You might be tempted to call AREA15, a development that opens in December a few miles from the Las Vegas Strip, a mall; its investors would prefer that you did not. The word “mall,” in the second decade of the 21st century, has come to be a word for something dying, if not dead. It connotes suburban sprawl, vacant department stores, plummeting real estate values. Accordingly, even though it will most likely feature retail tenants, an ice-cream parlor, a gift shop and a food court, AREA15 is being billed as something fresh and exciting — an “immersive bazaar,” an “experiential retail and entertainment complex,” a place where “artists are front and center.”

The developer Winston Fisher gave me a tour in February, when AREA15 was still a half-built concrete box with construction equipment trundling through the mud. Fisher could nonetheless envision what it would become: “a place of wonder.” Practically speaking, this means that there will be things like an arcade and an escape room, and that even the more traditional retail tenants — a shop selling sneakers, say — will feature some sort of interactive V.R. component. AREA15 will also host events. Fisher rattled off some ideas: “Deep house, E.D.M., drone racing, TED Talks, a barbecue competition.”

As the third-generation representative of Fisher Brothers, a New York real estate development firm, Fisher is well aware of the industry’s anxiety about what’s sometimes called “the experience economy” — the idea that, when it’s possible to buy or watch virtually anything online, the only way to get people to leave their houses and spend money is to offer them a fresh, surprising experience. “Most people in real estate today,” he told me, “are approaching the experience economy from fear.”

The “Dryer Portal” at the House of Eternal Return. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Fisher and I were talking in AREA15’s leasing-and-sales office, a broad, dark space with neon accents that seemed intended to telegraph a sense of playfulness. The room was dominated by two sculptures that were previously manifested at Burning Man: a 12-foot skull with shape-shifting images projected on its surface and a gleaming tangle of stainless-steel piping that was apparently a fully functional car. Fisher showed me renderings of the end point of all the construction. Schematic people danced to a D.J. in the event space; they lifted up their phones to take pictures of a 40-foot bamboo volcano. One long section of the floor plan was blank. It represented the 50,000 square feet of AREA15 that would be given over to the development’s anchor tenant, Meow Wolf. “We’ve blocked this out, because we’re not at liberty to describe what they’re doing yet,” Fisher said coyly.

For people like Fisher, the improbably named Meow Wolf has emerged as the great experiential-economy hope; the company’s most enthusiastic boosters claim that it’s poised to become the Disney of the 21st century. Meow Wolf’s story echoes the classic start-up narrative, in which the brilliant underdogs make it big against improbable odds. Six years ago, the group was an anarchic collective of artists who were barely known outside Santa Fe, N.M., their hometown. They numbered a dozen, or a few dozen, depending on how you felt like counting, and were known for prankish installations and raucous warehouse parties.

In the years since, as the group’s playful aesthetic has aligned with the market’s appetites, it has undergone a dizzying transformation. Meow Wolf has broken ground on a $60 million flagship project in Denver that will have more art-exhibit space than the Guggenheim and signed on to build a three-story, 75,000-square-foot permanent installation in Washington. Visitors to the Denver-area amusement park Elitch Gardens can strap in for a trip on a Meow Wolf ride, complete with laser guns and animatronic creatures; in a few years, you’ll be able to spend the night at the 400-room Meow Wolf hotel in Phoenix. The company produces music videos, runs an annual festival and recently opened a production studio that will churn out television shows and podcasts. It manufactures and sells the Experience Tube, a five-foot length of stretchy fabric that is supposed to foster human connection — if you stick your head in the tube, you are forced to look at the face of the person at the other end instead of your phone — and that baffled Hoda and Kathie Lee when it was featured on the “Today” show in 2017. Thousands of these tubes have since been sold. They retail for $29.95 each, which is perhaps the real punch line to the joke, as well as a microcosm of the Meow Wolf story as a whole: Make something to amuse your friends; discover that it anticipates the zeitgeist; become wildly successful. After Meow Wolf’s most recent fund-raising round concluded earlier this year, what was once a loose confederation of scrappy punks was a corporation with a nine-figure valuation.

