I was really fascinated by the industry, so I got into it and eventually built my own as a side project (http://StartupEscape.com)
It can be a good business if you have a few rooms. There's two types of people who get into it: passionate people, and people who buy designs online for a decent revenue. The latter makes more money, but there's some amazing escape rooms that are Disney-parks-level.
Unfortunately, escape rooms work way better in non-cities. Rent is too expensive in big cities, so the rooms suffer. Many of the best rooms are in really random places, since financially it works out better. It's a really interesting space, and I'm starting to see a few big companies form around it. I am curious to see if big companies (with decent but generic games) overtake the smaller passion project ones.
(Money aside, designing and building an escape room is one of the most fun things I've ever done. There was a solid mix of cool tech, puzzle design, prop design, showmanship and more. If you're interested, I can help get started! My email is in my profile)
We went to one escape room is a super sketchy part of town. It looked like an old abandoned business. I imagine rent was super cheap. The escape room was awesome. One of the best I've been to.
What are your favorite or most exotic gimicks? Like additional rooms hidden behind mirrors, or blacklight revealed writings on the walls?
I’m always curious to find out what new things people are creating, but due to the nature of the game it’s quite hard to find “reviews” of escape rooms and I mostly just talk superficially with others about where they’ve gone and how they liked them.
I live in Munich (the city with the highest rents in Germany) and there are like 4 or 5 rooms within walking distance (Maxvorstadt/Schwabing West area).
I wonder how they make a profit if there is so much competition close by.
I was thinking on the idea as a possible business, but it seemed like the best way to make money would be to own the land and commercially zoned real-estate is very expensive
Just as a side note, I wonder if this could be a better alternative to job interviews. An opportunity to have fun and interact with possible candidates.
Really? I've done a dozen and in every single one, you could simply exit back from the door you entered from. The rooms were never truly about "escaping", at least past the lore and story. They are about searching for clues and solving puzzles. I've never been in one where we were explicitly locked inside. Generally you just make your way through and exit out a different door at the end.
Just this month five Polish teens died in a fire in an escape room. Shutdowns are the consequence unless the companies up their game in regards to safety and monitoring.
True, but the genre/medium itself is broader than the conventions some have settled upon. The sense of being trapped is another sub-genre / experience that escape rooms can offer. Sounds like that's more popular in the European escape rooms, with all the negative safety implications:
> One survey of escape rooms by Scott Nicholson of the Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada found that in 43% of European escape-room players, once locked in, are dependent on staff outside the room. Some venues in eastern Europe even handcuff escapees to the scenery, as part of the challenge.
I never watched the TV show, but I played a Cyberdrome Crystal Maze as a child. This was an attraction that competed with bowling and laser tag that let you play a simplified version of the real Crystal Maze. It retrospect it wasn't very good, because too many of the games were just simple video games played with a trackball, but there were some with interesting physical interfaces, and I enjoyed it at the time.
I remember being impressed by "Sensor Cell". And some games had one player operating some interface while only the rest of the team could see what was going on, so they had to shout instructions (like the TV show "Knightmare"). I think that's good design.
I'd like to see something like this again, but I don't think it would be commercially viable without a popular license. Bowling and laser tag are both cheaper to build and have more replay value.
I went with my gf and her friends for her birthday last year for the first time. We had a great time and we'll certainly be going again. What made me wonder though is how they are able to attract repeat customers, e.g. if they only have 4 rooms/puzzles then soon people will be quickly moving to a different company. Repeat business must be difficult to retain unless you keep changing your rooms frequently (or rely mostly on tourists (or people who only do this for their birthday or other special events - but not as a serious hobby).
One thing that annoyed me was that we were obviously unable to solve the puzzle and the guy kept giving us hints over the comms.
I told him to stop several times (since it wouldn't matter - if we can't solve we'd return another day). Though he must have had instructions to push all customers into a "successful outcome" no matter how poor they do. For that I was furious - though will certainly go and check other companies next time and make it clear that if they do give hints (no matter how bad we do) they won't get paid.
lastly there was news just last week that one of these rooms burned down in Poland. Sounds like a backstory to one of the "The Saw" films:
They're like amusement parks in a way so the repeat customers are more spaced out but people will come back due to the memories and bring different people with them.
Also customers come back when themes change for the rooms or the room is redesigned.
> and make it clear that if they do give hints (no matter how bad we do) they won't get paid.
