Have you ever wondered; where did escape rooms originate?
Escape rooms are very well known now but this hasn’t always been the case.
Escape rooms seem pretty modern and the escape rooms of today are cleverly and expertly designed for maximum fun, but they were a lot cruder in the past!
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So Where Did Escape Rooms Originate?
There is no one single point of origin for escape rooms. Historically speaking, they may descend from haunted houses in Victorian Britain which became immensely popular at funfairs.
Haunted houses are still very popular today and have transformed into the sorts of mazes we’re used to seeing at Thorpe Park on Fright Night, for example.
In America, people started creating their own horror mazes in their front rooms and basements to celebrate Halloween. These would be decked out with scary decor and challenges or puzzles that trick or treaters have to solve in order to escape.
Here, we can see early forms of the modern escape room developing.
The First Escape Rooms
In the 1990s, escape game shows like Takeshis’ Castle and Fort Boyard really took off and entertainment businesses tried to emulate some of these games for the public.
In 2004, an escape room game called Crimson Room was created by Toshimitsu Takagi. This later came to influence Myst, the popular puzzle and escape game.
One of the earliest escape rooms was built in 2003 in Indianapolis, Indiana, in the USA, called True Dungeon. Asia was ahead of the game, though, where Real Escape Games had begun to construct special escape room puzzles.
Today, there are probably hundreds of thousands of escape rooms situated across the world ranging from family-friendly super-fun escape rooms for casual players to full-blown horror mystery escape rooms for die-hard fans.
Escape-Rooms-at-Home
So what is the most modern development in the history of escape rooms?
The escape-room-at-home. We can now build our own escape rooms in our own homes using high-quality puzzles and well-crafted plotlines!
Epic Escape’s Starter Pack is designed to do exactly this. It’s an escape-room-in-a-box that you can set up in your own house! Actually, though, there are 3 escape rooms included for near limitless fun!