RECON Boston Thoughts & Feels 🤯

Sometimes things turn out the way you fantasized. Against all odds, RECON Boston did just that.

After spending RECON with 250 people from our incredible community and sharing conversation and adventure with them… my heart is overflowing.

I had imagined how things could go well… and I had imagined how things could break… but I never imagined how our first in-person RECON would be such a touching and emotional experience.

It feels hyperbolic to explain the teary-eyed conversations that I had with more than a few guests in the closing hours of the event.

Those last few hours, the conversations, and the hugs… I’m getting emotional thinking about them a week later. I will treasure the memory of those moments.

How We Got Here

Back in 2019, Lisa and I got fed up with the state of escape room conferences… particularly in the United States. Up to that point we had a policy of being where the community was on the internet and in real life. We didn’t want to be the center of things; we just wanted to support.

When it became clear that existing options felt like poison to us, we decided to put our money, time, and effort on the line with an intent of “destroying the status quo, because the status… is not quo.”

We thought that there was a better way for our community to gather, connect, and learn. So we planned… and planned… and opened up ticket sales… and then we got 2020ed… and 2021ed.

As 2022 rolled around, we knew we were finally hosting RECON live in Boston… but we had to make most of the key decisions while everything was still foggy.

Most notably: How many people would we be allowed to have in one place in Boston? At the time, the cap was 300.

What We Made

Our team of overwhelmingly talented and devoted problem solvers crafted a convention that blended socializing, playing, and learning… with deliberately curated games, experiences, and talks.

Instead of a giant mess of speakers, we recruited a select group and worked with them to produce their sessions, ensuring that the talks were individually strong, technically accurate, took risks, and landed.

Each guest played an escape room from the Boston community as part of their schedule.

We showed our guests different ways to use the same immersive gaming tools as escape rooms… but in very different ways. 100 Earth Days, Boda Borg, and Level99 delivered different visions of immersive gaming.

What Our Community Made

Our team… as incredible as they were (and I’d work on solving any problem with this bunch of brilliant and dedicated nerds. They are all our kind of crazy)… We made a thing for the RECON community.

We made it as pretty as we could, and we poured as much thought and craft as we could into the thing that we made… but it was a shell. A vessel, in need of a soul.

The RECON community was that soul.

The folks who took a chance on us, bought a ticket, and showed up… made RECON into the experience that it was. Lisa and I will be forever thankful to those who rolled the dice on us… and then on top of it all, were so damn fun and brilliant.

RECON Boston sold out in June, more than 2 months before the event, because you believed in us and in each other.

What Comes Next

To be blunt, we’re still sorting that out.

We had a plan going in, but the wonderful reality of what happened at RECON has likely changed that plan.

So, while we were planning on taking a month or two off, instead our team is already hard at work pinning down what comes next.

We will do a livestream soon where we explain our vision for the future of RECON and the immersive gaming industry that we love so dearly.

What we can say: We won’t try to recreate the magic of RECON Boston. Instead, we’ll build new magic together as we design and experience RECON in different cities.

Thank you!

Thank you to the team that put on this event with us.

Thank you to everyone who was a part of RECON Boston and the past two virtual RECONs.

And thank you to our Patreon backers who have been our financial and intellectual fuel. These folks have been the foundation that all of our insane projects have been built upon.

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

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The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.