That sounds a bit harsh. The escape rooms I have been at all made it clear that the objective is to finish as fast as possible but if you get stuck on things and it seems unlikely you’ll make it on the hour they will give you clues. It’s just part of the deal, you will almost always finish, and “winning” vs losing is a question of how fast you finish.
This doesn’t apply to competitive rooms of cause. Where I actually don’t know how they handle clues as that has never been an issue for my groups in those room.
I've seen one that is combined with a small place to sit around independently of visiting a room, where you have a lot of mechanical puzzles available to play around with. It was fun just to stay there and explore those. It's close to the spirit of the room experience itself, and I can imagine going back to just explore those.
And the owner can probably add those easier than redesigning the rooms all the time.
I can't read the full article but it the preview seems oddly mixed in whether its talking about how there are fire hazards vs. how they're a successful business model.
Either way, I enjoy them. I do, however, think the business model could be a lot more scalable. Content providers should seek to either use the same space for multiple games, or use the same game across multiple scenarios.
This would be a great use case for current-tech level VR I think. Plop people into a correctly scaled virtual escape room in and bam, you can provide and deploy new content at the rate you can design it (perhaps physical locations not even needed).
Alternatively, build a spaceship, or a dungeon, or something else that can be generalized to different levels in the same basic space.
To anyone in the boston area, or, I suppose, Sweden, check out Boda Borg for what I think is a more entertaining take on them involving physical challenges, really abstract puzzles, and rapid feedback of try-fail-repeat.
I make content for Open Simulator type virtual worlds and I could see this becoming popular there. Definitely in a spaceship, dungeon etc., the possibilities are endless.
There was a hackathon project I saw a couple years ago where you had to defuse a bomb in VR. Not quite an escape room project but the potential there is clear.
DISCLAIMER: My own startup, Buzzshot (https://buzzshot.co), makes an Escape Room software SaaS product. I've been running it for 2 years and its been my full time gig for about 6 months
The article doesn't talk about it much but there's also a booming support industry that's built up around Escape Rooms. From prop makers, puzzle desingers, suppliers of full turn key rooms.
It's a fascinating industry to work in. Having spoken to every customer on the phone (highly recommended) there's such a range of people starting Escape Rooms from people starting their first ever business to people with lots of experience in related (or less related) areas. The amount of different skills that go into making these things is amazing. Having multiple rooms seems important to growing revenue, since it's the only practical way to get return customers. A lot of people of expanding to multiple locations as well as a way of reusing work.
A cool thing happening right now in the UK is two rooms are openning using licensed IP. There's a Dr Who one which sounds really exciting and one based on the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock show (disclaimer no 2, they're a customer of mine which I'm very excited about)
In Toronto there's a Murdoch Mysteries escape room which has been running for over a year. They've now moved to Casa Loma - an actual Castle in just-out-of-downtown Toronto.
A huge hit for fans of the show (and book) series.
We're at 25K downloads, 4.5 star ratings and it's growing nicely. Groupon sold over 1K mission packs in one week.
Last month, we added user-generated missions, and people use them for education, birthday parties and everything else that needs to be spiced up by a ticking bomb. ;)
“In 1975, the pet rock sold 1.5 million units at $3.95 a pop. And even though it was a fad that lasted only 6 months, it made the inventor, Gary Dahl, a millionaire overnight.”
Can anyone comment on what puzzles they've had to solve in an escape room? I haven't been to one but people I know want to do it, not sure how fun it would be.
Most of the time, you're trying to solve different types of locks: key locks, 3 and 4 digit combination locks, combination locks with letters, directional locks (not going to say always try the Konami code, but there's a good chance that's going to be the answer), stuff like that. You may have to solve riddles to figure out where the keys and combinations are.
Some puzzles are purely observation. The Jurassic Park "hide stuff in the bottom of a Barbasol can" trick is pretty popular, there are safes where they tell you the code is the "boss's wife's birthday", so you have to find the calendar or rolodex or dated happy birthday note in the room.
There was one room I did that swapped the keycaps on a typewriter to make a substitution cipher- type the coded message into the typewriter and the decoded message would come out.
The rooms with higher production quality tend to incorporate more technology into the puzzles. One room I did gave you instructions on a radio (which you got from a previous locked box), if you were tuned to the right station- hinted at from a different clue, with the radio instructions changing as you finished each step. Another room had rigged together a large box with a Kinect or Leap Motion or something similar setup where you had to stick your hand into the box and move it around in the right place to open a magnetic lock, but the screen showing you the correct sequence was in another room that you couldn't see so your teammates had to be in the other room shouting directions at you.