House of Eternal Return patrons using an Experience Tube, a Meow Wolf product intended to foster human connection, amid a Nico Salazar installation called ‘‘Hidden Capsule.’’ Jeff Minton for The New York Times

“They’re passionate and they’re genuine,” Fisher said. “They didn’t come into this being a corporation. They’re artists who are now growing up. That’s what I think this new economy is going to bring. It’s people like that who are the next titans.”

Meow Wolf most likely never would have existed without Santa Fe. The city skews older and whiter than the United States as a whole, with a notably high concentration of Ph.D.-holders and artists for a city of its size. It’s politically liberal but aesthetically conservative; a restrictive building-approval process aimed at visual uniformity has protected the historic district around a gorgeously preserved central plaza and resulted in IHOPs and Mattress Centers outfitted in unconvincing imitation-adobe facades. Along Canyon Road, which boasts what locals call the densest collection of art galleries in the world, the region’s rich indigenous history has been metabolized as bronze statues of elk and paintings of coyotes. In Santa Fe, sunsets are psychedelic, income inequality is rampant and basically nothing is open after 8 p.m.

All of which made it an odd place to grow up, particularly if you were a rebellious young person with a chip on your shoulder and a suspicion of established authority. The man who is now Meow Wolf’s chief executive, Vince Kadlubek, 37, was so miserable in high school that he petitioned his teachers to let him work on independent projects instead of coming to class. “I was basically writing pitch decks,” he said. “I was always coming up with ambitious things to try to sell to someone.” In those dark Bush-era days, Kadlubek told me, he felt frustrated by how young, creative-minded people were excluded from the conversation. In a semiautobiographical short story he wrote in 2007, the high-school-age main character “hates school. He hates the government. He hates money. He hates the fake.”

Vince Kadlubek, 37, a Meow Wolf founder who is now its chief executive, in one of the group’s new exhibits. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Kadlubek, who is tall and cleft-chinned and intense, wasn’t much of an artist himself, but he liked hanging out with people who were. In his 20s, he channeled his particular blend of opposition and ambition into hosting parties that were inevitably shut down by the cops. The Meow Wolf legend begins with him persuading his friends to pool their funds to collectively rent a 900-square-foot former hair salon. With space of their own, “we could do really weird things,” Kadlubek recalls in “Meow Wolf: Origin Story,” a documentary the group commissioned about its early days. “We could have sleepovers.” The name for the building, which eventually became the name for the group, was chosen out of a hat, exquisite-corpse style. The collective’s members liked how nonsensical it sounded; it felt appropriate to organize behind this phrase that left the brain feeling a little scrambled.

The group hosted dance nights at the local V.F.W. hall; they put on face paint and glitter leggings and freaked out the tourists with monster battles in the downtown plaza. Sean Di Ianni, a wry, bright-eyed RISD graduate, had just moved to New Mexico for a job. “I was having a really hard time meeting people my age,” he says. “I happened to drive by right after they put the Meow Wolf sign up and saw a bunch of kids smoking cigarettes outside and was like: Hey! I should get in touch with them.” The former salon served as both a project space and a place to congregate. Caity Kennedy, a petite, tattooed artist whose work teeters on the boundary between the beautiful and the grotesque, would text her friends meow now? which roughly translated to: Do you want to go over to the frigid building to glue some trash together with me? A core group began to coalesce — Kadlubek, Di Ianni and Kennedy, along with Matt King, a goofy painter with improbable, abundant hair; goggle-wearing Benji Geary, who was possibly a space alien; Emily Montoya, Benji’s deadpan foil; and Corvas Brinkerhoff, an analytical, motorcycle-riding artist.

Most early Meow Wolf art projects were trash-based, partly because of the thrill that came from transforming detritus — discarded furniture, scraps scavenged from a carpet store’s dumpster — into something magical, partly because they couldn’t afford traditional materials. They built entire imaginary realms out of that trash: futuristic cityscapes, tar pits full of glitter, neon forests. Using castoff objects was also an implicit critique of capitalist consumer culture. For a horror-themed show, Di Ianni built a gift shop where the beautiful, bright packages enclosed disgusting things: chewed-up gum, a dead bird, a handful of gummy bears dissolving in water. “They were supposed to be these fetishized consumer objects,” he says, “but when you looked closely, they were gross.” Over time, Meow Wolf’s art shows became more elaborate and topographical, full of domes and tunnels and human-size bird nests, a maximalist jumble of a dozen people’s aesthetics all cobbled together. When it didn’t work, it was a mess; when it did work, it was a thrilling mess.

