A 1907 Warehouse That Once Shipped Maxwell House Is About to Become a Real-Life Video Game
In 1906, a Nashville banker named William J. Cummins hired the Oliver Contracting Company to build something the city had never seen: a five-story reinforced-concrete warehouse, roughly 500 feet long, planted beside the rail lines that fed Union Station. When it was finished the following spring, it was the largest reinforced-concrete warehouse in the world. Half a million square feet of floor. Nearly four million cubic feet of space. A building designed for one purpose, which was to hold an enormous quantity of things and put them on trains.
One of its first tenants moved in that same year: the Cheek-Neal Coffee Company, the Nashville firm whose blend would go on to be sold as Maxwell House. For most of the next ninety years, Cummins Station did exactly what it was built to do, straight through until the redevelopment of the 1990s turned it into offices, shops and restaurants without stripping out its bones.
Later this year, one of its floors becomes a video game you walk into.
Twenty-eight rooms, three to five minutes each
Time Mission, a social gaming company founded in Rhode Island, is putting its first Tennessee location inside Cummins Station at 209 10th Avenue South, on the downtown edge of the Gulch. The company says it will be the largest venue it has opened anywhere: roughly 12,000 square feet holding 28 separate mission rooms.
The format is closer to an arcade than to an escape room, which is the comparison most people reach for first. Each room is its own short, self-contained challenge running three to five minutes — physical speed, memory, puzzle-solving, obstacle courses — and each is dressed as a different place and time. Teams of two to five players move room to room. One ticket buys the whole floor rather than a single scenario, in sessions of 60, 90 or 120 minutes, so a group can either sprint to clear all 28 or spend the hour replaying the four they liked. The company pitches it for ages 6 to 106, with under-14s accompanied by an adult.
Opening is set for December, and Time Mission expects to employ more than 20 people, with hiring anticipated to start in October. Booking is not open yet.
The other Vegas-in-Nashvegas story
Nashville has spent the past year arguing about spectacle at the largest possible scale — whether a version of the Sphere belongs on the East Bank, and what a 6,000-seat room like that would actually mean for a city whose entertainment economy already runs hot. That conversation is still a conversation. Nothing is signed.
This is the same instinct at one one-hundredth the size, and it is already leased. The through-line is that visitors and locals alike increasingly want to be inside the entertainment rather than seated in front of it — and that Nashville's supply of that experience is being built out of buildings that were originally meant for coffee, whiskey and freight.
There is a certain symmetry in where it landed. Cummins Station was constructed to move physical goods through a city as efficiently as possible. A century and change later, the thing being moved through it is people, in teams of five, on a clock.
If you are planning around it
The Gulch and lower Broadway are a ten-minute walk apart, which makes this an easy add to an existing downtown night rather than a destination trip on its own. For anyone building a visit around it, our guide to what has changed downtown since 2024 is the fastest way to catch up, and you can book your stay here.
Watch for booking to open closer to launch. December is the target.