I've done some where you have to physically search for hidden objects in the room, some where you sit down and do puzzles on paper, some where you have to recognize clues that refer to other things in the room, some where you have to figure out specific unexpected actions to take in a particular room or physical situation, and some where there were physical puzzle artifacts scattered around the room and it was quite recognizable what the puzzles were, but not necessarily obvious what to do with them.
So there really isn't just one style. (Also, some rooms give hints proactively, some give hints on request, while others are quite happy for you to lose if the hour runs out and you haven't figured it out yet.)
They can be a lot of fun, but quality varies a lot between rooms. Each place usually has one or two fixed room designs that rarely or never change, so each one is a one-time experience. You can't really replay them since you will know all the answers.
If you have ever played the Professor Layton video game series, the puzzles often remind me of that - a mix of lateral thinking, observation, basic codes and patterns and careful observation. The whole experience is very much like a real life puzzle video game.
I've done several of these and highly recommend it. Part of the puzzle is that you don't always know what the objective is; you explore a themed room turning knobs, pushing things and looking for anything out of the ordinary that might resemble a clue. It could be that you knock on a painting hanging on the wall and a hidden door opens, revealing a key. You remember that you tried to open a chest earlier but it was locked. So you try the key and the chest opens, revealing another clue.
Honestly I fail to see their appeal. I did one and it was so boring. I think the main “appeal” is that it locks you in a room where everyone is forced to actually interact and not just stare at their phones. It seems to be mostly used for corporate outings or clubs, where people aren’t quite comfortable with each other yet. I’m thinking it would also be good for group dates. But for with your real friends with whom you can do other activities or even just have a good convo? It just seems a “forced creative experience”. The only reason the industry is “booming” is because it was non existent before and filled these specific niches. It will oversaturate very quickly.
As someone who gets dragged on work outings I vastly prefer escape rooms to most other options. They are a good mix of interaction and activity, don't require me to put up with drink people, and can occasionally be fun.
The real challenge with the industry, unlike a lot of others, is the lack of replayability. This makes the industry rather unique and requires more operators to fill a given level of demand in a metro region than other similar options.
But god I hope the industry keeps growing or it'll be back to wine tasting or skeet shooting or all day resort retreats. Ugh.
Maybe you got a bad one. As someone who has done a dozen, there's definitely a wide range in term of quality, but the good ones can tickle the puzzle solving itch really well. This is coming from someone who has played almost every puzzle video game out there.
It's definitely not for everyone, and I'll say, I personally like it better when there's only 1 or 2 others in the room; more than that gets too hectic for me.
Personally, I see the "Escape Room" boom as something akin to the "Fondue Party" craze in the 70's. It's a fun social outing... once. Eventually there won't be enough new customers to sustain the business model and they will disappear almost as quickly as they arrived.
I'm sure there are better example, particularly ones from the entertainment industry booms of the 1920's and 1950's but I just can't think of any off the top of my head.
What city are you in? I can look at some internal ratings spreadsheets and find you a good one in your area! They're very hit or miss, and I've done some truly horrible ones before.
I think some can be boring. There is one near our house with 3 or 4 rooms. I took my family to it and we did two of the rooms. I've been to some escape rooms with work as well. The one near my house that I took my family to was my favorite, and had a room that was genuinely enjoyable and exciting.
That room was actually 3 rooms as part of the escape. It was built around the idea of a zombie apocalypse. You enter a room, #1, and the lights are off, and you are trying to get into a bunker. Once you get in to the bunker, room #2, you have to find your way out of that room before a toxic gas is released. We had to use a ladder to get to a "vent" to climb through (and shut off lasers in the vent) to room #3, the final room, a science lab.
The quality of the build was very high, and was pretty fun, as it was very much like a movie scenario.
[+] [-] gkoberger|7 years ago|reply
It can be a good business if you have a few rooms. There's two types of people who get into it: passionate people, and people who buy designs online for a decent revenue. The latter makes more money, but there's some amazing escape rooms that are Disney-parks-level.
Unfortunately, escape rooms work way better in non-cities. Rent is too expensive in big cities, so the rooms suffer. Many of the best rooms are in really random places, since financially it works out better. It's a really interesting space, and I'm starting to see a few big companies form around it. I am curious to see if big companies (with decent but generic games) overtake the smaller passion project ones.
