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Epic Games just bought a North Carolina mall for its new headquarters
- eurodancemag 6y agoThats wow now it's time to beat PUBG
- gallamine 6y agoIf anyone is curious, here is the mall in question: https://goo.gl/maps/pdJPjXz1zbrNmXSn8 https://goo.gl/maps/pdJPjXz1zbrNmXSn8 I grew up down the road from this place.
- morsch 6y agoHere's a video from inside: https://youtu.be/SqhMhJ-uFGY https://youtu.be/SqhMhJ-uFGY There are a couple more like this on YouTube. Dead mall videos are a genre.
- exrackthrow 6y agoThey should call it "Castle".
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vanilla_nut 6y agoI used to work for a company in NYS that used a section of a converted mall for office space. God, that was the worst office space I've ever been in -- the floors moved a ton when you moved your chair, echoed when you walked around, the temperatures were absolutely all over the place depending on how close you were to a heater/cooling vent, and worst of all... malls don't really have windows. Working in a converted mall might as well be working in a prison, for all I can tell. The walkway through the middle was kind of nice (and the food court still functioned as a cafeteria, so you could walk fully indoors during cold winter/hot summer days to get a coffee or lunch)... but I think I'd still rather be able to see the outdoors from my desk.
- quesera 6y agoEpic will be redeveloping the entire 87-acre site, for reopening in 2024. The mall is in Cary, NC (Raleigh-Durham / RTP area). Ironically, I was thinking it'd be kind of cool to work in an old mall building (with the typical US indoor shopping mall layout). Inefficient in many ways (parking, space utilization, HVAC), but the idea of locating teams in small (fishbowl?) office-like pods seems interesting. Natural light would be a problem. The food court could be appealing... Some of the complaints you mention sound like they might be specific to that building? Commercial floors should be standard build slab/tray concrete in a mall or office building. Retail HVAC should be adequate if inefficient.. Then again, a failed mall might have failed for a long list of reasons, and a crappy physical plant is definitely one of them!
- xnyan 6y agoI did some construction work at this mall in college. Of the many many problems, natural light is probably number 1. It's an absolute dungeon, dark and oppressive. I don't see how you fix it besides blowing it up and starting over.
- Grazester 6y agoAnything can be done especially if you have the will and the money.
- r00fus 6y agoI thought Epic was moving there because of the money savings...
- falcolas 6y agoMoney's not infinite (not even Epic's money). Much of the time, it's better (cost-effective) to demolish and start fresh, especially if the foundation and infrastructure are even remotely sketchy. Demolishing isn't really that expensive, at this kind of scale.
- birdyrooster 6y agoRackspace did a similar thing in San Antonio. There are many photos of the transition here: https://www.mysanantonio.com/lifestyle/slideshow/Photos-show-the-abandoned-Windsor-Park-Mall-165295.php https://www.mysanantonio.com/lifestyle/slideshow/Photos-show...
- notwhereyouare 6y agodid I miss the after photos? That seems to be all before photos
- Rendello 6y agouBlock origin blocks all of the "after" picures but none of the before ones, I was confused for a good two minutes!
- msisk6 6y agoYeah, that was fun. I worked in the Rackspace Austin office (an old call center building with it's own problems) but I often had to be in San Antonio for meetings. The noise was crazy. Even after taking steps to address the noise it was still an issue. Not much you can do with all the concrete a mall is typically made of. And the 2nd floor shook and moved around a lot after folks moved in. It was actually nauseating.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoI'm no expert, but I have a little experience with sound mitigation. IME, the effort needed to reduce unwanted noise depends a lot on the frequency range. Very roughly speaking, dampening high-frequency sounds can be done with relatively thin and light sound-absorbing materials. Lower-frequency noise, including vibrations that shake the building's superstructure, require more extensive modifications. It would be awesome if an actual acoustic engineer or architect could weigh in on this.
- xnyan 6y agoIn college, I pulled a gas line through 30 feet of existing retail space at this very mall for a retrofit asian bistro. It's an absolute dump, no natural light, sprawling and fundematly unfixable early 80s bad mall architecture. I have a friend who lives across the street from Epic's existing HQ. It looks like a fun-looking building to work in, I have a hard time imagining Cary Towne Center not being a downgrade no matter how much cash you throw at renovation. Just getting the all-permeating smell of stale roasted popcorn out of the concrete is going to take a small fortune.
- Gabriel_Martin 6y agoYou say "no matter how much cash you throw at renovation", but I think you may be underestimating just how much Fortnite alone makes, apparently in 2019, Fortnite brought in revenues of $1.8 billion. With costs of labor in NC, I'm betting they're feeling pretty confident about the renovation.
- Animats 6y agoIn 2020, Epic's revenues were somewhere above $4 billion. I'm sure they got that mall really, really cheap. Here's the current store list.[1] They're down to 22 small tenants, including the co-working space and the model train club. [1]https://www.shopcarytownecentermall.com/directory https://www.shopcarytownecentermall.com/directory
- wtallis 6y agoI've seen a $95 million figure reported for Epic's purchase. They're buying it from a group who picked it up in 2019 for $31.5 million after IKEA cancelled plans to build a store there.
