Myths about escape rooms

The 2019 campaign against the Polish escape room industry has created many untrue, even hurtful myths about it. Nowadays, this entertainment is successfully resurging and coming back on track. It may also be a response to the need for entertainment in an epidemic reality - we go to escape rooms in our own, several-person circle of friends or family - so the risk of infection is low.

Escape rooms are garage-made, low-budget, and amateur quasi-business ventures?

The escape room industry is already very developed and shaped. There are franchising networks (in Poland e.g. LetMeOut), the advanced market of additional services (e.g. Escape Room Supplier company, which delivers elements all over the world), that is set designers, special effects, game monitoring systems, and even actors who play specific roles in a given room (one of the most popular rooms of this type is "Asylum" in Wrocław).

- The industry has been developing very dynamically for years, becoming an entertaining alternative for people of virtually all ages. It's not far-fetched to say that people have fallen in love with this kind of fun for good and besieged escape rooms all over the world from New York to Nowy Sacz. The scenographic quality and technological level of the puzzle rooms are already competing with the sets of movies or computer games. The popularity and stability of the industry are proven by the fact that the number of escape rooms around the world is growing at a cosmic pace - there are now tens of thousands of them. And right next to them a whole new branch of services is growing in strength, producing semi-finished products for escape rooms: electronic components, puzzles, elements of scenography or scenarios - says Grzegorz Cholewa from Exit19.pl

Building an escape room is simple, cheap, and quick?

Creating a professional escape room means the price of at least an average class car (averaging around 30-40 thousand PLN), the need to develop a scenario, order elements of scenography, equipment (monitoring, security systems, robots, or 3D printing), often tens of kilometers of cabling and qualified staff - including game masters supervising every game. In the case of the newest, third-generation rooms (open-world elements, advanced electronics, and scenography), the price can grow to 200-300 thousand zlotys. The time needed to create such an escape room is an investment that sometimes takes even 18 or more months.

Escape rooms operate in the "underground"?

Escape rooms have to fulfill the same conditions of functioning as all other commercial establishments or fields of entertainment. Additionally, the last wave of inspections from building supervision, through sanitary inspection, to fire brigade have made escape rooms probably the best-verified form of entertainment nowadays. If an escape room is on the market today it means that in the last year it had to pass countless inspections, document verification, and meet the industry standards which are included in the internal code of conduct.

Thanks to the fact that in Poland, since the beginning of the industry's existence, there has been a marketplace (Lockme) gathering over 90% of the market - a strong community of enthusiasts has been created around it, who have even several hundreds of rooms, share their opinions, evaluate escape rooms and in this way influence the industry standards. So this market has a strong mechanism of self-regulation. It is also worth pointing out that escape rooms are one of the safest forms of entertainment in the context of coronavirus. You usually go to them in a group of 2-5 people, you only meet the so-called game master on the spot, and every room is regularly disinfected.  

Are escape rooms entertainment only for children?

Escape rooms can be entertainment for children, but first of all, they are entertainment for everyone - regardless of age, education, or place of living (they are not only in big cities). Among categories of rooms, you can find adventure, crime, science fiction, based on movie plots, thrillers, or horror. With escape rooms it is a bit like with movies - everyone will find something for himself.

A whole "sports movement" has already developed around escape rooms. Poland is the first country in the world, which started to organize its own national championship. They have already had three editions, and the last one (open to players from other countries) attracted around 3000 participants (from Poland, Germany, Denmark, and even Japan). In 2020 the competition has already got a fully international formula, which means it is something like the World Championships, in which Americans, Poles, Germans, French, and even Australians take part.

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Do Escape rooms have a niche interest?

In 2018, escape rooms nationwide counted more than 4.13 million visits. Escape rooms are a fairly common idea for a night out with friends, a bachelor party, or a team-building event. Companies use escape rooms when recruiting (ING Bank Slaski was awarded for this in the Power of Attraction contest) when promoting films (last year's Polish premiere of X-Men: Dark Phoenix was based, among other things, on a specially prepared escape room) or schools as an interactive tool for education (the Facebook group "Escape room in education" brings together more than 11,000 teachers, educators, school principals, and other education specialists).

Are escape rooms a Polish "invention"?

Escape rooms are common all over the world. Markets in the USA, Asia, or Europe have their own specifics, but they have one thing in common - they conquer the hearts of puzzle, riddle, and adventure lovers probably in every place of our globe. In Moscow, a building was specially arranged, in which there are... over 50 escape rooms. The Netherlands has taken the leading position in the number of escape rooms per capita and is quickly approaching the level of one room per 20 thousand people. The upward trend continues all the time. An annual increase of up to 20% in the number of escape rooms is no longer surprising, and there are nearly 60,000 escape rooms worldwide, according to a study by The Logic Escapes Me.

Owners of escape rooms are "ruthless capitalists" focused solely on profit?

Most of the owners were passionate about this entertainment in the beginning and after visiting one of the rooms they made a decision - I want to do it too. This decision required courage, creativity, and a lot of sacrifices and is, despite appearances, a tough piece of bread (running an escape room requires a lot of talent). - I have visited several dozens of different escape rooms in most Polish cities, but also Portugal, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. The owners of all of them have one thing in common: they are incredibly engaged in their work and you can see that they live for it. Running escape rooms is different from many other traditional business ventures as the lack of passion of the creators is immediately visible and such rooms are simply not playable - adds Paulina Polańska, escape room enthusiast.