Four years ago, Chad Wild Clay and Vy Qwaint had an idea.
They had spent well over a decade making videos on YouTube, building their kids’ entertainment brand, Spy Ninjas, to more than 44 million subscribers and 15 billion views across multiple channels. They’d launched legions of Spy Ninjas merch, signed a graphic novel deal with Scholastic, and designed their own mobile game.
It was time for something bigger.
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“The reason we acquired the building was because we were filming our YouTube videos in Las Vegas,” Clay tells Tubefilter. “A lot of them, we film outside. It’s extremely hot. So we were filming fight scenes in 107-degree weather. We were like, ‘This is too hot. We need air conditioning!'”
Clay and Qwaint–who have been married since 2011–didn’t stop at air conditioning. It wasn’t long into the planning process for their new filming headquarters that they realized the building could be much more than a production studio.
“We thought, well, since we’re not going to be filming and using it every day, what if we built something that we could open up to our viewers?” Clay says.
And thus, Spy Ninjas HQ was born.
The massive adventure park is 12 minutes from the Las Vegas Strip and is the first adventure park to open that’s based entirely on a YouTube-born IP. It has thousands of square feet of interactive activities, including a ropes course, multi-level escape rooms, trampolines, climbing walls, axe throwing, a retro-style arcade (something Clay is particularly fond of), virtual reality suites, a “rage room” where attendees can use various implements to take their frustration out on fruits (which are then donated to a local rescue farm), and the largest indoor zipline in Vegas.
“We tried to make everything as on brand as possible,” Clay says. The messaging kids see as they come into the park encourages them to use the activities to train up their Spy Ninja skills. (The HQ also has an “Incognito Café” serving food and drink, and gets every kid to wear Spy Ninjas grippy socks while they’re running around.)
Clay and Qwaint say they made the decision to open the park “out of a lot of confidence.”
“We just thought, we’re going to be doing this brand forever, and we want to keep growing it,” he says. “This is something that could help grow the brand and make it more immersive and engaging for our viewers, and hopefully get more excitement around the brand. It’s a very risky move, and it wasn’t an easy one to make, and as time went by, it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”
“I remember having a meeting a long time ago with Chad and a few other friends when the brand was growing so fast, and we were having like 400 million views per month,” Qwaint adds. “We were like, ‘Okay, so, guys, where is this gonna go?’ And we jokingly said, ‘A theme park, like Harry Potter World.’ That was something that was a goal, but we joked about it. That was the top tier, ‘we’ve made it’ goal. That’s the biggest thing you can possibly do. And now we’re here.”
Spy Ninjas HQ held its official grand opening March 9, and counted nearly 3,500 visitors that day.
Clay and Qwaint were involved in every aspect of developing the park during its three years of construction, but now that it’s open (every day except Tuesdays, with 3 hours of park access costing $40/person), they’re pretty hands-off on the day-to-day running. They have around 80 employees managing operations, and say their core focus remains on producing more Spy Ninjas content while they see how things shake out with the park.
“The plan is, let’s see how it goes,” Clay says. “Let’s see if it can sustain itself. We’ll see how much we have to do marketing. That’ll be something to learn more about. The bigger picture, the bigger goal, is if this does go well, we’d love to create more of these all around the country.”
So, keep an eye out: In a few years, there could be some super-spies moving in down the street.