The “Cosmic Cave” installation at the House of Eternal Return, designed by the Australian artist Pip & Pop. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Meow Wolf begrudgingly considered itself part of the art world, even as the group felt excluded from it. “We were frustrated by lack of access to consistent opportunity, and to agency,” Kennedy told me. Galleries largely didn’t know what to do with their art: “We work collectively, we make things you can’t buy, that you can’t really document.”

At this point, Meow Wolf wasn’t thinking much about its audience — or maybe it was more that its members’ primary audience was one another. The group held weekly meetings, gatherings that to the uninitiated might have looked more like parties. They sat in a circle on ratty couches and argued about what project to tackle next; often at least one person was on psychedelic drugs. From the earliest days, there was tension between those who wanted to keep things anarchic and open, and a faction, led by Kadlubek and Brinkerhoff, who had bigger ambitions for the group, and who dreamed of building something permanent. When Brinkerhoff brought agendas to a meeting one day, a member of the chaos cohort crumpled one up and tossed it on the floor.

Three years after the collective’s founding, it was invited to create an immersive art installation at Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts. What they came up with was goofily grandiose in typical Meow fashion: a 73-foot, dimension-hopping, time-transcending galleon christened the Due Return. The two-story ship was an enormous explorable sculpture full of gangplanks, interactive light elements, fanciful flora and fauna and a 20,000-word log book hinting at a multilayered back story. The $50,000 they raised to build it, partly via Kickstarter, was by far the most they’d ever spent on a project. Making the Due Return required an almost cultish commitment, and as usual, none of the 100-plus artists who worked on the project were paid. By the time the ship was dismantled three months later, it had been visited 25,000 times.

Early Meow Wolf founders circa 2010, from the book “Of Infinite Space.” David Loughridge

Clearly there was an appetite for the kind of art — large-scale, interactive, family-friendly — that Meow Wolf excelled at. The success of the Due Return spurred invitations from galleries across the country. This should have been a time of triumph; instead, the collective felt depleted, on the verge of disbanding. “We would send 15 people to New York or Chicago for three weeks to build an installation at a gallery that wasn’t going to charge admission,” Di Ianni said. “If there was any financial support, it was superminimal and would barely cover the cost of materials.” There seemed to be an unspoken assumption that artists should sap themselves for their craft. “We’d be taking time off work, paying for things out of our own pockets, just trying to make things work on a shoestring budget — it just wasn’t sustainable.”

Equally frustrated with the gallery model and the nonprofit world, Meow Wolf began considering another path. Visitors to the Due Return had been asked to make a $10 suggested donation. Kadlubek had the proceeds — around $125,000 in cash — stuffed in shoe boxes under his bed. Some Meow Wolfers wanted to burn the money in a giant bonfire, a bacchanalian screw-you to capitalism. Others had a different take: “The Due Return was a light-bulb moment,” Brinkerhoff said. “We saw that there was a business model here.”

Di Ianni remembers one day when Kadlubek was fretting, as he often did, about how to take things with Meow Wolf to the next level. But what was the next level? Di Ianni pointed out that they had been working in other institutions’ spaces, relying on other institutions’ funding: “The next level is to support ourselves,” he told his friend. “To become our own institution.” The Meow Wolf meetings became charged with a new energy, a blooming sense of possibility. Maybe, the collective’s members began to consider, they weren’t an art collective at all. Maybe what they actually were was a start-up.

Emily Montoya, co-founder and senior vice president of brand for Meow Wolf. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

In 1998, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore announced in The Harvard Business Review the advent of what they called the experience economy. In an affluent society with an abundance of opportunities for consumption, Pine and Gilmore argued, companies no longer distinguished themselves merely by the price or quality of their goods or services; instead, the new competitive advantage was providing a “distinct economic offering.” As the authors defined it, “offering” was broad enough to encompass Southwest’s chatty flight announcements and the Apple store’s gleaming rows of open laptops. Consumers (or, as the authors called them, “guests,” following Walt Disney’s lead) increasingly expected an entertaining or interactive context in which to spend their money. Companies that didn’t keep up risked losing out to more lively competitors; Pine and Gilmore imagined a future in which malls would have to become more like amusement parks to survive, offering up enough diversion that they could charge admission fees.

