Otherworld Brand Guidelines: Jordan Renda’s 2019 Columbus Dreamscape and a Philly Sequel

A haunted-house maker builds something bigger.

Otherworld is the work of Jordan Renda, a designer of haunted houses and escape rooms. In a long interview with the attractions trade magazine Blooloop in March 2023, Renda said he had built haunted houses as a child, then ran commercial haunts with his family, starting in an old furniture store in Florida and later in Jacksonville and the Columbus area. He described opening an escape room in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2015 with a scenic designer from the haunt business, and said that bank teams on team-building days became its main customers.

Escape rooms, he told Blooloop, came with a small space and a limited budget. The original idea for Otherworld was a much larger escape room in a rented warehouse, a hybrid of puzzle game and immersive theatre that visitors could explore freely; over time the project moved towards a walk-through art installation instead. Renda named two influences: the City Museum in St. Louis, which he visited as a child, and TransWorld’s Halloween and attractions trade show, which he said he had attended for almost twenty years.

The Columbus venue opened in 2019. PhillyVoice reported in April 2023 that Otherworld opened in Columbus in 2019 and Blooloop reported in May 2023 that it opened to the public on 24 May 2019, after a two-year project to convert an empty sports-goods store. The company’s own account gives the timeline as design from August 2017, construction from June 2018 and opening in spring 2019. WHYY, the Philadelphia public broadcaster, noted in August 2023 that Columbus is Renda’s home town.

Rooms, sensors and a loose story.

Otherworld describes itself as an immersive art museum for all ages. On its website the company gives the Columbus site as 32,000 square feet with more than 40 scenes, 47 rooms, 54 projectors and more than 40 artists, and calls it a mix of large-scale art, “mixed reality playgrounds” and secret passageways. Its own answer to “what is this?” lists the ingredients plainly: large-scale art in the style of Burning Man, immersive theatre, the escape room, the children’s museum and the haunted house. Visitors are free to wander, and some passages have to be crawled through; the company says these make up less than five percent of the exhibits and can be bypassed, and that it plans for visits of one to three hours.

A loose narrative ties the rooms together. The company’s about page casts the visitor as a volunteer beta tester at Otherworld Industries, a technology firm offering “alternate realm tourism,” who is left alone in a deserted research facility and finds a gateway to dreamscapes of alien plants, primordial creatures and abstract light. In the Blooloop interview, Renda explained that the firm in the story tried to harness and control dreams, and that in some rooms the dreams have taken over completely. He said the story is left open to interpretation, with more than one path and two underlying games that echo Otherworld’s escape-room roots, so that most visitors do not finish everything in one visit.

Renda described the making of the rooms as a pipeline rather than a factory: a top-down framework of themes and a rough narrative, then concept artists, 3D modellers and a technology team each reworking the idea in turn. About a hundred people were involved at that point, he said. Blooloop named the projector maker Optoma as a supplier and partner at Columbus. By day, Renda said, the venue draws families and school trips; late on Fridays and Saturdays it hosts DJ events from a stage in the central room.

How immersive art venues present themselves.

Immersive art and experience venues sell a visit rather than an object. When Superblue announced its Miami opening programme in October 2020, The Art Newspaper reported that the company would earn its revenue through ticket sales rather than through sales of artworks. In December 2024 the same paper recalled that it had counted more than 100 large spaces for immersive digital art around the world, a group it called “immersive institutions.”

The companies present themselves through their rooms. Projection-filled halls, where images run across walls, floors and ceilings, sit beside mirrored rooms and colour-saturated light works. Frameless in London opened in October 2022 with four themed galleries of digitised paintings, one of them edged with mirrors, ianVisits reported; Superblue in Miami opened in May 2021 with a mirrored maze by Es Devlin and a light work by James Turrell, according to The Art Newspaper.

Naming is usually plain. Venues tend to carry the company name and the city, as in Superblue Miami, and shows and rooms take descriptive titles: the four permanent galleries at Frameless are called Beyond Reality, Colour in Motion, The World Around Us and The Art of Abstraction, The Art Newspaper reported in 2024. Both companies also list a café and private-event hire on their own websites, alongside their tickets.

Corporate pages are where founders, studios and owners appear. Artists and studios are credited by name, such as teamLab, DRIFT or Random International at Superblue, and partnerships with museums and production studios are announced in public: Frameless Creative’s touring work with London’s National Portrait Gallery, made with the studio Cinesite, was reported by The Art Newspaper in 2024 and 2025. This guide sets out what dated sources say about each company, and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

A second city, then a games hall.

The second Otherworld opened in Northeast Philadelphia in August 2023. WHYY reported that week that it filled a 40,000-square-foot former retail space with more than 50 scenes, made by hundreds of artists and engineers, and that Renda, whom it called Otherworld’s chief executive, described it as “a 2.0 version.” At its centre is an artificial-intelligence entity called ATAM; Renda told WHYY that about 20 percent of the rooms were made by local artists, including one by the Philadelphia collective MZ.ICAR. Earlier that year he told Blooloop that the partner for Philadelphia was Thirteenth Floor Entertainment Group, a company he had known since his haunted-house days, which would handle marketing and day-to-day operation once his team had designed and built the site. The Philadelphia website today credits Otherworld Holdings LLC and Thirteenth Floor Entertainment Group.

Back in Columbus, the company added Gamegrounds, which the Columbus magazine (614) reported in April 2025 had opened that February in the same building as Otherworld. It takes up 12,000 square feet and has twelve room-scale carnival and arcade games with a neon, surreal look, among them a ball toss aimed at the mouth of a giant clown and Space Boopers, in which players shoot at alien ships on the ceiling. The Otherworld website calls it a sister concept, “a surreal, artist-designed gaming experience from the creators of Otherworld.”

For a design guide, Otherworld shows how a venue can be branded as a place inside a story: a fictional company, a deserted lab and rooms that slide into dream. Compare Meow Wolf, a story-led art venue that grew from an artists’ collective, and AREA15. For this guide we use violet, night ink, teal and orchid with a wide sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Otherworld’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.