Imagine a friend telling you to visit the local movie theater because you absolutely must see a new movie called Obtuse. “It’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in years,” your friend raves. So you buy your ticket, sit through the trailers, and as the opening scenes roll, you realize that you’ve seen this movie before. You were on vacation across the country and went to the movies on a rainy day to see a comedy called Dullish. Obtuse and Dullish are the same movie, but the local theater decided to call it by a different name. Dullish was edited just slightly differently from Obtuse.
This is a problem that currently exists in escape rooms.
Types of purchasable games
A fair number of escape rooms are purchasable. This isn’t an inherent problem, but far too many like games are given unique names. This is confusing and problematic.
There are primarily three different purchasable game formats. (This post isn’t going to delve into the viability of these models, but there are serious challenges and limitations with all three of them.)
Designs
You can acquire room escape designs and implement them to your liking. With this model, no hardware or construction is included, just the ideas that make up the game.
Complete games
You can purchase full games including all of the props and engineering needed to get them up and running.
Franchise games
You can acquire a game in part or in whole through signing a franchise agreement.
The naming problem
The entire escape room industry is already riddled with naming problems between companies. There is an emerging naming problem with purchased games.
We’re hearing of an increasing number of identical purchased room escapes in places all around the world going by different names. This causes confusion among people who like to escape rooms when they’re traveling.
For example, Brooklyn Escape Rooms in Brooklyn, NY used to be a Claustrophobia franchisee. When they broke off from the mother franchise, they had to change the name of their games for copyright reasons, but their Shelter-R is for all intents and purposes the same game as Claustrophobia’s Vault 13, and Medieval Dungeon is essentially the same game as Claustrophobia’s The Dungeon. The kicker is that 60 Out in Los Angeles, CA is operating a game called Outbreak that I’m told shares many puzzles and structural elements with Vault 13 / Shelter-R. This kind of information is difficult to know as a “normal player.”
Similarly, if you were to go play Central Bank, Cold War Bunker, Zombie Lab, and Prison Break at Room Escape LA, you’ve essentially played Fox in a Box’s The Lab, The Bunker, The Bank, and The Prison, as they are all part of the same franchise. However, you’d never know that as a “normal player.”
I’ve heard a tale of duplicate games 80 miles apart in Wilmington & Fayetteville, NC. These are the same room escape offered by two different companies, with two different names.
I have more examples, but I’m not looking to shame here. I’m looking to make a point. This is the result of multiple accidents.
Why is this a problem?
There are absolutely going to be owners reading this saying:
“95% of my players are first-timers. This doesn’t matter to me.”
This is the wrong mentality. We have over 1,700 different escape room facilities in the United States. This industry needs to mature and foster regular players if it’s going to be a viable industry over the long haul.
That means we need to take care of the most dedicated players and foster enthusiasts.
If booking an escape room becomes a game of Russian roulette, this is a massive failure. It’s also a stupid failure because it’s preventable.
Purchased games
Purchased games should come with a mandatory name. The designer’s name should also be affixed to the booking details. Authorship matters.
I know that there are companies that like to hide who created their games. I’ve heard some pretty funny stories about a designer who likes to hide his involvement with some of the games that he has designed. (For what it’s worth, if a consultant wants you to sign an NDA, they are shady).
Franchises
Keep your naming consistent across both locations and games. If you can’t do that, at least make it clear on your website.
This will worsen
Unfortunately, I think that the problem will persist and worsen for the following reasons:
Ego
There are a lot of purchasable games out there and a fair number of owners who will pretend that it was their design.
Bad contracting
People who sell games to more than one company are not contractually insisting on consistent naming and labeling.
No one should be hiding.
International contracting
A lot of game sales happen across national borders making it expensive, difficult, and largely pointless to enforce contracts.
Franchise failures
We keep hearing about franchises failing to offer the proper support. Consequently, the franchisees leave the mother franchise, but continue using a variant of the same games under a different name because the names are copyrightable.
I’d love to be proven wrong
I want to be wrong about this.
I’d love to see escape room designers and owners stop this from becoming a problem. So that’s my challenge. Prove me wrong.
I agree 100%. Players should be told where else the game is to avoid duplicates. I’m not even sure if naming it the same will help as so many names sound the same.
I am in the region you mention as having duplicate rooms only 80 miles apart. I also agree that there needs to be consistency in naming. As a designer myself, were I to sell my game, I would insist the name be unchanged because we put a great deal of thought into our naming. Also, the name recognition is a great proof source of the quality of your games.
Ironically, I’ve got a pretty good grasp of the UK based duplicates but no way of disseminating this information. I don’t think this will happen to me here (although it almost did in Amsterdam).
I’ve also seen the reverse problem – where escape rooms looks to be identical but actually turn out to be different. Cursed Carnival in Breakout Liverpool is an almost entirely different room from Cursed Carnival in Breakout Chester. Same decoration but they’ve changed so much it’s not recognisable apart from about three puzzles.
And that brings me on to yet another problem. People are increasingly selling escape room “modules”. Individual puzzles that you can shoehorn into your escape room to fill out a need. I’ve seen a couple of rooms recently that have bought in puzzles which matched a room I’d previously played. At what point does a room become one you should ignore? One puzzle, three, half of them? I don’t know how you deal with that. I’m not even sure there’s an answer.
These are all great points Ken. I have no idea, but I find the whole category of problems frustrating.
It’s funny because just today I was thinking that this is becoming a GROWING problem, and the 80-mile radius you describe is becoming smaller and smaller. As this medium continues to grow, and we’re seeing this more and more, it makes it harder to just book a game online because you become concerned that it could QUITE POSSIBLY be the same as another game.
Yeah, I have to agree.
Do you think there’s more of a problem in the States. In the UK, ignoring franchises with the same room in lots of places, there are probably around ~30-40 bought in games. The vast, vast majority of games are home-grown.
I think there are maybe six or seven sources of games that aren’t original/part of franchises:
– Indestroom
– Escape Game Design
– Mazebase
– NERD
– TRAP
– Five have been bought in privately – an owner played the game overseas and liked it enough to buy the rights.
– Four have been bought when they were closed by the original designers.
It’s getting steadily worse though – it’s harder for brand new players to jump in and create a game so they’re keener to go to Eastern Europe and buy in a game.
Yeah, it’s a much bigger problem in the States. I cannot list all of the purchased games within a few hundred miles of me, let alone the whole country.
A few hundred miles *is* the whole country for some of us 🙂
I know 🙂