(Money aside, designing and building an escape room is one of the most fun things I've ever done. There was a solid mix of cool tech, puzzle design, prop design, showmanship and more. If you're interested, I can help get started! My email is in my profile)
[+] [-] irrational|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talltimtom|7 years ago|reply
I’m always curious to find out what new things people are creating, but due to the nature of the game it’s quite hard to find “reviews” of escape rooms and I mostly just talk superficially with others about where they’ve gone and how they liked them.
[+] [-] nullmedium|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvrossb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autokad|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devgutt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehsankia|7 years ago|reply
Really? I've done a dozen and in every single one, you could simply exit back from the door you entered from. The rooms were never truly about "escaping", at least past the lore and story. They are about searching for clues and solving puzzles. I've never been in one where we were explicitly locked inside. Generally you just make your way through and exit out a different door at the end.
[+] [-] TomK32|7 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46781545
[+] [-] oh_sigh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] npunt|7 years ago|reply
> One survey of escape rooms by Scott Nicholson of the Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada found that in 43% of European escape-room players, once locked in, are dependent on staff outside the room. Some venues in eastern Europe even handcuff escapees to the scenery, as part of the challenge.
[+] [-] throwdaddy425|7 years ago|reply
Edit: Not sure why downvoted, I'm genuinely curious of this person's experience. Is asking not allowed?
[+] [-] kozikow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgingahead|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Maze
[+] [-] CJKinni|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrob|7 years ago|reply
More detailed description: https://web.archive.org/web/20050305152830/http://alumni.ox....
I remember being impressed by "Sensor Cell". And some games had one player operating some interface while only the rest of the team could see what was going on, so they had to shout instructions (like the TV show "Knightmare"). I think that's good design.
I'd like to see something like this again, but I don't think it would be commercially viable without a popular license. Bowling and laser tag are both cheaper to build and have more replay value.
[+] [-] tragic|7 years ago|reply
We did the one in Islington for a work away day, it was pretty sweet. Just about worked for me and I watched the show back in the 90s ...
https://the-crystal-maze.com/
[+] [-] selimthegrim|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DyslexicAtheist|7 years ago|reply
One thing that annoyed me was that we were obviously unable to solve the puzzle and the guy kept giving us hints over the comms.
I told him to stop several times (since it wouldn't matter - if we can't solve we'd return another day). Though he must have had instructions to push all customers into a "successful outcome" no matter how poor they do. For that I was furious - though will certainly go and check other companies next time and make it clear that if they do give hints (no matter how bad we do) they won't get paid.
lastly there was news just last week that one of these rooms burned down in Poland. Sounds like a backstory to one of the "The Saw" films:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/poland-escap...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/poland-escap...
[+] [-] forkLding|7 years ago|reply
Also customers come back when themes change for the rooms or the room is redesigned.
[+] [-] talltimtom|7 years ago|reply
That sounds a bit harsh. The escape rooms I have been at all made it clear that the objective is to finish as fast as possible but if you get stuck on things and it seems unlikely you’ll make it on the hour they will give you clues. It’s just part of the deal, you will almost always finish, and “winning” vs losing is a question of how fast you finish.
This doesn’t apply to competitive rooms of cause. Where I actually don’t know how they handle clues as that has never been an issue for my groups in those room.
[+] [-] megous|7 years ago|reply
And the owner can probably add those easier than redesigning the rooms all the time.
[+] [-] b_tterc_p|7 years ago|reply
Either way, I enjoy them. I do, however, think the business model could be a lot more scalable. Content providers should seek to either use the same space for multiple games, or use the same game across multiple scenarios.
This would be a great use case for current-tech level VR I think. Plop people into a correctly scaled virtual escape room in and bam, you can provide and deploy new content at the rate you can design it (perhaps physical locations not even needed).
Alternatively, build a spaceship, or a dungeon, or something else that can be generalized to different levels in the same basic space.
To anyone in the boston area, or, I suppose, Sweden, check out Boda Borg for what I think is a more entertaining take on them involving physical challenges, really abstract puzzles, and rapid feedback of try-fail-repeat.
[+] [-] jammygit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpindar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Invictus0|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] almost|7 years ago|reply
The article doesn't talk about it much but there's also a booming support industry that's built up around Escape Rooms. From prop makers, puzzle desingers, suppliers of full turn key rooms.
