The Great Escape! Video Game Maker Creates Real-Life Puzzle Rooms

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Have you ever been to an escape room? I first heard of escape rooms maybe three or four years ago, I suppose, and I went and did it, I've done it twice now, both times with different members of the WDS team. First time was a couple of years ago, the second time was just a few months ago. It's a really fun team building experience. I don't know that I would want to do it with strangers, but with people you know, it's really fun to go to this activity center and go into a room where you're essentially locked in.

I mean, not really, but like it's an activity, it's fun. You're locked in for an hour and you have to solve puzzles in order to escape, right? So as I said, it's team building, you get to work together. There's usually lots of little riddles and different kinds of puzzles. So if you're not good at some of them, hopefully somebody else on the team is.

So it was a lot of fun. And from a business perspective, I've been learning about escape rooms in preparation for this episode, they're not cheap. Like they're not cheap as a consumer to go to, you know, I remember when I took the WDS team there, it was several hundred dollars. And you know, a typical escape room is seeing lots and lots of groups come in every single day. So for the right person, especially somebody who's entering a new market or otherwise doing something different, it can't be a really interesting opportunity.

Now in today's story, I'm going to tell you about a video game company employee who turns a childhood love for adventure into a real life escape room business. He's actually a part of pioneering the industry in the United States. They were previously popular elsewhere in the world, but at least until recently, they weren't really in the States. Anyway, this has really taken off and now he does it full time. So how does this come to be?

What happens along the way? And what can you take away from the story? Well, stay tuned for "The Great Escape." [Music]

Nate Martin loves video games. Growing up, they were his favorite form of entertainment and played a massive role in his life. He loved games so much, he decided to learn all about them in school, earning a bachelor of science in real time interactive simulation and computer science, which sounds like a great degree.

This eventually led to a career at Microsoft followed by a stint running the online services division at Electronic Arts, also known as EA, one of the largest video game companies in the world. While there, he worked on several well-known games, "Battlefield 4," "Plants vs. Zombies," and "Dragon Age," among others. But he wanted to have even more of an impact. And after doing some math, realizing he'd have to work until he was at least 200 years old before becoming the CEO, Nate started thinking about other ways he could make his mark.

It was while he was a senior project manager at EA that he learned about escape rooms. The concept was already quite popular in Japan, where it originated, and Europe, but nobody was really doing it in the US. In a typical escape room, a group of six to 10 people are locked in a themed room for an hour. To break out, you have to work together to solve a series of puzzles. There's often a guide or attendant in the room who can help you if you get stuck.

It can be a lot of fun to do it with people you know. The way Nate saw it, real-life escape rooms were the direct physical manifestation of adventure games he'd known and loved for decades. It was the next level of gaming. The more he and his co-founder, Lindsey Morris, got to talking about the escape room concept, the more they wanted to do it. Someone should bring this to Seattle, they thought.

So they decided to do just that. To start, they got to work securing a commercial space for rent in Capitol Hill. Nate took a shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to getting what he called a puzzle break off the ground. He held a sincere belief they should just figure it out as they went. If they succeeded, they could expand.

And if they failed, they could do something else. He and Lindsey avoided traditional first steps taken by startups, like extensive market research, saying that they had neither the experience nor the patience for it. Instead, Nate drew inspiration from some of those video games he adored growing up, as well as the ones he encountered in adulthood. Games like Myst, The Room, and The Legend of Chirandia. He focused on creating something centered around finding clues, solving puzzles, and joining forces with real people in real life.

When designing an escape room, Nate said the process starts with a list of puzzle concepts. He adds those to a list of interesting themes upon which he can craft exciting experiences. From there, he identifies which theme makes the most sense and begins developing a list of puzzles that work well within it. Then it's a matter of putting together a narrative and experiential flow that combines everything into what he described as an unforgettable experience. Getting puzzle break off the ground cost about $7,000.

This included all the physical material for his first escape room and rent for the commercial space. Initial marketing consisted of putting up flyers, something that Nate says still works well in Seattle, and doing everything he could to encourage word of mouth. Puzzle break also earned the attention of a famous puzzle enthusiast and a popular local blog, both of which were instrumental in its early success. And since then, business has grown. Since launching in August 2013, puzzle break has gone on to boast seven figure revenue, five locations, multiple portable experiences for corporate clients, and over a dozen experiences across the Royal Caribbean cruise line.

When attracting customers' attention these days, Nate says they've adopted a more traditional approach in the form of Google ads. Facebook, he believes, is too far removed from a purchasing decision, so he doesn't use it. Nate left his day job with Electronic Arts to man the helmet puzzle break just three months after opening its doors. He plans to keep cranking out the maximum amount of enjoyment for the maximum amount of people. He's got several new locations and experiences in development.

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So I was thinking about this because, as I mentioned, until a few years ago, escape rooms were not really known at all in the U.S., even though they came from Japan or elsewhere in Asia and Europe, et cetera. But we're pretty new here. Now, however, there are a lot of escape rooms. So it's not a saturated market necessarily, but it's definitely a lot more crowded. I think, however, that it's crowded in the way that podcasting is crowded.

Like people ask me all the time, almost every day, should I start a podcast? There's just so many of them starting up now, I just feel like I've kind of missed my chance. Well, there's a lot of people out there who still don't listen to podcasts. So even though the market is somewhat crowded, there's also all these people that are coming into the market for the first time. So a lot of people don't listen to podcasts, and a lot of people still don't know about escape rooms.

I imagine that a lot of people listening to this episode haven't heard of them. So in some ways, when more and more of these things are cropping up, it can actually make your job easier because there's a bit more familiarity with it. You don't have to explain the concept to every single person for the first time. Of course, it's still probably not gonna be a $100 startup to go and actually open a physical location and do this, put together all the items that you need for your first themed room. So naturally, you do want to be mindful.

We asked Nate, "Hey Nate, what happened "when you got your first sale?" And he says, "My co-founder and I, we were thrilled, "but I like to think that we played it pretty cool "and just continued about our business. "It's important to note that both of us "already had established careers, "and though we would later dedicate ourselves full time "to puzzle break, when we started, "we didn't need sales to pay rent or afford groceries." That of course is the side of soul way. It's exactly what I'm trying to encourage people to do. Start your business, start your income generating project, whatever it is, while you still have a reliable income. And this way you can have options in the future.

You might be able to go full time with it just like Nate has done, like many of the other stories that we talk about, or it could just be, you know, this other additional reliable income stream, which is a good thing too. Again, that is the Side Hustle School way. Listeners, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes, including links to puzzle break, anything else we can find about escape rooms that might be relevant, all that will be at sidehustleschool.com/927. Thanks so much for listening.

Much more is coming up. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.