Pine and Gilmore’s article was published nine years before the release of the first iPhone, at a time when Amazon was still primarily known for selling books. In the two decades since, the twin forces of phone-fixation and e-commerce have only intensified appetites for the immersive and experiential. The ideal experience-economy offerings are engaging enough to distract us from our devices but also optimized to be shared on those devices.

Today the experience economy manifests as brand activations, festivals and pop-up shops. It’s there in the shopping complexes opening in major cities in Asia, which claim to make going to the mall feel like a “unique event,” banking on the idea that “investing in a value system that surrounds the shopping experience will pay off in consumption,” as The Times reported last year. It has crept into the theater world, as evidenced by the popularity of participatory productions like “Sleep No More.” It appears to be a governing principle behind Hudson Yards, where public art takes the form of an explorable sculpture/selfie-staging ground, and whose retail area boasts a “Floor of Discovery” featuring both “immersive installations” and “custom merchandise.”

The “Laser Harp” by Meow Wolf. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

The world was increasingly hungry for something, and it happened to be very close to what Meow Wolf had already spent years doing. “I think Vince probably had the realization sooner than any of us,” Di Ianni says. “That there was this new kind of economy that was possible.”

In 2014, Di Ianni and Kadlubek attended a start-up accelerator in Albuquerque, where they learned how to write a business plan and pitch to investors. The grandiose language of the start-up world, with its promises of disruption and world transformation, suited Kadlubek’s visionary tendencies. “Vince is always five steps ahead of everyone in the group, always thinking about something bigger than any of us,” Di Ianni says. “And often it comes true when he says stuff like that.” Kadlubek and Di Ianni won the accelerator’s pitch competition, and Meow Wolf — which would soon reconstitute itself as an L.L.C., with six founding members collectively sharing power and making decisions by consensus — walked away with a $25,000 prize. They spent part of it on a business trip to Disneyland, where Kadlubek, a Disney fanatic, insisted on maximizing every minute in the park. The six founders showed up at the gates at 8 a.m. and stayed until the park closed at midnight. Kadlubek led them on a strategic exploration, focusing less on the rides than the interstitial spaces between them. He called their attention to how the park’s planners subtly shaped crowd movement, and how they provided small moments of surprise and joy that helped distract from the long lines and pricey soft drinks.

Kadlubek was a student of the Disney empire’s delights and failures. “Disneyland is a pivot in the history of mankind,” he told me. “Still to this day, it’s probably my single favorite place in the world. At the same time, it’s so committed to a fictitious way of being, a flawlessness and a happiness. And so much in the world of themed entertainment and mass consumer pop culture has grown from that kernel. The mall of the 1990s is very much Disneyfied. Clear Channel pop radio is Disneyfied. And every amusement park. American culture as a whole has a gloss of Disney to it.” Kadlubek envisioned Meow Wolf building a new kind of entertainment empire, one that carved out space for weirdness and discomfort. Unlike Disney, Kadlubek told me, “Meow Wolf celebrates the flaw, celebrates the other.”

Outside the House of Eternal Return, with the robot sculpture “Becoming Human” by Christian Ristow. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

“I think that when Meow Wolf first started, the big vision was to change Santa Fe,” Di Ianni told me. “And I think, for Vince, that quickly turned into changing the world.”

Securing the capital to get this world-changing going, though, proved tricky. Meow Wolf was fortunate to get early buy-in from the “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin, a longtime Santa Fe resident who happened to have both deep pockets and an affinity for the fantastical. Kadlubek pitched Martin on a project Meow Wolf had decided to call the House of Eternal Return. Visitors would enter the exhibit through a full-size Victorian house, which would seem normal at first glance. But various things would hint at something more uncanny: a floor that undulated like a disturbed ocean, mysterious papers strewn on a desk, a refrigerator that opened into a tunnel. Portals would lead to the multiverse behind the house, an explorable dreamscape of impossible physics and playful surreality: a tornado of household furniture that twisted up to the ceiling; an enormous mastodon skeleton whose ribs could be played like a prehistoric xylophone. There would be no set path to follow; visitors could spend as long as they liked exploring in any direction. Some might spend hours parsing the complex story line embedded in diaries and letters hidden throughout the house; others would be content to subject themselves to the aesthetic overload. Martin eventually agreed to spend $3 million to buy and renovate an abandoned bowling alley in the city, which he would then rent to Meow Wolf.

