Around the World: the Dark Ages

A monochrome image of a dark forestAround The World is an occasional series in which this site release its self-imposed general restriction of a focuses upon the UK and Ireland. There are have been a couple of really interesting stories about exit games in other countries recently, too good to miss, particularly when thinking about what exit games could be.

A news story about an exit game from Manila in the Philippines starts “Imagine yourself and a friend blindfolded, handcuffed and trapped in a room. You are being held hostage by a psycho killer who gave you an hour to solve his riddle so you can set yourselves free.” The images show the blindfolds are literal, though there is no evidence either way about the handcuffs.

This possibly should not come as a surprise, as another exit game from the country, Breakout Philippines, similarly blindfolds its players at the start. This site is not aware of any connection between Breakout Philippines and Breakout Manchester, or any other UK site that yet blindfolds its players, but never say never. That said, as it’s been in the Edinburgh Evening News, it’s probably not a spoiler to suggest that Escape’s Prison Break room sees teams start off quite literally in the dark, and the first challenge is to find out how to switch on the lights – a puzzle that has eluded some groups for up to 15 minutes.

This site also really enjoyed this New York Times article about exit games in Budapest; the latest count from exitgames.hu suggests that Budapest alone has 56 exit games – or at least 56 rooms, for there seem to be some sites with multiple one-room locations in the city. Either way, it’s a lot, and suggests how much room there remains for growth closer to home.

The New York Times article also lets this site put together more pieces of the jigsaw together that could be a history of the exit game tradition. Para Park (“Fear Park”) opened in Budapest in 2011, with this English-language article narrowing it down to June 2011 and claiming that Para Park was Budapest’s first. (It also suggests that founder Attila Gyurkovics was inspired by online room escape games, rather than directly by the original Asian in-person eit games that share the same inspiration.) A little further research on LinkedIn points to Istvan Rusvai opening the original, Hungarian, HintHunt early in 2012, before the London branch opened in April 2012. The rest is history.

The NYT article also provides another part of the trail by suggesting that many exit games have a Hungarian connection, either because they were started by an émigré, or because they’ve been designed and licensed by one. The Room, scheduled to open in Berlin in September, is one of the few exceptions; its chief executive, Jochen Krüger, is German. He got the idea from his partner, who had visited a live-action game in Tokyo. Together they went to Budapest, where, over the course of two days, they played eight different games. Sounds like a plan!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *