As opposed to being in one room, you move through a number of different spaces. Sheena Patel, producer of Time Run, an escape game in east London, said: “We’ve really invested in high production values and creating worlds that you actually step into. Then one of our actors, our maze masters, will come in and be your guide through the show.” “If you buy a ticket and come along, you go in and you get put in your teams. “We have 30 classically trained actors on our books: some are standup comedians, some have done feature films, and some have done television,” Lionetti-Maguire said.
Photograph: Patch DolanĮscape room games go beyond the standard format of a team of players locked in a single room, and draw on immersive theatre, in which the audience is used as part of the performance. The low-tech, screenless experience is part of the appeal for people who are now surrounded by screens, Ferguson believes, but escape rooms also make sense to people who have grown up with video games that set puzzles for players. The only piece of technology required is a combination padlock.” “There’s nothing that couldn’t have been done 10 or 20 years ago. “Most of the games are not hi-tech,” Ferguson said. More than 300 have opened in the past year. Figures compiled by Ferguson on his blog The Logic Escapes Me show that there are now 500 games at more than 200 venues. People can play escape room games from Penzance to Inverness.
“Now you’ve got a couple of new venues opening each week – it’s quite hard to keep up,” he said.
The first escape room game opened in Britain in 2012 but it was only last year that the genre really took off, according to Ken Ferguson, a blogger who played the original British game, Hint Hunt. “Often they’re from brilliant producers and they’ve got clever ideas, but not quite as good as the Crystal Maze.” “I’ve been here four years and I’ve had more escape-the-room pitches than any other format,” he said.
Tom Beck, Channel 4’s commissioning editor for live TV and events, said bringing the Crystal Maze back to TV was partly inspired by the enormous number of pitches for escape room TV shows Beck has had over the past 18 months. We co-produced it – we built everything you see on the TV show.” Last week the company they formed, Little Lion Entertainment, began selling tickets for a Manchester version, which will open in April.Ī few months after the London launch, Lionetti-Maguire was approached by a production company to see if Channel 4 could film a new version of the TV show. More than 70,000 people have played since, and tickets are sold out until May. They built a set in a former warehouse in north London and opened in March. But this is not simply an exercise in 1990s nostalgia – the rebooted classic game show came about because of a wave of live action puzzle games sweeping Britain.Ĭhannel 4 was inspired to bring back the show, which will be hosted by comedian Stephen Merchant, as a celebrity one-off for its Stand Up To Cancer season by the popularity of “escape room” games which, much like the original Crystal Maze, test a team of players locked in a room who have to solve puzzles within a time limit to get out.Įarlier this year, three fans of the show, Tom Lionetti-Maguire, Dean Rogers and Ben Hodges, realised that opening the Crystal Maze as a team experience would be the perfect next step for people hooked on escape room games. The Crystal Maze is back on Sunday night TV for the first time in 21 years.