- hakfoo 6y agoThey're pushing out a model train club? That's full moustache-twirling evil. Serious pivot: there are a lot of hobby, public-service, and charitable organizations which could use permanent, cheap space with minimal features: woodworking and craft groups, maker spaces, library branches, model train clubs, indoor community gardening, political party offices, various service organizations. Why is there no efficient strategy to get them into the large number of empty mall spaces?
- sli 6y agoIf the teams are small enough, they could be put in the vacant shops. It would probably still feel a bit open-plan, though.
- kingnothing 6y agoSounds terrible unless they're able to add windows to all of the current stores.
- nickelcitymario 6y agoI've long said that if I ever struck it stupid rich, I'd buy a mall to live in. It would still have stores. I'd pay to have those stores stocked. Ideally it would have a 90s-era movie theatre in it, too. But otherwise it would be empty. Why? So that I can live every day like I'm the last surviving human. Dawn of the Dead, minus the flesh eaters. (Alternative plan: buy up a ghost town. Same plan, otherwise.)
- Melting_Harps 6y ago> I've long said that if I ever struck it stupid rich, I'd buy a mall to live in. > It would still have stores. I'd pay to have those stores stocked. Ideally it would have a 90s-era movie theater in it, too. But otherwise it would be empty. Remember that 90s kid movie 'Blank Check?' I wrote a short fan art film script as a 13 year old that followed a similar premise, the origin of the funds were that the kid was a 'hacker' so the kid stole the funds from a crooked stockbroker firm trying to launder their money and ended up taking so much he ended up living in an abandoned mall and 'sold warez' out of the stores with various business models.. I recently saw the notebook and I had clearly recently just saw that movie with Angelina Jolie and Swordfish when I wrote that as that was around the time I had just discovered Newsgroups. I somehow managed to get to the beginning of the 2nd act and just forgot about it entirely until the day I re-read it, haha. Which for being 13 was more resolve than I thought I had.
- nickelcitymario 6y agoI'd watch this movie. Especially if it somehow had Hackers-era Angelina Jolie, Mathew Lillard, and Jonny Lee Miller. Or, plot twist: Those 3 are now the old/lame parents of the young hacker(s).
- Melting_Harps 6y ago> I'd watch this movie. Especially if it somehow had Hackers-era Angelina Jolie, Mathew Lillard, and Jonny Lee Miller. Or, plot twist: Those 3 are now the old/lame parents of the young hacker(s). Maybe I should revisit that script then... I've definitely gotten more ideas about where it would go now that we're in 2021 and I have way more to work with to flesh it out. It probably wouldn't end up appealing to the Disney crowds like the original, though. Ha. How is the book app going? I found more old scripts in boxes I want to update when I have the time, some of my other fan art pilots are digital but lack the proper format of a script and your project sounds interesting for amateur writers as I imagine you have specific templates for the specific type of writing one would use. All of my formatting is all off and looks like I just wrote long format stories in paragraph with quotes for dialogue as I didn't know any better and just did what I saw in books and wrote with total abandon in a way that only made sense to me. What would be cool would be able to denote where the arcs and acts are as you're writing to be able to go back to after long pauses. I'd pay for that! ;) Sidenote: I think I enjoyed finding out out Ray Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 on a rented typewriter at UCLA just as much as reading the book, and especially more than watching the movie.
- acheron 6y agoThey should release a new ZZT world set in an office/mall to celebrate.
- Apocryphon 6y agoEpic seems to be the one company in the Research Triangle that's been making the news often, recently. Wonder how the startup scene has been in Raleigh–Durham–Cary.
- corysama 6y agoProbably got a good deal on it. Malls were overbuilt for quite a while and oversupply has had many of them struggling for over a decade.
- mhh__ 6y agoThey're all rammed with tricks to get you to consume, too.
- entangledqubit 6y agoI believe the Google X building in Mountain View on San Antonio used to be the Mayfield Mall. They did a nice job renovating it for their purposes but you still feel like you're at a mall when you go through the building.
- athms 6y agoHP did the initial renovation of Mayfield Mall into office space in the late 1980s. They moved out in the early 2000s, deciding to consolidate operations after acquiring Compaq.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoWill Former Malls soon become the new Former PizzaHuts?
- wowzers123 6y agoMeh, Tencent owns a huge portion of them. At least there are still good American game dev jobs though.
- wowzers123 6y agoPray tell, the downvote without an explanation. Business with China is good and all until you remember what happened with Blizzard and what happens with Disney, NBA...
- AceyMan 6y agoGoogle is in the middle of refitting the former Westside Pavilion, located at Westwood & Pico, as a new Los Angeles office. The last I'd seen a few months ago, it'd been taken down to the floors and structural risers; all the walls and other partitions are gone, so they'll be able to include natural light however they see fit.
- generj 6y agoThat’s one way to encourage your employees to walk a certain amount per day.
- ReallyAnonymous 6y agoI grew up in the 80s going to the Cary Mall. It was awesome. I used to converge at the arcade where my dad would occasionally give me $.50 to play 2 games......Mostly I would watch. Anyway, it's great to see my hometown have Epic and SAS as headquarters as this usually leads to good paying middle class and above jobs ..........