting the virtual game could inspire you to go to the actual park, or the game could be a living souvenir.

Future planned metaverse-ish explorations could have a similar vibe. Meow Wolf’s own physical spaces communicate with each other via telephones, and a ton of merchandise already extends the stories into some take-home souvenir directions. You can buy Omega Mart merchandise from the alternate-universe store’s gift shop, for example, or get books and artifacts, much like you can at Disney’s stores in Galaxy’s Edge. In some ways, Meow Wolf’s virtual spaces may aim to do the same.

«Mini-golf is not a collective world, so there can’t be live feeds into anything, but having connections between the two, where people can at least see one from the other, or use something they found in one to affect the other… this is going to be kind of our test case,» Kennedy said. «This is our first foray into connecting a real world exhibit with virtual reality.»

Lucas Martell, the director of Walkabout Mini Golf, said the Meow Wolf course «is going to be much more of an experience,» admitting that the company is starting to flex out with more experimental designs that start becoming more like one-hour excursions for groups, as opposed to just a casual sport.

Even though Walkabout is a VR game, the company has also released a phone-based version that’ll use augmented reality, sort of: Courses can be seen through the phone screen, and swings happen by moving your phone like a real putter. The phone version is arriving ahead of Meow Wolf’s course, meaning more people could try it out.

«The irony is that a lot of people playing probably haven’t even been to an actual Meow Wolf,» Martell said. Considering Meow Wolf is still an organization some people haven’t heard of, much less seen, a little mini golf game like Walkabout could be a chance to open up awareness to a whole bunch more people. As someone who’s been lucky enough to check out the real-world Meow Wolf spaces, I’m looking forward to visiting a small virtual shard of it in my home.

Meow Wolf’s course isn’t available until later this year, but I can’t wait to play it with a few friends. We could explore those strange spaces together in VR as we talk, just like we’d do in the real world, too.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Endless Gaming Crossovers

In navigating my own love-hate relationship with this phenomenon, I talked to some of the devs behind them to get a better sense of how these crossovers work and why companies pursue them.

When my friends want to play Magic: The Gathering, I wade through my two-dozen or so decks built for Commander — the card game’s casual, multiplayer format. I might choose the deck built around Elenda, the Dusk Rose, a vampire saint who can create legions of vampires. Maybe I’ll take my Narset, Enlightened master deck, which lets me cast powerful spells for free when she attacks. Both Elenda and Narset are original characters from Magic: The Gathering.

Or maybe I’ll grab my Lightning, Army of One deck, constructed around the Final Fantasy 13 character, so I can attack people for absurdly high amounts of damage. Maybe my Godzilla deck will engage in glorious combat against my friends’ decks led by characters from Dracula or Warhammer 40K. Would Eowyn from Lord of the Rings be a better match-up against the forces of the Imperium?

It’s a double-edged sword, this impulse toward crossovers. And it’s happening in games far beyond Magic: The Gathering.

Overwatch featured skins from Persona 5 in September, Halo armor and weapons showed up in Helldivers 2, and edgy looter shooter Borderlands 4 is showing up in… golf game PGA Tour 2K25. The crossover crown lies eternally with Fortnite, thanks to its never-ending influx of skins from games, movies, comics and real-life celebrities — leading players using the Sabrina Carpenter skin to stop shooting each other and, say, hold impromptu concerts instead.

When the elements fit each other are handled with care, it’s a fun way for fans to engage with multiple interests simultaneously. But when it feels carelessly thrown-together or when the elements don’t mesh, it can feel like a cash grab that hollows out the original property. And what works for one player might feel egregious or immersion-breaking to another.

«Am I the problem?» I ask myself, as I work on a fourth Magic deck built around a Final Fantasy character, after spending hundreds of dollars on cards and accessories from the set.

I do realize that the money I spent on the release event and weekly drafts screamed to Hasbro, «It’s working!» At the same time, playing with cards from that Final Fantasy set was also the most fun I’ve had with Magic in several years.

Corporations betting big on brand crossovers feels like the unavoidable consequence of a world in which players look more and more for customization and ways to show off their personalities and interests, which dovetails with companies looking for lucrative ways to attract new players and increase revenue in ongoing games. Is other media filtering into popular games about the joy of including familiar faces, or does it turn characters into digital bumper stickers, starved of their identity from their original context?

The answer, like it or not, is both.

Money is a big part of the motivation, but expanding reach and offering customization also factor in

Blending different properties together generally requires an intense collaboration between the property owners and the game inviting the crossover. So what makes these gaming collaborations worth it for those parties?

There’s a financial incentive, to be certain, as Hasbro has made astonishingly clear. In its second-quarter 2025 earnings call, CEO Chris Cox noted that Magic: The Gathering’s Final Fantasy set made $200 million in revenue in one day, while it took the Lord of the Rings set six months to hit that milestone. To put those two collaborations in the context of original Magic: The Gathering sets, the bestselling Magic set before Lord of the Rings was Modern Horizons, which made $200 million over two years.