Being a member of Meow Wolf had always required putting in hallucinatory amounts of work in the weeks before a project opened. The build-out for the House of Eternal Return was like that, but lasting more than a year instead of a month, and with much more at stake. Contributions from Martin, as well as other New Mexico art patrons, meant that Meow Wolfers could quit their day jobs to work on the House full time. The six founders each had a hand in designing the House, though their roles were increasingly specialized. Kadlubek hustled for money; Di Ianni fretted about code compliance; Kennedy led the art team; King was in charge of fabrication; Brinkerhoff ran the tech team; and Montoya did graphic design. The aptest job description they could come up with for Benji Geary, who was better at pranks than strategy, was “mascot.” Everyone was aware that the House was a test case: Would Meow Wolf the business be as successful as Meow Wolf the art collective?

A new piece in production by Meow Wolf. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

At times, the project felt like a slog — “but, like, a really hectic, fast slog,” Di Ianni told me. Three months before the House was scheduled to open, people were putting in 12-to-14-hour days, six or seven days a week. A hundred thirty-five artists were working full time on the project, and it was still behind schedule and overbudget. The early investors were tapped out, so Kadlubek embarked on an anxious quest for other sources of money. Wound incredibly tight, he became particularly touchy about disruptive construction sounds during his walk-throughs with potential investors — and so, during those final, hectic months of the build-out, everyone would periodically have to stop working and look cheery for the venture capitalists.

On opening day — March 18, 2016 — there was less than $1,000 in the company checking account. Emily Montoya was so exhausted she couldn’t see straight; she’d been awake for 36 hours. A Meow Wolf founder set as a creative goal the making of an environment so visually stimulating that kids would barf as soon as they stepped inside. Sure enough, that first day a child threw up inside a tunnel of flickering televisions; it was gross, but it also felt like a victory of sorts.

Meow Wolf had planned for 125,000 visitors annually, in a city with a population of just 70,000; they got that many in the first three months. Over that first year, the House of Eternal Return made three times its projected revenue. On the busiest weekends, visitors had to wait in line for three hours to get into the exhibit. When Kadlubek initially pitched Martin on the project, he assumed the House would appeal to a niche, art-world-adjacent audience. That turned out to be true, but it was also wildly popular with families, school groups and out-of-town visitors. Soon the House was the most Instagrammed place in the state of New Mexico. In 2018, Time Out placed it fourth on its list of “the best things to do in the world right now.”

Meow Wolf’s production facility. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Meow Wolf wasn’t entirely prepared for that level of success. Amanda Clay, an escapee from the advertising world, was hired on as the House’s general manager nine months after opening day. At that point there was still no cash-management system. “At the end of the day,” she says, “Vince would take all the cash and put it in a duffel bag and take it to the bank.” Artists who thrived in the loose, anarchic warehouse days, people who had never had anything resembling a managerial job, were now in charge of growing teams of employees. There was still a pervasive discomfort with hierarchy and authority, which manifested in a resistance to calling people supervisors. “They called them time worms,” Clay told me. “I’m like, Oh, my God, you guys.”

The House soon had plenty of immersive, interactive competition. In San Francisco, paying the Museum of Ice Cream’s $38 admission fee gives visitors the chance to cavort in a brightly colored “sprinkle pool”; in New York, the digital media company Refinery29 opened 29Rooms, a pop-up installation designed by brands, artists and celebrities where visitors wandered past walls emblazoned with neon rainbows and posed next to empowering slogans: Live and Let Love, the Future Is Female. Experiential museums and exploration spaces and fun houses cropped up in cities across the country. These “art experiences” were typically nonideological and nonconfrontational, intended to delight and inspire play; unsurprisingly, they were often friendly with brands, if not conceived by brands in the first place. In Chicago, a founder of Groupon opened the wndr museum — that is, “Wonder” run through the app machine and stripped of its vowels and capital letters — which featured the now-obligatory Yayoi Kusama mirror room and various trippy selfie backdrops. Las Vegas’s new “cannabis art museum” offered an “immersive cannabis experience” in its “15 interactive cannabis-themed rooms.” These days even the Bellagio has a Kusama.