It's a fascinating industry to work in. Having spoken to every customer on the phone (highly recommended) there's such a range of people starting Escape Rooms from people starting their first ever business to people with lots of experience in related (or less related) areas. The amount of different skills that go into making these things is amazing. Having multiple rooms seems important to growing revenue, since it's the only practical way to get return customers. A lot of people of expanding to multiple locations as well as a way of reusing work.
A cool thing happening right now in the UK is two rooms are openning using licensed IP. There's a Dr Who one which sounds really exciting and one based on the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock show (disclaimer no 2, they're a customer of mine which I'm very excited about)
They're a whole lot of fun to play as well :)
[+] [-] the_unknown|7 years ago|reply
A huge hit for fans of the show (and book) series.
[+] [-] hemmert|7 years ago|reply
https://www.escape-team.com
We're at 25K downloads, 4.5 star ratings and it's growing nicely. Groupon sold over 1K mission packs in one week.
Last month, we added user-generated missions, and people use them for education, birthday parties and everything else that needs to be spiced up by a ticking bomb. ;)
[+] [-] notus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soufron|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Terretta|7 years ago|reply
https://growthlab.com/the-pet-rock-how-to-make-big-money-fro...
[+] [-] neonate|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] throwdaddy425|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bskap|7 years ago|reply
Some puzzles are purely observation. The Jurassic Park "hide stuff in the bottom of a Barbasol can" trick is pretty popular, there are safes where they tell you the code is the "boss's wife's birthday", so you have to find the calendar or rolodex or dated happy birthday note in the room.
There was one room I did that swapped the keycaps on a typewriter to make a substitution cipher- type the coded message into the typewriter and the decoded message would come out.
The rooms with higher production quality tend to incorporate more technology into the puzzles. One room I did gave you instructions on a radio (which you got from a previous locked box), if you were tuned to the right station- hinted at from a different clue, with the radio instructions changing as you finished each step. Another room had rigged together a large box with a Kinect or Leap Motion or something similar setup where you had to stick your hand into the box and move it around in the right place to open a magnetic lock, but the screen showing you the correct sequence was in another room that you couldn't see so your teammates had to be in the other room shouting directions at you.
[+] [-] schoen|7 years ago|reply
I've done some where you have to physically search for hidden objects in the room, some where you sit down and do puzzles on paper, some where you have to recognize clues that refer to other things in the room, some where you have to figure out specific unexpected actions to take in a particular room or physical situation, and some where there were physical puzzle artifacts scattered around the room and it was quite recognizable what the puzzles were, but not necessarily obvious what to do with them.
So there really isn't just one style. (Also, some rooms give hints proactively, some give hints on request, while others are quite happy for you to lose if the hour runs out and you haven't figured it out yet.)
[+] [-] ageitgey|7 years ago|reply
If you have ever played the Professor Layton video game series, the puzzles often remind me of that - a mix of lateral thinking, observation, basic codes and patterns and careful observation. The whole experience is very much like a real life puzzle video game.
[+] [-] joshuamcginnis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nanoseltzer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guest2457533|7 years ago|reply
The real challenge with the industry, unlike a lot of others, is the lack of replayability. This makes the industry rather unique and requires more operators to fill a given level of demand in a metro region than other similar options.
But god I hope the industry keeps growing or it'll be back to wine tasting or skeet shooting or all day resort retreats. Ugh.
[+] [-] ehsankia|7 years ago|reply
It's definitely not for everyone, and I'll say, I personally like it better when there's only 1 or 2 others in the room; more than that gets too hectic for me.
[+] [-] cc439|7 years ago|reply
I'm sure there are better example, particularly ones from the entertainment industry booms of the 1920's and 1950's but I just can't think of any off the top of my head.
[+] [-] gkoberger|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superqd|7 years ago|reply
That room was actually 3 rooms as part of the escape. It was built around the idea of a zombie apocalypse. You enter a room, #1, and the lights are off, and you are trying to get into a bunker. Once you get in to the bunker, room #2, you have to find your way out of that room before a toxic gas is released. We had to use a ladder to get to a "vent" to climb through (and shut off lasers in the vent) to room #3, the final room, a science lab.
The quality of the build was very high, and was pretty fun, as it was very much like a movie scenario.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dawhizkid|7 years ago|reply
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