“Where Terry and I live is between games and theater.”

If you ask any escape room enthusiast to recommend a must-play game in Los Angeles, you’ll hear about Lab Rat. When it first opened in 2018, it was ranked #8 in the world on the TERPECA list. It has maintained a ranking in the top 100 games ever since, which is no small feat. Hatch Escapes’ highly anticipated new game, The Ladder, has wowed the escape room community with its unique, replayable mechanics and branching narrative.

Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp and Tommy Wallach, the creative minds behind (and owners of) Hatch Escapes, join us for a deep dive into escape room storytelling. They spend a remarkable amount of time thinking about how to craft stories with interludes – a skill they developed while writing musical theater. They approach escape rooms from a writer’s perspective, with an eye towards unique interactions, but always with storytelling at the heart of the experience.

“When we played our first escape room, we realized immediately: oh, this is a medium that captures, in some ways, the best of both worlds.”

Terry and Tommy are constantly iterating on escape rooms as a medium for narrative. I especially enjoyed hearing their analysis of what makes for good storytelling, and the details of how they advance plot and characters in their work. They muse on including plot twists or moments where the stakes change. Terry and Tommy are truly excited about the future of escape rooms as a medium and the ways in which it can evolve, and that excitement is contagious. 

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t miss their talk at RECON LA titled:

 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.

Thank You to Our Sponsors

We are immensely grateful to our sponsors this season: Morty App, Buzzshot, and COGS. We truly appreciate your support of our mission to promote and improve the immersive gaming community.

Topics Discussed in this Episode

• 00:00 Welcome to the Reality Escape Pod!
  00:12 Sponsor Break: COGS by Clockwork Dog, Interactive Show Controls
  02:35 The Origin Story of Hatch Escapes
  04:46 Escape Rooms as a New Storytelling Medium
  05:40 Escape Rooms and Musical Theatre
  06:34 Tommy & Terry’s Unique Backgrounds
  10:12 The Backstory of the Hatch Escapes Building
  12:31 Creating Lab Rat: Goals and Inspirations
  16:09 Key Lessons Learned from Designing Lab Rat
  19:07 The Importance of a Simple Plot
  22:10 The Success and Longevity of Lab Rat
  24:53 Sponsor Break: Morty App, Discover and Track Escape Rooms
  26:22 Exploring The Nest: An Emotional Journey
  27:05 The Line Between Immersive Theater and Escape Rooms
  34:52 Sponsor Break: Buzzshot, Escape Room Marketing Software
  35:25 Discussing The Ladder
  36:57 Innovative Replayability in Escape Games
  39:46 Incorporating Video Content in The Ladder
  41:50 Challenges and Lessons from Developing The Ladder
  44:39 Upcoming Talk at RECON Los Angeles
  47:15 Pricing Philosophy at Hatch Escapes
  54:11 Collaboration with Escape My Room
  58:01 Tommy’s New Musical Vicky and Frank
  59:36 Balancing Art and Commerce in Escape Rooms
  01:02:47 Future Plans for Hatch Escapes
  01:06:20 Closing Remarks and Gratitude
  1:10:51 Bonus Story: Males of the Species

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Got a question or thought for the podcast? You can submit a voice recording by calling the Room Escape Artist not-so-hotline that always goes straight to voicemail (551-227-7273).

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

• Hatch Escapes Website
• Tommy Wallach’s Website
• REA Reviews
  • Lab Rat
  • Mother of Frankenstein
  • The Ladder
• REA Article
  • The Quest for Replayability [Innovation Interview Series]

About Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp

IG: @hatch_escapes

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 TERPECA’s 8th best room in the world the year it came out. Their second room, The Ladder, recently opened. 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.

About Tommy Wallach

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. 

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.

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