Admittedly, $200 million in 24 hours is performance that Magic: The Gathering will likely struggle to replicate, even with the overabundance of outside properties coming next year: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Hobbit, Star Trek and Marvel. Still, Cox said the company feels good about the collaborations set to launch next year in terms of pleasing players and bringing in revenue. And Final Fantasy ultimately points to the financial power of a good gaming crossover, one where the properties are handled thoughtfully and intentionally (even if some of that intention is making the collaboration more collectible).

To better understand how and why these crossovers happen, I talked with some of the people powering these gaming collaborations.

There were «a lot of clues» both internally and externally that Magic could support these kinds of crossovers in the game, said Aaron Forsythe, Magic: The Gathering’s vice president of research and development.

Sets like Lord of the Rings and Final Fantasy can also help funnel new players into a game that has been around since 1993.

«With Final Fantasy, we have seen a marked increase in play participation, especially among players who haven’t previously participated in our Organized Play programs,» said Rebecca Shepard, the vice president of franchise for Magic: The Gathering. That participation also extends after the launch of sets based on the other properties, which Magic brands Universes Beyond.

She noted that Universes Beyond releases also lead to increased interest in older products, demonstrating the crossovers’ ability to drive interest in the game’s original creations.

Magic’s designers have spent decades creating multiple in-game worlds or «planes» with their own lore, characters and mechanics. To a certain degree, crossovers are baked into its premise.

But what about something with a considerably smaller scope, like the hero shooter Overwatch 2? The team-based game is set in nearish future Earth, where other Blizzard games like Diablo and Starcraft are minimal parts of the world as references and outfits. But aside from a small Lego crossover, other external properties were mostly only winked at… until the game introduced skins from the popular manga and anime One-Punch Man back in 2023.

The game’s collaborations started out as infrequent events, but now show up roughly every season.

The Overwatch team was nervous for its first collaboration and took a cautious approach, said Aimee Dennett, Overwatch’s associate director of product management. Devs wanted to ensure that heroes were still recognizably Overwatch characters while also maintaining the integrity of the game’s lore. The solution was described as «our characters are cosplaying,» meaning that the Overwatch heroes maintain the iconic parts of their visual identity, while incorporating elements that are recognizable as the characters from the crossover properties.

There are also internal motivations for these opportunities.

«We’ve found that it has such a positive effect on the team,» said Overwatch’s Art Director, Dion Rogers. People who work on the game are also fans of these properties, and the opportunity to design those crossovers can be a creative spark for the developers.

Fortnite didn’t start the party, but it did invite basically everyone

Fortnite is the de facto example of crossovers in gaming. It represents an astonishing evolution of a concept that kicked off decades ago.

Video game publishers were firmly protective of their properties to keep their games unique, but gaming website Giant Bomb asserts that crossovers started in earnest with 1992’s Battle Soccer, where Godzilla could take the pitch against giant mech Gundams and superheroes from Japanese TV. A few years later, Marvel’s X-Men faced off against Street Fighter characters in a move that would eventually spawn the Marvel vs. Capcom series of fighting games.

Crossovers ramped up in the 2000s with Sonic the Hedgehog and Solid Snake as the first two characters not owned by Nintendo to show up in Smash Bros. Brawl, a few years before horror movie villain Freddy Krueger first appeared in a Mortal Kombat game. Thematically, these all make some sense — but Fortnite took crossovers to another level.

The crossovers started with the Infinity Gauntlet limited-time mode, where players could transform into Thanos, the villain of the 2019 film Avengers: Infinity War. It was quickly followed by the first Marvel-themed skins for Black Widow and Star-Lord that any player could wear. That kicked off a wave of Fortnite crossovers that would grow beyond Marvel to also include DC Comics, Star Wars, celebrities and various other games.

More have followed in Fortnite’s wake. The jump to include characters from other media besides video games has proven popular, with games like Mortal Kombat bringing in the villainous superhuman Homelander from The Boys, and the asymmetrical PVP horror game Dead by Daylight leaning heavily into killers and survivors from various games and movies — and also Nicolas Cage as himself, delivering some truly amazing voice lines.

Still, when it comes to bringing in everything from everywhere, nothing tops Fortnite, where crossover events feel less like guest stars and more like the first stop for major franchise promotion. And the cumulative results are, for lack of a better word, bonkers. Now a squad of Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga and Sabrina Carpenter can face off against a squad made up of Darth Vader, the Joker, Thanos and Mortal Kombat’s Sub-Zero… and then perform *NSYNC’s Bye Bye Bye dance on the villains’ corpses.

Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, declined to comment for this story.

Convenience and customization… at a cost

While crossovers with other properties help bring revenue and new players into games, they also risk alienating players whose primary interest is in their games’ original concepts and who may feel the crossovers move the game away from its identity.

«We listen and learn more than folks realize but at the same time, our goal of making Magic for everyone — because it is — can also frustrate our existing players,» said Shepard in response to a question about the feedback to Universes Beyond and the seemingly polarized responses online.

You can see that frustration in videos from prominent Magic creators, with titles like «The Problems With Universes Beyond — Even if You’re NOT a Hater» and «Half of Magic: The Gathering Will Not Be Magic: The Gathering.» The discussions in those videos touch on multiple elements, but center around the proportion of and execution of Universes Beyond sets and how those sets do or don’t gel with the rest of the game.

That tension exists with most gaming crossovers. I wasn’t initially a fan of Overwatch’s move into collaborations. For me, the image of Doomfist in a yellow suit and flowing cape cheapened a character who’s supposed to be a surly big bad in the Overwatch universe. To me, it felt tonally mismatched with his identity, and I feared Overwatch feeling less like Overwatch as a result.

But the response I saw was largely positive. A change being celebrated doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for the game, nor does outcry mean a change is bad. But there were clearly people who wanted the customization and expression of anime skins, highlighting the tension inherent in gaming collaborations like this.

Magic’s Aaron Forsythe acknowledged the competing interests, saying, «Players that have been with us for a while don’t feel the need for a change of this magnitude, and I appreciate how this hits them. But we’re doing this both because we want to grow the game — and we are — and because we think it’s another really fun way to enjoy it.»

For longstanding fans who have played the game for years, perhaps even decades, it may feel like the resources for the game’s original ideas are being diverted to fuel crossovers.

There are degrees, though. In the case of Magic: The Gathering, one-time Secret Lair drops like Sonic the Hedgehog that mostly show up in casual multiplayer formats may not seem as disruptive. But over the course of next year, Magic will release four more sets based on outside properties, bringing the total to seven such sets in two years. More than any individual card or set, that density of outside properties might feel particularly unwelcome, contributing to the feeling that it’s just Fortnite now.

Everyone is here (and here to stay)

I think a lot of the response to crossovers comes down to two things: how well the concept fits and how good the execution is. Fortnite itself has become a conglomeration of various game types — from Battle Royale to Lego to Ballistic, festivals and Creative modes — so the game featuring skins from all kinds of movies, games and celebrities sort of fits into that «everything for everyone» idea.

Something like Dead by Daylight is an example of using crossovers with a narrower focus, incorporating horror icons that fit its gameplay and lore. Resident Evil characters trying to escape from Halloween’s Michael Myers doesn’t make total sense, but there’s enough of an internal logic in the genres of slasher films and survival horror games for it to work.

And, despite my initial reservations about Overwatch’s collaborations, I was immediately enthralled when I saw Kiriko’s Suki skin from Avatar: The Last Airbender. In addition to giving me a new outlet for my favorite character from the show, it just fit the visual identity and the concept of the Overwatch hero, a protector in her own right.

The people behind the games acknowledge how much that matters. «If we don’t do this right,» Overwatch’s Rogers told me, «the fans will call us out.» Players have their own ideas of what fits and what doesn’t, and they aren’t shy about voicing those feelings. But Rogers said that getting it right instead helps maintain the identity of the game’s heroes.

Similarly, Magic’s Shepard said one step in the process of evaluating potential crossovers is feeling out whether it feels like «an authentic relationship» for the game and its players. The challenge, however, is that each player’s mileage will vary when it comes to that authenticity.

There’s no putting these crossovers back in the box, for better and worse. We’ll continue to have more options to play as our favorite characters across a variety of games. Right now, if I wanted to, I could fire up Street Fighter 6 and play a game as Chun-Li in the context of her original series. I could then swap over to Fortnite and run around sniping people as Chun-Li before logging into Overwatch and playing as Juno in her Chun-Li skin, healing people with a Martian mediblaster. And then over the weekend, I could play Magic: The Gathering with my friends and pull out a deck built around a Chun-Li character card.

For Chun-Li superfans, that’s great. At the same time, my Magic opponents may be sick of playing against characters from Stranger Things, Jurassic Park and Marvel, which might break the immersion of the game for them.

The demand is there and the complaints are valid. Companies will follow the money. But each game’s developers have to find their own way of squaring the crossover — justifying (or not) how another creative world collides with theirs.

For Overwatch’s Dennett, as the game grows and changes, so does the team’s philosophy about collaborations — because pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the hero shooter sparks the imaginations of its player base.

«It’s sort of a self-reinforcing cycle, where our players grow and change so much, and so do the types of collaborations, and the types of collaborations change, which grows and changes our players.»

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