WORLD FOCUS
GREAT ESCAPES
team building inspired by Houdini
I
by Scott Alexander Young n my previous column
the spotlight fell upon my
adopted hometown of
Budapest, Hungary. This
The disaster time around we examine
a leisure activity that was developed
scenario might, for here but which in the space of just
instance, take the a few years, has gone global.
As many are doubtless aware,
form of a ticking one of Hungarys most famous
historical personalities was the
bomb, set to an escape artist Harry Houdini.
hour timer. As the It's a cinch that he would
approve of a new form of escape
clock ticks down to artistry, pioneered in Budapest
but spreading throughout the
doomsday, players world. Escape Room Games are
must engineer their tests of brain and brawn that have
become an incredibly popular form
escape. of recreation in Budapest for both
locals and visitors. And now the
phenomenon is spreading to all
corners of the globe. Google Escape
Rooms New Zealand or Australia
for verification.
It all began in 2011 - as indeed
have so many other revolutionary
concepts - over a beer in a pub. In
this case the pub was Gondoz kert,
one of Budapests so called ruined
pubs, in the seedy but up and
coming 8th district. The first escape
games were cooked up by one Attila
Gyurkovics.
He is a mild mannered sociologist
who wanted to apply some of his
theories about people management
and flow, to a leisure activity. Thus,
the first Escape Room game was
built, and instantly caught on.
Attila (as Hungarian a name as
can be) can have hardly imagined
what a sensation this first Parapark
escape game would prove to be.
So what is an Escape Room
game, exactly, for the uninitiated?

Well, the typical Escape Room game
consists of between two to five
people locked together in a room,
usually a cellar. The players then
have 60 minutes to prevent disaster,
and get out of there alive; or at least
with their pride intact.
The disaster scenario might, for
instance, take the form of a ticking
bomb, set to an hour timer. As the
clock ticks down to doomsday,
players must engineer their escape.
Time is running out, and they must
solve the puzzle before a bomb goes
off, the world comes to an end, they
are trapped in a dungeon forever.
Thankfully however, they are not
alone.
There are fellow team members
of course, numerous clues hidden
everywhere; and a game controller
watching everything on camera.
The controller will sometimes give
confused players a nudge in the
right direction.
Each game has its own theme, its
own story. This runs the gamut from
Medieval Dungeons to Soviet
Cosmonauts. The games are fun
and an obvious and effective team
building exercise. They also tend
to be quite challenging, so unless
players have a surname such as
Holmes or Poirot, we do suggest
playing in a group of four or five.
Working out the clues and
combinations needed to arrange
their escape is not child's play, and
tends to be more a test of brains
than brawn.
There is however some light
exertion involved, with players are
actively encouraged to probe every
stick of furniture, every manila
folder and under every rug. Thats
generally where the starter clues are
concealed anyway.
You could say our games have
a Houdini difficulty level of one to
five, says the laid-back Hungarian
89
CORPORATE TRAVELLER
SUMMER 2017
WORLD
FOCUS
inventor Attila Gyurkovics of
Parapark.
But the difference between us
and Houdini is you dont need to
do anything dangerous. Its about
working through challenges, with
creativity and thorough thinking.
It took less than a year before
imitations and some variations on
Attilas Escape Room were spawned,
with a handful of such companies
springing up in the Hungarian capital
like mushrooms after the rain. Flash
forward to 2016 - and the game
Attila Gyurkovics invented over a
beer at his local garden bar has
caught on all over the world, with
Parapark franchises alone operating
as far apart as Norway and Australia,
Vietnam and Colombia, Florida and
Kuwait. But there is competition
now both in Hungary and abroad,
and some of it quite substantial.
Though he was unable to patent
or copyright his idea, Attila is fairly
WORLD FOCUS
sanguine about competition.
Parapark will always be the first
ever real life escape room game in
the Galaxy, he says, and who could
argue with that?
Competition is healthy in any
business you can think of, and thats
what Escape Games are becoming,
a veritable global business. I went
to meet one of Attilas more worthy
rivals, a gentleman named Gbor
(Gabriel) Rtfalvi, who is the founder
of Exit The Room games. A wiry ball
of energy and enthusiasm, barely
a heartbeat over 30, Gbor is an
internet sales pro and entrepreneur,
whose life has been taken over by
escape rooms. Not that he seems
to mind. Exit The Room games now
have franchise operations in Austria,
Germany, the United States and
Saudi Arabia. He employs dozens
of people in his Budapest operation
alone, including the boffins (I believe
thats the technical term) who design
new games. This sounds like a fun
way to make a living.
