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Escape rooms grew from Japanese puzzle games and a 2003 live-action game in Indiana
The format of a room full of puzzles appeared on TV first, in game shows such as Now Get Out of That, The Crystal Maze, Fort Boyard and Knightmare. Escape-the-room Flash games then taught players to find clues in a single room. True Dungeon, a team-based live game that premiered at GenCon in Indianapolis in July 2003, had many features of modern escape rooms. Real Escape Game opened in Kyoto in 2007, and its games were mostly logic puzzles. Hungary's Parapark in 2011 used hidden keys and flow theory, and in 2012 AdventureRooms added scientific puzzles such as infrared and polarised codes. By 2019 there were an estimated 50,000 escape rooms worldwide.
Each room is a chain of puzzles: players find a clue, which unlocks a container or code, which reveals the next clue. The design works like a sequence of logic locks, so every solved step gives the group new information. The time limit forces the team to divide tasks and communicate.
Escape rooms are a commercial example of a game that mixes teamwork, time pressure and physical puzzles, and they spread through franchises across dozens of countries. They also show how the puzzles of one medium, games and TV, can be turned into a physical place.
The puzzle-room format has been on television since at least 1981 in game shows, and it moved into physical venues only after decades of interactive fiction and video games had popularised the idea.
The first scientific escape game was built in 2012 by Swiss physics teacher Gabriel Palacios for his students.
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