Epic Games rezoning plans for Cary Towne Center withdrawn after years of uncertainty
Plans to build the headquarters of a prominent video game developer in a vacant Cary mall are officially no longer in the works.
Epic Games confirmed Wednesday the town has withdrawn its zoning request to convert the former Cary Towne Center due to inactivity. “We don’t have any updates on our plans to share,” company spokesperson Elka Looks said.
It has been nearly three years since the Cary-based Epic Games filed to rezone the 87-acre site. The application was pulled late last year according to Triangle Business Journal, which first reported the news. The Town of Cary’s rezoning website was updated to reflect a “withdrawn” status for the rezoning application.
The last public hearing for the redevelopment was in December 2021. During this meeting, Cary council members denounced Epic’s preliminary plans for their lack of clarity on parking, the construction timeline, and how the buildings and landscape would appear.
Since then, town officials had waited on Epic to request another hearing before the town’s planning and zoning board, which the company never did. Epic must wait at least a year before submitting a new rezoning application under town rules.
Cary Towne Center first opened in the town in 1979 and offered at its peak over 1 million square feet of retail near downtown Cary. The mall officially closed in 2021 after struggling for nearly a decade as anchor tenants JCPenney, Dillard’s, Macy’s and Sears left. Efforts to bring in an IKEA and Top Golf also fell through.
Propelled by the success of Fortnite, Epic Games in the late 2010s became one of the world’s wealthiest private companies. It bought the mall property for $100 million on the last day of 2020 in an attempt to expand its operations. The game developer told The News & Observer that in 2022, over 1,000 employees reported to its existing Cary headquarters near the intersection of Crossroads Boulevard and Jones Franklin Road, about a seven-minute drive from the old mall site
The company initially said it would open its new headquarters in 2024, a mixed-use district with 3.5 million square feet of office space, a hotel, 75,000 square feet of commercial space, parking spaces and other uses like recreation fields and outdoor work areas.
However, the vacant mall has sat untouched after the building structures were demolished. Epic has not provided a public update on its headquarter plans since 2021. Local officials had been left wondering, too.
In an interview last year, Cary council member Lori Bush called the undeveloped site a “moonscape.”
“Nothing has happened,” Bush said last March. “We’ve reached out to (Epic) and have not heard back, and that’s where it is.”
This story was originally published January 29, 2025 at 1:03 PM.