Meow Wolf felt confident it was doing something more complex and rich than most of its experience-economy competition, but its members also knew that their out-of-the-way location meant they risked being relegated to roadside-attraction status. “I felt like it was really important for us to announce a big project and then keep announcing more projects to build the brand, to build the perception that we’re a leader in this emerging industry,” Kadlubek told me, “because I knew there were a lot of different opportunities for investors.” Keeping all these artists employed as artists — not just ticket-takers — necessitated new projects and bigger investors. Meow Wolf also found itself caught up in the relentless logic of the start-up world. If you weren’t growing, and growing quickly, you were basically on your way out.

Caity Kennedy, Meow Wolf co-founder and senior vice president for creative direction. Jeff Minton for The New York Time

In 2017, Meow Wolf dissolved the old consensus-driven egalitarian collective and reformed itself as a B-corporation, answerable to a board, with Kadlubek installed as C.E.O. This move toward professionalization reassured potential funders: “They went from an artist collective to a company — they had a structure and a hierarchy,” Winston Fisher told me. “I value the people who can be creative, because that’s the future, that’s the alpha. Creative but stubborn doesn’t get you very far; creative but recognizing you can put your stuff out there without worrying about selling your soul — that’s something that Meow Wolf gets.”

Where the art world had been dismissive, tech investors and real estate developers were more receptive. AREA15 bought a stake in the company, and Fisher took a seat on the board, as did Stewart Alsop, founder of the venture-capital fund Alsop-Louie, an early investor in Twitch and PokémonGo. Meow Wolf began announcing expansions into bigger markets where they expect to draw millions of visitors annually. Kadlubek told me that Meow Wolf plans to open at least 15 locations in the next five years. “We’re trying to do both big, unique locations but also replicated experiences,” he says. “That could increase if we find that the replicable ones are successful, and the fact that they’re replicable doesn’t damage the brand.”

As Meow Wolf tries to become a nationwide phenomenon, it’s adapting the lessons it has learned from the House of Eternal Return. In the three years since the House opened, one thing its makers have learned a lot about is the sadism of the public. All potential materials are now entered into a spreadsheet where they’re graded on their ability to withstand common abuses: stab, poke, crunch, smash, step, scratch, puncture. When designing its spaces, photographability isn’t Meow Wolf’s main concern. Instead, it aims for a broader, multifarious sense of engagement. “We try to give people a choice, even if it’s just go left or go right,” Kennedy says. “It gives them a sense that they’re exploring and helps absorb people into the space, rather than walking in and doing what you’re supposed to do.”

The ‘‘Forest Tree’’ installation in the House of Eternal Return. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Visitors’ appetite for interactivity extends to the House’s narrative component, which has been much more popular than originally expected. Accordingly, the company is focusing more on what it calls the Meow Wolf story universe, investing in an 11-person narrative team and conceiving of future exhibits as episodes in an overarching meta-epic. From a storytelling standpoint, Meow Wolf is less exciting in terms of its content — the story line so far involves secret experiments, bright inquisitive children, journeys across space-time and government conspiracies — than its form. Piecing together the story while navigating the House’s maze of corridors and platforms is something like playing a video game and something like reading a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, even as it also feels entirely new. Meow Wolf is banking on the idea that there’s enough intrigue in its stories to compel repeat visits, thus helping it avoid some pitfalls of the experience economy — namely throughput (only so many people can fit through the door of your immersive theatrical production) and the one-and-done phenomenon (once you’ve figured out how to get out of the escape room, why go back?).

Meow Wolf will need to draw in many more people if its expansion is to succeed. The House, which initially felt like Meow Wolf’s foray into the big leagues, covers 20,000 square feet and cost about $3 million to build; it’s nothing compared with what’s coming. (“We all felt extremely limited by the scope of this space,” Meow Wolf’s creative director, Chadney Everett, told me. “I never come in here! Maybe five times a year?”) The Denver project, which will open by early 2021 and serve as a kind of flagship space, will be three times that size and cost 20 times as much to build. The installation at AREA15 is even more crucial to Meow Wolf’s future; it will be the proving ground to see whether the company will be able to make something that is at once magical, on budget and replicable without seeming too much like a millennial version of Chuck E. Cheese’s.

