Escape Room Owners Solve the Pandemic Puzzle

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- When Rock Avenue Escape Room closed in March—in the middle of what is usually its busiest month—owner Rob Faiella laid off three employees and wondered how the business would survive.

“What am I supposed to do, strap a GoPro to my head and have people call in?” he asked local business owners. Faiella, a computer programmer who runs an escape room with his wife, Alison, about 20 miles outside of Tampa, ended up doing exactly that.

He set out to turn an in-person game into a virtual one. In the new game, which is played with customers by videoconference, Faiella takes the role of small-town mayor working to crack a missing-person case. With a mobile phone strapped to his chest, he’s the players’ eyes, ears, and hands as they sift through clues and open locks. It’s been a big hit. Tickets are sold out until June, and customers are logging in from as far away as Australia and India.

For escape rooms, adapting to business during the coronavirus pandemic has meant finding ways to bring games online, such as placing webcams in rooms and creating puzzle graphics to share with players. Instead of the usual instructions, like telling players not to open things by force, hosts give tips on how to share screens and use Google Drive. In one escape room, the session begins with the host asking, “Can I offer you something to drink ... from your own refrigerator?”

Billed as real-life adventure games, escape rooms combine a bit of mystery theater with puzzling, such as cracking a riddle or searching for a hidden key, to keep groups entertained and working together, making them popular for corporate team building. There were 2,350 escape room facilities in the U.S. in 2019, up from about two dozen in 2014, according to Room Escape Artist, a blog and industry tracking site. Most are small businesses, but there are also a handful of chains with dozens of sites.

I’ve tried several during the pandemic. Over the past six weeks, I’ve virtually time-traveled to prevent a toxic explosion in Florida, uncovered the whereabouts of a missing Russian submarine in Amsterdam, secured critical Mafia documents in northern Germany, and lifted an evil curse in a fairy-tale forest in Seattle. Puzzle creators are tweaking their formulas to make them work better in the online world. While many have switched to a live camera that's held or worn by the host, others use prerecorded scenes of actual rooms or have gone entirely virtual. Still, it’s not been a smooth transition for everyone. Some aspects of game play, especially high-tech rooms with complicated sets and props, don’t translate to the small screen.

Julia Ivancenco, who owns Harz Escape in Wernigerode, Germany, adapted one of her older games, the mob-themed Don Vito Investigation, because of its small size and basic style. She’s charging less but making enough money to cover costs for now. “I can’t say it was the same as if we’d never been closed, but for us it was a really big rescue,” she says. April was busy, with more than 100 bookings, but Ivancenco is worried May could be slower as many enthusiasts have already played her game. She’s working on a second but also trying to persuade local authorities to ease restrictions on on-site visits.

For Seattle’s Puzzle Break, the day after lockdown was a roller coaster of “how can we survive this,” says Chief Executive Officer Nate Martin. They got to work tweaking the Grimm Escape, which revolves around a witch who’s cursed an enchanted forest.

The company, which has designed games for Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., gets half its business from consumers and half from corporate clients. In mid-April, it was ready to offer the Grimm Escape to corporate clients, and “almost as an afterthought,” it put up some time slots for consumer teams. They sold out in 12 hours. The schedule is now full one to two weeks out, and there are already large corporate bookings for the fourth quarter. “It’s not just a fun thing, which we also still need, but employers need to be able to build morale,” Martin says.

Puzzle Break’s annual sales are normally north of $1 million, and it’s on track for 2020 to be its highest revenue year, Martin says. The company plans to continue this new business model after stay-at-home orders end. “This isn’t going to be a stop-gap measure to get us through the storm,” he says. “This has scarily high potential.”

Still, it’s not clear how many businesses can survive being all-virtual and for how long, says David Spira of Room Escape Artist. Rooms are charging less for online customers, but costs such as rent, insurance, and personnel remain. “These games cannot function as a full substitute for these companies,” says Spira. “It’s a Band-Aid, and it’s definitely helping these companies stop the bleeding, but it is not going to turn them into the profitable businesses that they were.”
 
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