Hello fellow escapers! We hope you are having a great 2022 so far. We also wanted to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for nominating The Return of the Magician in ESCAPETHEROOMers‘ 2021 Bullseye Awards, and though we didn’t win the award, we do thank you all for the nomination and recognition of our game as one of the best escape rooms in Orange County.

Because of that, we’d like to give a little brief history of our game for those of you who are interested.

The Beginnings

 

When we first entered into the escape room world, we were 5 friends who just loved to play escape rooms. We played about 30-50 games before we decided “hey, let’s make our own!”

We entered this industry not so much as a goal of making the best escape room in Orange County, but more of contributing something from us to the industry that we love.

Deciding the theme of magic was a joint effort. One of the owners really liked the idea of a “Magician’s Study” type of theme. One of the owners was a former magician which lent to the ability to repurpose some magician props for the game. Some of the other owners were very handy and able to build modified magician props based on actual magician prop blueprints and guides, modifying them for the purpose of integrating puzzles into the narrative.

Our Unique Game

This was our first ever escape room we built, and we wanted to make it something unique and never-been-seen before. We did not have a big budget, so a lot of our build had to rely on creatives uses of our space and our props. With that in mind, we wanted the players to feel like they are part of the narrative, and that they are magicians themselves. Within the first 10 minutes of the game, we were able to apply a magic principle that, though risky in our minds, has been successful in achieving the wonder and excitement that one does when they are part of a magic trick or grand illusion. Throughout the rest of our escape room, we integrated as much magic as we could, and if you are magician then you may have even more enjoyment with our easter eggs.

We were able to run our game in our old location from 2017 to 2019, in which we moved locations in 2020 to a larger space to start working on our next games. Moving to a new space also required us to make modifications to our magician game but before we could open, the world had something to say about that.

Pandemic Changes

During the pandemic, we unfortunately had to shut down our escape room for physical games along with other escape rooms in Orange County and across the state. With the help of Mind Trap Escape Room and their Live Stream Adventures platform, we reworked out Return of the Magician game into a Remote Play Live Avatar game. It was a challenge to achieve since we had to modify and adapt our puzzles into an online format, quickly learning html and java to do so on our technical backend. It was this game that earned us a nomination for ESCAPETHEROOMers’ 2021 Bullseye Awards, and we can’t thank you enough to all of you who played and supported us during this time of uncertainty.

Back In Person

When our industry was allowed to reopen, we opened with new cleaning procedures between games and modified a substantial amount of our existing builds and games to accommodate for the new world of living-with-COVID. Some of our interactive pieces have been adjusted, and some worked while others didn’t but the history and love is still there. As we continue to move forward, we continue to adjust and adapt our games while retaining our passion for the industry of escape rooms and for providing you entertainment and memories for your friends and family.