Coming Soon: Golden Lock Awards 2022

Many of you noticed that we didn’t announce any Golden Lock Award winners back at the start of the year… We didn’t forget, we weren’t being lazy, and we didn’t abandon our award. We were low-key moving it for a whole bunch of reasons.

So let’s start with the details on the 2022 Golden Lock Awards… and then we can chat about why we moved it.

2022 Golden Lock Awards

The 2022 Golden Lock Awards livestream will happen on Saturday, April 30.

We’re hosting a live gathering of the REA Hivemind: a swarm. We’ll all be together to share our favorite games of 2021 and Q1 2022. Moving forward, we will be hosting the Golden Lock Awards in April.

So, yes, the Hivemind and our active reviewers will be a big part of this year’s awards and their presentation.

The last big change we’re making this year is the addition of a Tabletop Escape Game category. Plus, special for this year only, we will be adding retrospective awards for Tabletop Escape Games we played in the past that really defined this medium.

Why the Changes?

The Golden Lock Awards were the first escape room awards (in English) that we’re aware of. Since launching them on January 2, 2016, a lot of folks have joined in honoring their favorite games in different ways. No shade from us; it’s a great thing to do and we certainly didn’t invent the concept of awards.

We did, however, fatigue on “escape room award season,” which for the past few years has begun with the prolonged TERPECA nomination and voting process in the fall, and has ended with our Golden Lock Awards… with a lot of other awards in between. By the time it was our turn, we were legitimately tired of escape room awards, so we decided to move ours to a time of year where we and our community will have renewed award energy.

This move also solved a problem with the Golden Lock Awards that has annoyed us since shortly after we launched it. The most current award always felt immediately out of date. (For example, we awarded the 2020 Golden Lock Awards in January 2021). It’s a small detail, but it has long irked us. This year, the 2022 Golden Lock Awards will be announced in 2022.

Finally, Room Escape Artist is more than Lisa and me. The Golden Lock Award has long been our pet project, but there are so many more people involved, and we wanted to take the time to figure out how we were going to evolve this award in a way that would include the entire review team. When Andrew Reynolds, Fro, Kate Wastl, Matthew Stein, Sarah Mendez, Sarah Willson, or Theresa W show up at a company to review their games, we don’t want those companies to feel like they aren’t in the running for the Golden Lock Awards. We value our reviewers, we want them to be able to bestow the honor on their favorite experiences as well.

So, that’s the rationale. We’re excited to produce this award show, and look forward to streaming it on April 30th. Hope to see you there.

Past Golden Lock Awards

• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015

Thank you!

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