According to Wikipedia, 2006 is the earliest reference point for the development of real-world games in which people are locked in a room and have to explore their surroundings and find clues in order to escape.
To understand how the escape rooms we know today came about, though, we have to look back at the computer games of the 1990s. They provided the inspiration: games set in a virtual world where you clicked your way from room to room, finding clues to escape or to solve a crime.
From here on I’ll trace the history of escape rooms from the point at which actual escape game companies began operating. How did this become a successful industry, what stages did it go through, and what new possibilities lie ahead for escape games?
In the same year the iPhone appeared — 2007 — Japan’s SCRAP Entertainment was founded, after its founder Takao Kato watched a classmate playing an online game in which you clicked around a room to find clues and objects that would open its door. Kato became curious about whether the concept could be translated into real life, and began developing what can be regarded as the forerunner of the escape rooms we know today.
At the same time a very similar concept appeared in Silicon Valley in the United States, and alongside the Japanese game it is often called a great-grandfather of the escape room. The difference was that while Kato was inspired by 1990s computer games, the American version drew heavily on Agatha Christie’s crime novels. In the Silicon Valley game, escaping typically meant unravelling a murder or another crime.
The next major chapter belongs to the early 2010s. Hungary’s first escape room (ParaPark) opened in Budapest in 2011. Over the following years escape rooms of all sizes sprang up across the capital, and it was from here that the concept we know today began to conquer the world. Időcsapda started in this early period too, first with the Psychopath Killer room, and then, encouraged by that early success, with the other rooms one after another.
The essence of the concept is that the escape room became a year-round business running several rooms. With that boom, Budapest counts as the global capital of escape games. Visitors from abroad now happily take in the ruin bars and these authentic exit games alongside the usual sightseeing.
Escape games have thus broken into Hungary’s tourism industry, where they have played a defining role for years. It has become a favourite pastime for young people from home and abroad alike: locking themselves in an unfamiliar place in teams of five or six and working their way out through logic and dexterity puzzles, playing as a team and having a great time.
After that, rooms working on a similar concept began appearing in more and more countries across Europe and the wider world. Alongside France, England, Switzerland, Germany and the Czech Republic, a significant number opened in Hungary outside Budapest too — a sign of how sought-after this form of entertainment had become.
Alongside the past, the future is worth a mention too. The pandemic accelerated thinking about how to renew escape games. More and more online escape rooms appeared in Hungary in response to the virus. Games have also emerged in which teams move around the city solving tasks and hunting clues to unravel a case. In this format players use their phones to work through the clues and puzzles — think of it as augmented reality, where you explore the details of the game through your phone’s camera, much like the popular mobile game Pokémon Go. This version is still in its infancy and it isn’t clear whether it will become widely popular, but it does suggest that information technology and smart devices may be what shapes the escape room of the future.
