Escape room – what is it?

What is this escape room thing that everyone is talking about? What can you do there? Are escape rooms scary? Can children come to EscapeTartu’s escape rooms too? These are questions we get from our customers every day. In this post we’ll try to explain things a little and tell you about escape rooms and their history.  

Escape rooms

An escape room, also known as an escape game, is an interactive game in which a group of people  is locked in a room and has to find a way out. The group size is usually 2-6 people. The exact number depends on the nature of the room and how the game is structured.

To find the way out you need to search for hints,  solve lots of different riddles and puzzles, and do a great deal of teamwork. 

An escape room can consist of a single room or several. Teams have to get out within a set time. This is generally 60 – 90 minutes, but there are also longer games. 

Usually each game has some kind of theme. Themes can be on the scarier side (meant for adrenaline junkies) or more ordinary (meant for everyone). At EscapeTartu, for example, Bank Robbery, Asteroid, Dracula, Psycho Lab and Disco are neither scary nor startling, which makes them suitable for children. Other very popular themes include prison escapes, office-related themes and so on. Every theme comes with a story about the room. It is usually told by the escape room’s game master at the start of the game, or played on a TV screen.  

The history of escape rooms 

Escape rooms were inspired by so-called “escape the room” video games. The first escape game was reportedly invented in 2007 by Takao Kato of Japan, but in reality the history of how they came about is rather murky.  

The first escape games appeared in Singapore in 2011, and Takao Kato’s friend Kazuya Iwata brought the first games to San Francisco in the USA in 2012.  

In Europe the first escape rooms appeared in Hungary in 2011. Their creator was Attila Gyurkovics. He claimed he knew nothing about the games developed in Japan, and that his games were based on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory. 

The escape rooms created by Gabriel Palacios of Switzerland are also very well known. He was a teacher and made  escape rooms for his students in 2012. These were escape rooms with educational content. Later he began offering the same rooms to the public. 

Escape rooms around the world and in Estonia 

The popularity of escape rooms keeps on growing, and today there are already nearly 10,000 different escape room companies in the world. More are being added all the time. As they have become so popular, several series and films have been made on the escape room theme. The most recent was the thriller Escape Room, released in 2019, which was also shown in cinemas here in Estonia. 

Escape rooms have gained a firm foothold in Estonia too, and their popularity keeps on growing. You can find them in Tallinn, Tartu, Pärnu, Viljandi, Rakvere and other towns. 

In Tartu, EscapeTartu is the largest and most popular company offering this service. Our aim is to offer world-class rooms in South Estonia. That is why we keep  a constant eye on what is happening  in the field worldwide and always try to offer our customers ever more innovative escape rooms and solutions.