You learn things about yourself when you’re trapped in an Egyptian tomb with a group of relatives and strangers. In my case, I found out I’m a control freak.
I watched in dismay as our group of intrepid adventurers splintered with no sense of organization at all. Some knelt around a pedestal attempting to decipher ancient writing. Others skidded their sneakers through piles of sand on the floor, looking for clues. A few tinkered with small mirrors, trying to bounce light from one to the next, hoping to trigger a hidden door that would allow for our escape. Poor communication hampered our progress.
Finally, sporting hangdog expressions, we shuffled over to the corner of the tomb and picked up a dusty telephone to ask for help. A voice crackled over the line giving us just the right hint to nudge us along in our quest.
For we were, of course, not in an actual Egyptian tomb. Nor were we on a movie set or playing a video game. We were in an escape room—a kind of hip-yet-geeky entertainment that has swept the country in recent years. According to one tally, there were 22 escape-room facilities in the United States at the end of 2014. By July 2018, there were some 2,300.
Escape rooms are something like a theme-park version of a locked-room mystery story—Agatha Christie meets Walt Disney. Participants enter a room together, usually in groups of two to eight people, and must solve a series of puzzles to escape within a set time. The escape room my family and I visited looked from the outside like any other Georgetown business—an inconspicuous black storefront huddled among the overpriced boutiques. But down a dark staircase are five basement rooms tricked out with electronic special effects and atmospheric decorations—and, in the room we entered, a sandy floor, two sarcophagi, carved hieroglyphics that glow when touched, and eerie noises.
The Georgetown escape rooms are part of a larger Washington-based company, started in 2014 by Ginger Flesher-Sonnier, a retired high school math teacher then dabbling in real estate. Flesher-Sonnier first encountered escape rooms in Prague, when she and her husband were honeymooning. She had fun, and even though she had never run a business, she decided to try to re-create the attraction at home; the concept appealed to her lifelong love of puzzles and interior design.
“It was almost nice going in semi-blind,” she said, “because if I had known all that I didn’t know, I probably would have backed out. But it was kind of a learn-on-the-fly situation. . . . Within months of opening, I even asked my husband—I’m like, you have to quit your job and come and help me. Because we’re making more with this than what he was doing.”
Flesher-Sonnier benefited from starting early. She entered the business as it was just taking off in the United States (and two years later she received a boost by selling a 40-percent share of her business to the hosts of the TV show West Texas Investors Club for $800,000). Her company, Escape Room Live, had 13,297 visitors across three locations during July 2017; that comes to more than $350,000 in gross revenue for just one month.
From mazes to haunted houses to scavenger hunts, there is a long history of using puzzles and obstacles for fun. The DNA of the escape-room idea can be found in such entertainments as the “dinner mystery” fad of a few decades ago. Some British and Japanese TV shows of the 1980s and ’90s featured escape-room-like challenges. The Tokyo Broadcasting System’s Takeshi’s Castle (1986-90), for instance, had contestants overcome a series of loony barriers on a steep, vast, and varied cross-country obstacle course to reach the stronghold of the evil Count Takeshi. Winners were exceedingly rare, and the moments of triumph passed swiftly and without fanfare.
Adventure quests came to computers around the same time. The graphic-adventure games churned out in the ’80s—like Sierra’s King’s Quest and Space Quest—contributed to the early popularity of the PC. The most direct digital ancestor of today’s escape rooms are the point-and-click escape games programmed in Flash in the early 2000s. One such game—Crimson Room—inspired Takao Kato to create what is generally credited as the first physical escape room, in Kyoto, Japan.
Kato started Real Escape Game (Riaru Dasshutsu Ge-mu) in 2007 out of frustration with the lack of adventure in real life. “The fact is that stories have the power to make the real world a better place,” he said in a 2009 interview with the Japan Times. “By creating a game, an ordinary desk can suddenly become the hiding place of secret treasure.”
In 2012, the company that owned Real Escape Game started the first U.S. escape room in San Francisco. Rags-to-riches stories were common among early escape-room entrepreneurs. “All of the people who had opened the initial escape rooms . . . have the same story, which is that they opened up with $10,000, a dream, and some moxie,” said David Spira, who runs the blog Room Escape Artist with his wife, Lisa. “What you started to see was people with all sorts of different backgrounds getting into escape rooms . . . people who really understood how to produce proper games—how to design games that flowed and that made sense.” As the marketplace matured and the design and experience of escape rooms improved, soon there were “people who were either able to keep up with that or who weren’t.”
