Red Bull Home Ground: A Fusion of Fabrication and Competition

The atmosphere hits fast at Red Bull Home Ground NYC.
The bass rolls and the music pumps.
Fans find their seats with electric anticipation.
LED light beams cut across a dark room with an unmistakable esports intensity.

It doesn’t feel like you’re waiting for a match to start.
It feels like you’ve stepped into the actual pre-game lobby.
And that is exactly what the agency set out to build, creating a space where the digital game world becomes part of the real word experience.

To bring that vision to life, they partnered with the expert fabrication team at Fuller Street who worked behind the scenes crafting this vision to reality. While the task was simple in words and complex in execution: Taking a digital-first esports entity and turning it into a physical, practical scenic element that players could walk through became a visual statement piece for the VALORANT tournament experience.

Why Fabrication Matters in Esports

Esports events are more than competitions. They’re high-impact productions and true experiential marketing events. Fans have grown to expect a level of immersion and for the set to reflect the excitement and aesthetics of the game. Generic and off-brand setups can diminish that energy and leave audiences underwhelmed and disconnected, especially when competing with global events that feature broadcast-quality visuals.

That’s why custom set fabrication matters. Fabrication for esports events brings creative ideas to life through precision engineering and brand integration. It takes a bland stage set and transforms it into a world fans are familiar with. From custom gamer pods to LED-integrated broadcast desks, fabrication defines the visual identity of modern tournaments.

Designing for a Gen Z Experience

Red Bull Home Ground is built for a generation that knows exactly what an immersive experience should feel like. After spending a large majority of time shifting between screens, streams, and content, there comes an expectation for the physical world to keep up and translate digital experiences.

For the agency leading the production, that meant more than just booking talent and filling a venue with people ready to blandly watch gamers at a desk from the distance.  It meant shaping an environment where every walk-on, every transition, and every camera shot hit with intention on huge LED displays. The live production needed to be as seamlessly energetic as the broadcasted gameplay.

The production and fabrication teams sat in crucial support roles to hit that goal for the agency. Their task: to seamlessly integrate visual technology with experiential fabrication and turn a standard stage footprint into a cohesive, tournament-ready environment bold enough to look good on broadcast, durable enough for practical use, and intuitive enough for players to move through without compromising gameplay.

The Valorant Player Portal

The LED screens remain paramount pieces to main stages in modern live events, and especially with eSports. The LED Wall has become the norm for any live experience really.

But the real hero element stealing the show was a full life-size Valorant portal the gamers walked through as they entered the stage. The portal functioned as much more than just decoratively cool scenery. This thing was a compelling narrative device that fans of Valorant would instantly recognize and connect with. This portal was the ultimate WOW element.

Walking into the room with a fully functioning portal made it seem as if you walk through it, you’d instantly be in a Valorant match. Players were immersed by it. Fans were enthralled with it. It was the ultimate photo op, and it looked GOOD on camera.

Not Your Average Trophy Stand

With the immersive portal highlighting team arrivals, the trophy stand showcased the team victory.

The stand had to — well, stand out — visually, structurally, and narratively within the show. Featured downstage center of the Player Portal, this custom scenic fabricated piece was built with beauty and function in mind.

And this was no off-the-shelf pedestal put together by hex nuts and allen wrenches. This was a custom built true-to-design trophy stand that featured a backlit Home Ground icon engineered to glow evenly on camera and in person. This fully branded element made the tournament winners look that much better holding that winner’s trophy.

With replays happening everywhere on streams, socials, in highlight reels, and video playback, the victors and this trophy element will shine online forever.

Home Ground Player Desk Badges

Beyond the big hero pieces of the player portal and sleek trophy stand, the agency remembered the smaller player-level details by featuring Home Ground branded player desk badges for consistent visual identity.

These badges needed to integrate with LED walls positioned in front of the player desks. It was a well planned design that allowed for additional video elements beyond the on-screen gameplay (scores, team names, supplemental digital branding). As the players sat behind, the action portrayed on front, accented by the custom badges on either end.

Framing the Action:  Fabricated Surrounds Engineered Around the LED Walls

Video LED walls are essential for any eSports event. It’s what translates the players’ monitors into an experience fans in-house can experience and watch real time. These LED walls are essential to convey the action, competition, and visuals that define the Red Bull Home Ground broadcast look.

But the agency leveled things up.

Raw video walls can feel unfinished around the edges. So the agency had Fuller Street build a custom surround to frame the screens, giving the content a defined place inside the stage environment. It even provided a great space for lead guitarist of chaotic duo House of Protection to perch during their live walk-up music. The agency may not have included “a perched electric guitarist” in the design spec, but shout out to the fabrication team at Fuller Street for the sturdy design work! This is where experiential design and fabrication meet: understanding how content, scenic, and technical elements interact in real time. The surrounds couldn’t interfere with pixel mapping or LED maintenance, needed to elevate the look without becoming the look, and needed to be ready for real world use — even the unexpected. Mission accomplished!

A Seamlessly Built Experience

As with many productions, from the seats the experience felt effortless. The audio, the video, the scenic elements, and the stage presentation made Home Ground in NYC a hit. Behind the scenes, the agency coordinated a system of teams, production crews, leads, and scenic fabricators with tremendous oversight and scheduling expertise.

These fabricated elements sit at the intersection of creative intent and on-site reality that translates design decks into real world components. Fabrication for live production is particular and fast-paced. A key differentiator is building with the production in mind, anticipating how a structure reads under live lighting cues, how it handles movement, how production elements blend with the scenic, and how it feels when hundreds of fans see it from different angles at once.

The Red Bull Home Ground stage expanded the world of the Valorant game into the physical space everyone could see, feel, and experience. For a generation that blends digital and real without thinking, that immersive element matters.

By focusing on custom stage fabrication that supported key event elements, the agency created a space where fans and players could experience a familiar digital world in real time. The portal, trophy stand, desk details, and LED surrounds became integral elements of the event.

In today’s esports landscape, where moments are judged by replay value as much as real time action, scenic fabrication is central. At Red Bull Home Ground, it meant building a place where, for a moment, everyone in the seats felt like they were inside the game itself. Achievement unlocked.

Ready to Build Your Esports Experience?

In the world of competitive gaming, production quality is becoming a large part of the spectacle. Fuller Street helps event producers, agencies, and brands create memorable, functional, and visually stunning environments that elevate both player performance and audience engagement.

Let’s build something unforgettable.

Contact Fuller Street to bring your next esports stage or gaming activation to life.

Imagine what we can create together.