History of escape rooms: from the screen to a shared adventure

The earliest well-documented live game that called itself an escape game was the Real Escape Game by the Japanese company SCRAP. It took place in Kyoto in July 2007. SCRAP opened its first permanent venue in 2011, and in 2012 and 2013 escape rooms spread quickly across Asia, Europe and beyond. The roots of the format go back further, though: to computer games, live-action role-playing, treasure hunts and TV game shows.

The history doesn’t boil down to a simple contest for the title of “the first room”. A browser game, a one-off event and a permanent venue are different formats that developed side by side.

A puzzle you watch on a screen

One important source was point-and-click adventure games and, before them, the text adventures of the 1980s. In both, the player explores places, finds objects, combines them and solves puzzles. Out of this tradition grew browser games in which the hero is locked in a room and has to find the way out. The genre came to be known as “escape the room” games.

A well-known example is Crimson Room, a free browser game from 2004 by the Japanese creator Toshimitsu Takagi. Clicking a seemingly ordinary object revealed a detail, and putting several pieces of information together let you open up the next part of the space.

What mattered most was the way it worked: you look, collect, connect and test a hypothesis. An ordinary room became a problem to solve. When a similar challenge moved into real space, the players also had to split the work between them.

Not just computer games

In a 2015 report based on a survey of 175 companies running escape rooms, game researcher Scott Nicholson points to several sources of this kind of entertainment. Besides computer games, they are:

• live-action role-playing games, in which players in costume solved puzzles and looked for a way out of makeshift rooms,
• treasure hunts and puzzle hunts, in which a team solves a chain of tasks leading to a goal,
• interactive theatre and haunted houses, where visitors move through the space themselves and meet actors,
• adventure game shows, such as the British TV programmes of the 1980s and 1990s, in which teams completed physical challenges to get out of one room after another,
• themed entertainment, meaning earlier companies that combined set design with puzzles against the clock.

Nicholson stresses that there was no single room where it all began. Around 65% of the owners surveyed were inspired by playing another escape room. The rest created their games without knowing that similar ones already existed.

SCRAP events and permanent venues

SCRAP started out as the publisher of a free magazine. According to the company’s official timeline, the first Real Escape Game took place in 2007, and in 2011 its first permanent venue opened in Tokyo’s Higashi-Shinjuku district. The format was created by Takao Kato, who wanted to take puzzle-solving off the screen and into reality, so that players could step into the adventure themselves instead of watching a hero.

It’s a useful distinction: the start of organised play doesn’t have to mean the opening of a room that runs every day. Over time SCRAP also became famous for huge events for hundreds and thousands of players, but the first game in 2007 was exactly that: a room for a single team.

Among the companies that most often inspired new creators, survey respondents named SCRAP, Parapark in Budapest, HintHunt in London and Escape the Room in New York. According to Nicholson, Hungary was one of the important centres where the format developed in Europe.

From a code to a story

A mechanical padlock is a clear symbol of a puzzle, but it doesn’t define the whole experience. A task can use sound, images, the arrangement of objects or an electronic response from the surroundings. Technology gives creators more options, though on its own it can’t replace a story that makes sense.

When you compare older and newer games, it’s worth asking what a puzzle is there for. Does it follow from the players’ role and the goal of the mission? Does the object you find mean something in the story? Questions like these say more about quality than the number of gadgets.

The Krakow angle: the game steps outside a single room

Krakow shows clearly how the format has grown beyond one room. Alongside permanent escape rooms, there are city games with puzzles hidden in the real streets of the city. EscapeCity says it has been leading teams around Krakow since 2015 with tablets, a GPS map and augmented reality tasks. Eight Portals combines a route around the old Zwierzyniec district with archive photographs, and the Krakow Legends app lets you play on your own phone, with breaks and no fixed start time.

History also finds its way back into the rooms themselves. House of Krak at Gamescape is a fantasy story woven around the legend of King Krak, and a mobile escape room can be set up in an office, a hotel or outdoors. Each format changes the conditions: out in the city you also have to find your way and deal with the weather, while with portable chests working together around a single set of objects matters more.

So the place and the way the adventure is run keep changing, but the familiar pleasure of Crimson Room and that first game in Kyoto stays the same: spotting something you hadn’t noticed before and finding the answer together.