The Mardi Gras Study

at Escape My Room

(2015)

In 2014, barely anyone knew what an escape room was. Although The New York Times published this article that year, if you’d used the term in conversation most people would think you were talking about stuff that happens in horror movies.

I was living with my boyfriend in New Orleans at the time. When he read the NYT article, he realized he had the resources and skills to bootstrap an escape room company: loads of antiques, original artwork made by his father and family friends, basic construction skills, and writing ability. He’d successfully run a small business before, and he knew he could get a handle on operating this one because it had a similar business model.

He spent a few months writing the game’s narrative: an elaborate story of an eccentric and wealthy New Orleans family. But when it came time to make the story into a game, he couldn’t figure out how to do it. After a few months I was able to convince him to let me collaborate with him. Neither of us had played an escape room and although I wasn’t much of a gamer, I’d taken one game design class in graduate school. We drove out to Houston to play the nearest escape room in the area, and afterwards we knew we could do better than the competition.

I read the story and developed a way of designing puzzle mechanics and a puzzle flow. I built props and so did he. Most of the puzzles were analog, although one prop had a digital component. We built the set together in unused office space above an old post office building. We used some old-school mechanical tricks made with pulleys, cables and latches. Their analog nature was part of their charm. We worked 18 hours a day, 6 days a week for about 6 months.

In mid-2015, we were ready to test the game. We invited our friends to come in groups of 6-8. I sat in the office watching the live feed of them playing and took notes on where the puzzle design was unclear, the props weren’t effective, or when the game was just plain unfun. After a few weeks of tests, we’d ironed out the problems as best as we could. We were ready to launch the business with the first room, “The Mardi Gras Study.” Here are some of the photos I took just before we launched: