The video game Zork was released in 1978. It was the primitive kind where you type in your commands—”hit troll” or “drink water”—and get trapped in rooms and have to solve little puzzles to escape. The Legend of Zelda (1986) copped this feature to a degree, then Myst (1993) took it even further, and plenty more followed suit. Eventually, the “room escape” feature became a mainstay of the adventure genre of video games. Then some enterprising nerdlinger realized that, unlike some video-game features, rooms are real.
In 2006, two unaffiliated groups on opposite sides of the world—Hong Kong and Silicon Valley—designed prototype versions of what’s now known as real-life room escape (RLRE). The idea, which combined elements of the aforementioned video games, Dungeons & Dragons, and Agatha Christie novels, found an audience immediately…