To design the new spaces, Meow Wolf has enlisted a tech team that includes performance artists, robotics experts, special-effects technicians and someone who spent a decade making control systems for factories. While the interactive elements of the House are sensor-based, the new projects will be exponentially more high-tech, and will largely rely on triggers based on computer vision, “a more natural way to interact with technology,” Drew Trujillo, the company’s director of technology, told me. The tech team has been experimenting with video-game peripherals, directional sound and object-recognition software, all aimed at providing visitors with “a personalized experience where the art that happens to them and on them depends on what they do,” Trujillo says. If the technology keeps pace, and if 5G data networks arrive on schedule, the Denver exhibit could also incorporate headset-driven mixed-reality components.

Corvas Brinkerhoff, co-founder and senior vice president for experience design at Meow Wolf. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

At Meow Wolf’s Santa Fe headquarters, Cathy Laughlin, a member of the tech team who is the lead automation and interactive lighting developer, introduced me to a “little dude” that was actually an infrared laser. “It can see 360 degrees around itself — it’s the technology used in self-driving cars and way-finding robots,” she explained. “We might use it as a 2-D touch sensor on a wall or a floor. Or the ceiling!”

“You can imagine a crazy artwork,” Trujillo suggested, “a painting on the wall that becomes like an interface — like your iPad. But huge. Or I can imagine this inside a sculpture — like, a creature whose movements are dependent on the personality assigned to it. Maybe it’s timid — so how does it move if a lot of people are moving toward it quickly?”

In the lobby of the House of Eternal Return, I ran into Kadlubek, who was giving a tour to a group of venture-capital funders, men in puffy jackets, several of whom were named Jim. “We came through just to see how crazy our partner is,” one said. “I told him, you need a V.C. room — you walk in and then when you walk out, all your money is gone,” another added, chuckling at his own joke.

Kaleidoscape , a Meow Wolf attraction at Elitch Gardens Theme and Water Park in Denver. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

That evening, at dinner, Meow Wolf’s six founding members talked about how disconcerting it was when they were minding their business out in the world — at a hot spring deep in the Jemez Mountains; at the airport; at some random bar in Arizona — and overheard strangers talking about this thing that they had made. It was frankly psychedelic to hear that nonsensical phrase — Meow Wolf Meow Wolf Meow Wolf — arising out of the background chatter of the world.

In classic start-up fashion, the founders themselves — their wild pasts, their improbable success — had become crucial to the emerging company lore. This was intentional; another one of Kadlubek’s savvy moves was to commission the documentary about the collective’s early days. Even so, living inside the mythology wasn’t always comfortable. “I don’t even tell people anymore,” Matt King said. “I tell them I work in waste management.”

Most of the founders previously worked menial service-industry jobs to keep their time (and minds) free to make weird art. Now that they were newly minted managers and executives of a multimillion-dollar corporation, their days were largely consumed by meetings. Di Ianni was spending a lot of time at conference tables. Sometimes there was a pleasurable surreality to being professional — “I like to sit in a room on the 50th floor of an office building with a bunch of real estate developers in golf shirts and think, You have no idea how weird we are” — but then again, the company now had hundreds of new employees, people who didn’t remember him from the old trash-art days and who probably saw him only as a guy in a suit who was worried about rules. “Now there are employees of Meow Wolf who don’t know that about me,” he said. “That I was an artist.”

Meow Wolf’s Kaleidoscape ride at Elitch Gardens Theme and Water Park in Denver, Colorado. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

The more time I spent with Meow Wolf’s founders, the more I found myself alternately wanting them to succeed and fearing what success might look like. The House of Eternal Return charms in part because it feels like a discovery: In the middle of this stodgy old-person’s town, who would expect to find this improbable riot of colors, this clothes dryer that’s a portal to another universe? Even when components occasionally go on the fritz — the laser harp that refuses to sing, the interactive elements that don’t interact — the House still skates by on its hand-built charm. For better or worse, the new endeavors won’t be cobbled together by several dozen friends staying up all night, covering the walls (and ceilings and floors) with wild designs.

