Room Escape Artist

Update 5/28/24: If you enjoyed this article, we hope you’ll check out our interview with Hatch Escapes owners Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp & Tommy Wallach on Season 7, Episode 12 of The Reality Escape Pod.

Tommy Wallach & Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp are the creators of Hatch Escapes… whose replayable game The Ladder opened last week. (Stay tuned for our review in the coming months!)

Their RECON talk is Tell Better Stories vs. Stop Telling Stories: A Knock-Down, Drag-Out Debate Between the Two Owners of Hatch Escapes.

Or… in their own words:

Room Escape Artist Presents

The Hatch Escapes Championship Title Bout

“Tell Better Stories vs. Stop Telling Stories”

A debate between Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp and Tommy Wallach in which the ultimate fate of the medium shall at last be determined.

In David’s words… the Hatch duo will explore the nuances of storytelling in escape rooms and its place in the medium.

About Tommy

Tommy Wallach owns Hatch Escapes, creators of Lab Rat, the top-ranked escape room in LA, Mother of Frankenstein, a narrative tabletop game lauded by such luminaries as Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood and available at all 2,000 Barnes & Noble stores nationwide, and The Ladder, a groundbreaking new game featuring a branching narrative, multiple playable avatars, and a dozen endings (opening later this year).

Tommy has also published five YA novels with Simon & Schuster, including We All Looked Up, which spent over six months on the New York Times Best Sellers list. As a screenwriter, he recently sold the feature film Delilah to Sony (in development; dir. Alexis Ostrander) and the limited series JonBenet to Paramount+ (in development, not yet announced). His musical TV pilot PV & Franny was recently recorded as a podcast starring Fred Armisen and Ty Burrell, who are attached to the project as director and producer respectively.

About Terry

Hatch Escapes is the brainchild of childhood friends Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp and Tommy Wallach. In 2017, they opened their first escape room, Lab Rat, which was ranked TERP’s 8th best room in the world the year it came out. Their second room, The Ladder, will open in 2023. The Ladder is a fully replayable experience featuring a branching narrative, two different play tracks (traditional escape room puzzles and scored games), and a whole lot of secrets players won’t discover their first time through. It stars Tony Revolori of The Grand Budapest Hotel and Jordan Belfi of Entourage.

Hatch’s first tabletop game, Mother of Frankenstein, raised nearly $250k on Kickstarter and was lauded by such luminaries as Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood. MoF is a collaborative narrative puzzle game based on the life of Mary Shelley. In its 15-hour playtime, MoF tasks players with solving puzzles, constructing both 2D and 3D jigsaw puzzles, and reading an enormous amount of text to follow the story of Mary Shelley’s life.