David met Lisa just as escape rooms were taking off. These days, their blog is the go-to site for reviews, stats about the industry, and practical tips (a recent article offers advice on designing well-hidden trap doors).
The Spiras have tried to keep up with the industry’s rapid growth, which seems to have peaked sometime after a 2015 MarketWatch article pitched escape rooms as get-rich-quick schemes. That led, according to David Spira, to a “land rush of people who thought this was going to make them rich with no effort.” The result was a marketplace crowded with inexperienced entrepreneurs opening subpar escape rooms. A correction is underway: By Spira’s count, about 220 escape rooms have been shuttered this year, up from 45 closings in 2017. The rate of new escape rooms opening for business has fallen as entrepreneurs wise up to the risks. And the market is becoming more intimidating for small-business owners as companies with vast resources come to dominate.
The high end of the escape-room biz is very high indeed. Seattle escape-room operator Nate Martin told the Wall Street Journal that he started in 2013 with a $7,000 investment but now his company, Puzzle Break, shells out over $100,000 for each new room and generally earns back that investment quickly. That scale of spending, Spira said, is “not uncommon in the upper tier of the industry.”
None of which is to say that the bar is prohibitively high for newcomers. But Spira discourages casual entrepreneurs from alighting on this particular industry as an easy way to score a buck. “There’s this long list of stuff that you need to do to make a successful escape room,” he said, “from the standard business stuff of legal and marketing and accounting” to “the game-design and game-development aspect and puzzle technology and game play.” Any escape-room business that doesn’t focus on the latter will suffer. While bigger companies can afford to hire out-of-house talent, small companies don’t usually have that luxury.
But small businesses can still thrive with the right teams. “There are companies where all of the partners have different backgrounds—someone has a background in set design, someone has a background in software engineering, and one person maybe doesn’t have a background in game design but they really love playing tabletop games and video games and they’ve gotten a good handle on [designing escape rooms] by doing years of what they didn’t realize was research,” Spira said. “If you get a group like that together, you can make an incredibly high-end game.”
One type of prior experience that can benefit aspiring escape-room owners is work with haunted houses. Alumni of those Halloween-season attractions “have the business experience, and they have the design experience,” said Ginger Flesher-Sonnier. They’re “opening escape rooms” that “look gorgeous.”
Her own process of designing escape rooms starts with picking a theme. Then she shops for decorations, both online and in thrift shops and antique stores. “If you go with antique you have to go with something that’s extremely sturdy,” she noted. “Wear and tear on the rooms is unbelievable.”
Flesher-Sonnier’s rooms have grown more elaborate over the years. Her first attempts were just old offices that had been redecorated. Her more recent creations, like the Georgetown escape rooms, have temporary walls—“just two-by-fours with vacuform and decorating over them.” It is easier to incorporate wiring and electronics when you create rooms with freestanding walls. In the “Curse of the Mummy” room I visited, players decode hidden messages and manipulate mirrors to shine a laser onto a target. Other rooms use iPads and Pokémon Go-style augmented reality. Flesher-Sonnier said she and her colleagues want to make sure the technology doesn’t take people out of the story.
The greatest creative challenge lies in designing mysteries that seem fair to players. “You don’t know in which order they’re going to discover things, what path they’re going to choose,” Flesher-Sonnier said. Her company has partnered with a puzzle designer who once worked on MIT’s famous annual puzzle hunt. Flaws that slip past the creators are often ironed out during beta testing—when volunteers try out the rooms. Even so, customers find any number of ways to get into scrapes. An employee at Escape Room Live told me a player once attempted to escape by climbing out a window into a back lot. Some customers, less industrious but equally discouraged, just plopped down on the furniture to wait out the clock, ignoring encouraging hints from an employee over the loudspeaker.
“I remember watching a room once where some guy just lay down on the carpet and was lying in the middle of the room and was like, ‘I quit, I’m not doing this.’ And everybody was stepping over him,” said Flesher-Sonnier, laughing.