As the company’s projects have become more expensive and expansive, and as it increasingly operates outside its own local context, it is no longer necessarily regarded as a beloved local underdog. “The problem with Meow Wolf is that it is a supreme act of late-stage capitalism disguised through the collective’s mantra of the underdog as art savior,” the contemporary-art curator Erin Joyce wrote in the online arts magazine Hyperallergic after the announcement of the Phoenix hotel project. Some Denver activists have criticized the company’s expansion into a neighborhood, Sun Valley, that has been identified as one of the city’s most vulnerable to gentrification; upward of 90 percent of its residents live in subsidized housing. (In response, Meow Wolf formed a community-outreach team and pledged to hire locally and to prioritize women- and minority-owned contractors.) The company’s promise to jump-start the creative economy has certainly come true in Santa Fe, where Meow Wolf now employs around 400 people. It’s less clear what the impact will be in the new cities; Brinkerhoff estimated that about 30 local artists would end up working on the Las Vegas project (plus “a bunch of contractors who we’re asking to do really creative work”).

Meow Wolf’s artists are also having to familiarize themselves with concepts like value engineering. “Not every object has to be a custom sculpture,” Kadlubek said. “Not every square inch has to be interactive.” When we last spoke, in February, he had just wrapped up a 14-month fund-raising spree, and he sounded depleted — although Kadlubek depleted is still more forceful than most humans on their best days. “When you have no resources, everything you create is above par,” he said. “There’s an excitement around it. I fear losing that sense of artistry that comes from not having the resources. When you come from a perspective of having nothing to lose, there’s a lot of freedom. Now we’ve got something to live up to.”

Mascot sculptures in production at Meow Wolf. Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Today, as Meow Wolfers and their investors eagerly (or anxiously) wait to discover whether the new projects will justify the company’s valuation, the rebellious spirit that animated Meow Wolf’s early years coexists somewhat uneasily with an increasingly professionalized atmosphere. During my tour of the company’s entertainment division, where men in checkered button-down shirts talked to me about “onboarding opportunities for end-users” and “relationships with the I.P.,” the word “authentic” was used so many times — Meow Wolf is an authentic brand that drives loyalty, and so on — that I started to idly wonder whether I was at the center of an elaborate prank, like something from the old Meow universe, a joke taken to absurd lengths for the amusement of one person. But who had time for such antics anymore?

After all that, I was frankly feeling a little punchy, arguing in my head with imaginary investors, trying to convince them that delight wasn’t scalable. Meow Wolf had always been in the business of dreaming up improbable realms; it seemed to me that its most fantastical creation was this idea that it could become huge, popular and profitable while still maintaining its autonomy.

But then, toward the end of the day, I stopped by the art-fabrication headquarters, which had the warm, lived-in feeling of a place where people spent all day making things, and I felt my gloom start to dissipate. At the far side of the room, beyond a table where a handful of staff members prodded at some gloopy orbs, Caity Kennedy was giving a virtual-reality tour of the Swamp, a section of the Denver installation, to a dozen people on her team. She strapped on bulky goggles, and a pair of glowing blue hands appeared on the computer monitor behind her. “This program is amazing, because we can make ourselves the right size, so we can get a feel for how enormous the swamp will be,” she said as she navigated a mazelike series of platforms and walkways. There were secret cubbies, ladder tubes, doors in surprising places, something called the Cosmohedron and something else called the Sparkle Cave. A few members of the tech team drifted over to watch. “These ledges are going to be really great for housing creatures,” she said. “A big creature could live here. ... ”

A little farther down the path, a glitch of the 3-D modeling software left a door hovering on top of an inaccessible landing. “Oh, look at that!” she exclaimed.

“I like it!” someone shouted from the back of the room, and the tour briefly devolved into an appreciative discussion of absurdist spaces.

“But you’d never know they existed,” Kennedy said.

“But we would know,” a woman in denim overalls said quietly.

Above the model, the vast digital sky went on forever and ever and ever, unreachable and unchanging. When Kennedy took the glasses off after 20 minutes, her eyes were glassy. She rested her head on her knees. Navigating new forms of reality had left her queasy, or excited, or a little bit of both. The woman in overalls put out a hand to steady her. “Welcome back to the world,” she said.