Chad Hardy
“Have you ever been written about in a newspaper, magazine or online?” “Oh my god,” responded Las Vegas: The Game mastermind, Chad Hardy. You might recognize his name as the man who garnered international media attention several years ago when he founded the controversial Men on a Mission and Hot Mormon Muffins wall calendars. The infamous project Mormons Exposed featured a shirtless male calendar of returned missionaries and pinups of Mormon mothers, which ultimately led Brigham Young University to detract the college degree he had earned. His Exposed project has been featured in Rolling Stones Magazine, In Touch Weekly, Newsweek, Huffington Post, TMZ and seen on Fox & Friends MSNBC, ABC Nightline, Steven Fry in America and Sunrise in Australia just to name a few.
Hardy’s roots start in Palm Springs, California, a resort town where he feels the veil between perfection and reality is blurred. The two years of Hardy’s youth spent on a mission for the Mormon Church in San Diego might have been required, however his current weekly retreats to Disneyland provide a necessary relief from the constraints of adulthood responsibility. A trained actor and entertainer, he once turned down the coveted role of Prince Charming to finish his studies and pursue big business. Disneyland continues to provide Hardy a platform to better understand the concept of experimentation by providing an immersive experience with the tenacious relationship between imagination and delusion.
The structure at BYU was an integral part in his success, and provided him a seemingly quick progression to serving as the youngest Entertainment Director at the Utah Jazz owner’s Jordan Commons, starting his own production company and becoming famed in celebrity circles as a competent source of fun. A triumphant coupe at the Sundance Film Festival bolstered his expansion to corporate events such as the grand opening of the Daybreak master-planned community in Utah, where he garnered a Golden Spike Award for Best Overall Event. The unadulterated praise and support he received was what ignited his next direction, a wildly successful team building company AdVenture Group Inc., where he has produced events and seminars nationwide for billion-dollar corporations such as Facebook, Red Bull and Coca-Cola.
Hardy has more “Did that really happen?” stories than one can count. “I found myself in the eyes of Peter Pan. I hate having a real job – I insist on having fun while making money. I want to play all the time and I have figured out a number of ways to do it,” exclaimed Hardy. In pursuit of that, Hardy has created his own pay-to-play endeavor with Las Vegas: The Game.
“Life is a wheel,” Hardy says, “Sometimes you’re at the bottom, sometimes you’re at the top. It takes being at the bottom occasionally to cultivate the energy necessary to project you back upwards.” Hardy currently resides and works in the downtown Las Vegas arts district, where he plans to continue developing Las Vegas: The Game as a new way of experiencing the oddity that is the City of Sin.