Given the variety of puzzles offered by Escape Room Live, it is easy to see how things could go wrong. But a small control booth behind the game space contains a bank of screens that let employees monitor the players and manage the special effects. Between groups of players, employees reset the rooms—adding more sand to the “Curse of the Mummy” floor, sweeping the wood chips on the floor of a cabin in the “Friday the 13th” room.
As escape rooms became popular—first in Asia, then Europe, then America—a fan base grew online. The largest dedicated Facebook group has 15,000 members, one of whom recently wrote, “We have done 61 escape rooms though out 11 diff states and also 2 others in Sweden and Amsterdam!” That’s a low number compared to some diehards. David and Lisa Spira have done over 600. Even his marriage proposal came via scavenger hunt.
“We get a lot of proposals,” said Flesher-Sonnier. “They will contact us beforehand and we’ll decide on where to hide the ring in the room and we orchestrate it so that they can propose to the person during the actual game or at the end of the game.”
There are escape-room podcasts (of course). There are even escape-room conferences. TransWorld’s Room Escape Show & Conference—which claims to be the world’s largest conference for the industry—showcases the latest in escape-room technology, design, and puzzles. The conference has escape rooms for attendees to try and training sessions to teach escape techniques. At this year’s conference, held in Nashville in July, nearly 60 companies registered to exhibit.
Some aficionados like to visit escape rooms with a regular team. Thomas Nicol of central Illinois and his wife, Becky, discovered escape rooms in 2015. “It has actually been a while since we’ve gotten grouped in with strangers to play a room; we have our group of friends we’ll play with,” he said, adding that the games often draw on players’ differing strengths. “Personally, I’m most useful with puzzles based in logical deduction, pattern matching, or spatial reasoning, but almost worthless at lateral thinking and memory challenges.” It helps to have teammates with complementary skills. “A room we played recently had a puzzle whose solution was something that’s typically frowned upon in escape rooms, and so the experienced players totally missed it—but the first-time player figured it out pretty quickly.”
The potential of escape rooms for corporate team-building exercises has not been lost on management types. My father’s small engineering company recently used an escape room for just that purpose. One team member, more experienced with this particular pastime, helped lead by finding ways to draw on the various skills of the team members.
What ultimately accounts for the rapid rise of escape rooms? For Takao Kato, the original inspiration was escapist—to bring to real life an Indiana-Jones-like fantasy. So perhaps part of escape rooms’ popularity arises from a desire to get away from this world and to inhabit, however briefly, a more dramatic one.
Flesher-Sonnier has a different explanation: not a wish to escape from the world but a wish to live in it more fully. She points to the contemporary desire for experiential entertainment. (In this regard, it is worth mentioning that she now operates in the nation’s capital an axe-throwing bar, another phenomenon she’s catching on the rise.) “People are looking for more and unique things to do,” she said. And “with social media, everybody wants to share what they’re doing, not just what they have. They want to show that they’re out living and creating experiences for them and their family and their coworkers.”
David Spira agrees in part. Nowadays “it is bizarrely revolutionary to do something in real life. I think that that’s the short answer. But this is another means of story conveyance,” he said. Escape rooms “are a new way of telling stories.” And unlike novels or movies, this new way of telling stories is social and gives its participants agency, so that “when you sit down and talk with your friends afterward, you’re not just talking about what someone else did, you’re talking about what you did. And that’s powerful.”
It seems reasonable to think that people whose lives are increasingly lived virtually—like those millennials whose relationships are more and more conducted digitally—might long for offline adventure. Escape rooms are hands-on, so players can feel they’ve had some sort of genuine experience. Of course, escape rooms are also artificial, safe, controlled settings. They offer all of the kudos and glamour of #authenticity with none of the risk. They come prepackaged with built-in photo-op moments—perfect for Instagram.
In playing escape rooms, there is always one risk: the risk of doing badly and embarrassing yourself in front of friends, family, colleagues, or strangers. In my visit to the Egyptian tomb, I barely put together one clue. I left the game frustrated. I couldn’t control all the moving pieces. I couldn’t control the outcome. I had expected to go in and have a good time, because I had expected to win. Alas, I fear I’ll have to seek my escapes elsewhere.
