Pirate Experience Nice

The starting point

This is the first collaboration between this operator and the Pirate Experience licence, and the brand's second venue after Paris.

The principle is no longer the Paris one. In Paris, the course had to be invented. Here it already exists: drawn, built, opened and traded. The operator is not buying an idea, they are buying a venue that already runs, with its six rooms, its games, its operating system and the training of its teams.

The design decision

Pirate Experience does not stand alone here. It is built into a multi-activity entertainment centre bringing together a bowling alley, arcade games, darts, a colour room and a brick room, a karaoke room and a bar. A Prison Island sits right beside the course.

This is exactly the situation the format was designed for. A tunnel-format action game takes in one group every ten minutes. In Nice the course fits into 140 m². It uses little floor area for the throughput it delivers, and it does not compete with the other attractions in the centre: it feeds them. A group coming off the course heads for the bar, the bowling alley or the karaoke.

The design work

The Nice course takes the Paris grammar and redraws it for a unit with different dimensions. The hold, the attack, the captain's cabin, the treasure door and the treasure room are all there. The cave, however, is split in two: two rooms instead of one, because the centre's column grid would not take the large one.

Around the game rooms, the briefing and the weighing of the loot close the course. The whole thing fits into 140 m², access and circulation included.

Every room is dimensioned in area and ceiling height. Those are the two figures that decide what a set can hold, and they are what a licensee must be able to check before signing.

The build

Works are under way. Opening is planned for December 2026.

The sets leave the workshop before they reach the site. That is the moment a turnkey course stops being a drawing.

What Pix does, exactly

Pix works for the Pirate Experience brand, not for the operator. The brand delivers its course to the licensee; Pix is the design office that fits it into a unit the brand did not draw.

The scope comes down to four deliverables: the 2D drawings, the layout of the elements inside the game rooms, the lighting plan, and the coordination of the decoration works through to handover.

This is the part of the arrangement nobody sees, and without which a licence does not hold. A turnkey course has to land on its feet in any unit: different dimensions, different ceiling heights, different circulation. Without a design office redrawing it for every venue, the brand delivers a theoretical plan and the site improvises.