In 2022, we bought our name back. That sentence sounds simple. It wasn't.

Secret Location was founded in 2008 in Toronto by a small group of digital artists working out of a borrowed basement. The founding belief was straightforward: technology could do something more interesting than sell things. We made websites, games, apps — whatever let us experiment with what screens and code could create.

Those experiments started winning things. Two Emmys. A Peabody. A handful of Webbys and Cannes Lions. We weren't trying to build an award-winning studio. We were trying to build things that felt alive. The awards were a side effect of that obsession.

The entertainment years

In 2016, we joined eOne — a major music, film, and TV producer and distributor. It was a significant move: from a scrappy independent studio to part of a company with real scale in the entertainment industry. We got to collaborate with some of the most talented people in the business. We started thinking seriously about original content.

Then eOne was acquired by Hasbro. And suddenly we were a small, weird digital studio inside a global toy company inside an entertainment conglomerate. We struggled to articulate what we were, why we mattered, where we fit. The answer changed depending on who was asking.

In 2022, Hasbro and eOne decided to divest from several areas — ours among them. There were ideas we'd been nurturing for years that we couldn't let go. So a small group of us did something that felt improbable: we brokered a deal to buy back our name and certain creative assets, and walked back out as an independent studio.

The bet we made

We had one clear idea: stop making things inside other people's visions. Build something of our own.

The question was what. We'd spent fifteen years exploring what technology could do — games, film, VR, interactive installations. We kept coming back to one thing: the most powerful experiences we'd ever made were the ones where the technology disappeared and you were just somewhere else. Transported. Present in a world that wasn't real but felt completely real.

That pointed us toward immersive entertainment — physical spaces where story and technology combine to create worlds you step inside. We'd seen what was being built globally: teams doing extraordinary things with projection, spatial audio, and interactive tech in fixed venues. We thought we could build something better than anything that existed in Canada.

Illuminarium Toronto

We partnered with Illuminarium Experiences and found the space we were looking for: the Fermenting Cellar, a 19th-century brick vault in Toronto's historic Distillery District. 13,500 square feet of raw industrial space with 20-foot ceilings — the perfect blank world to build other worlds inside.

We opened Canada's first permanent immersive entertainment venue in 2023. We've since created four original productions — Waking Wonderland, Lite-Brite: Worlds of Wonder, Journey to Oz, and Mythos — and put them in front of hundreds of thousands of people across four countries.

For the first time in our history, we feel like we know exactly what we are: a studio that builds worlds people step inside. Not art exhibitions. Not passive shows. Places where the story is everywhere — walls, floor, ceiling — and you're in the middle of it.

We're just getting started.