People think this is easy. Its
not. The upfront investment, once
you include marketing and so on,
is more like 30,000 euro a game.
Not ten, which some operators
seem to imagine. The good news is,
a well planned game can become
profitable in less than a year.
I note that escape rooms were
listed as the second most popular
activity on Trip Advisor for visitors
to Budapest, but now they seem
to have lost their ranking. Gbor
informs me that the games were
ranking so highly across a number
of cities, that Trip Advisor shifted the
category around in their algorithms,
to put museums and galleries back
on top. Why does Gbor thinks the
games are so popular? Because
locking yourself in a room for an
hour and trying to figure your way
out, is oddly relaxing. We are under
so much stress in our everyday lives,
across all walks of life, this is a way
to forget all those troubles, and just
live in the moment."
90
CORPORATE TRAVELLER
SUMMER 2017
As Ive written about before in
Corporate Traveller, Budapest is a
real start-up city. Theres something
about this burgeoning form of
interactive entertainment, a big hit
with millennials, that fits with that
profile. Even so, I am surprised
when Gbor tells me there are more
than 50 Escape Room start-ups in
Budapest alone. Common sense
and law of averages would suggest
that most of them will have gone
bust in a year or two. Its like a spin
on the old frontier lawman speech:
"There aint enough room in this
town for all 63 of us, 57 of you will
have to go. Or words to that effect.
Its an interesting discussion.
I mention to Gbor that Im going
to try the new Parapark game, Mata
Hari, which is a new departure for
Escape Rooms. The game is a "tie-in"
with "The Spy," a new novel by Paulo
Coehlo published this November.
The game has the co-operation and
blessing of Coehlos publisher. This
does sound like an interesting new

direction for Escape Room games
- book, film and TV tie-ins. Can we
escape from a Meereen dungeon
before one of Daenerys Targaryens
dragons eats us? Or disarm the
message from Mission Impossible
HQ, before it self destructs and kills
everyone!? (Five seconds would,
admittedly, make for a quick game).
But Gbor Rtfalvi of Exit The
Room is sceptical.
There are some interesting
possibilities opening up," he says,
but the companies that survive are
going to be the ones that get the
fundamentals right first."
Before dreaming of movie tie-
ins and their name in lights, game
developers should concentrate
on creating fun, compelling
games. Gbor had attended the
Escape Room industrys first ever
conference in Amsterdam a few
months prior.
Just the fact that the conference
even took place confirms that
this is a new and viable form of
entertainment. But again, Rtfalvi
is obviously wary of the industry
running ahead of itself.
Yet an industry it is becoming,
with new games and new
operations launching somewhere
in the world every few days. I just
joined a Facebook group, Escape
Room Enthusiasts, some 5000-
plus members strong, and growing
every day. And on a relatively balmy
October night, I go back to Gondoz
kert, where the whole thing started,
to try out the Mata Hari game with
some fellow "game-hardened"
chums.
This game is different in a few
respects shorter for one thing, just
33 minutes on the clock. But since
wed all played these games before,
worked together well as a team,
and really went at it with gusto, we
were all pretty confident, quite sure
wed find out what happened to the
super spy before our 1980 seconds
was up. Wrong. We failed. On some
level, I was almost glad the game
91
CORPORATE TRAVELLER
SUMMER 2017
WORLD
FOCUS
had beaten us.
It proved to me that there is
plenty of life in this genre yet.
Escape artists worth visiting
Parapark, parapark.hu
The success of Parapark has
spawned a host of imitators all over
the world. They're still innovating.
Exit The Room, exittheroom.hu/
en/budapest
Escape the zombies, defuse the
bomb, and boggle the mind at one
of their Budapest or international
locations.
Trap Puzzle Games, trap.hu
Beef up on your Roman numerals,
they could come in handy decoding
messages and combinations inside
Trap's puzzle games.
In New Zealand
Escapade The Kiwi Escape
Game, escapadenz.co.nz
I cant vouch for this personally, but
escaping from the bach or the
shed certainly looks intriguing.