Locked-room entrepreneurship
In May 2012, a Japanese ARG known as Escape from the Werewolf Village came to Taiwan. Zhang Jinwei, who had loved playing games ever since he was a child, took part in the event and was left hankering for even more. He looked up Yolanda Chiou, similarly fanatical about alternate reality games, and they began to work together to create their own diversion. They adapted a mélange of European fairy tale episodes into a locked room escape game they called Happily Ever After?!, hoping to make their mark even before graduating.
After four or five trial runs, they decided to hold their event at the Huashan 1914 Creative Park in Taipei. Despite this being their maiden voyage, Zhang confidently estimated that with this entertaining game format they could attract a large enough crowd to achieve the 70–80% ticket sales that they needed to recover their costs of NT$800,000.
But things didn’t start off quite as he had anticipated. Throughout the first week that they staged Happily Ever After?! ticket sales stayed poor. It was only then that Zhang realized, “People in Taiwan simply are totally clueless about locked room games!” The team had no choice but to make some emergency adjustments, including offering discounts for checking in at the game venue on Facebook. Relying on interpersonal and online networks and word-of-mouth marketing, they finally began to draw crowds. During the subsequent three-week run, they attracted more than 1000 people to the venue, and in so doing added the “locked room escape” genre to the list of entertainment options available in Taiwan.
Despite their success, Zhang and Chiou discovered that their status as students had caused problems for them in the process of dealing with their business partners. Therefore, when Happily Ever After?! was over, Zhang decided to raise some capital to found an alternative reality game company that they christened RMT (for “Riddle Me This!”—the trademark taunt of Batman nemesis “The Riddler”). Since its founding, RMT has staged a wide variety of spectacles, including Hercules (based on Greek mythology, and combining physical skills with mental challenges) and Miko (a chilling and thrilling haunted house game drawing on the motifs of Japanese horror films). In July 2013, coordinating with the appearance in theaters of the Japanese detective feature film Galileo, RMT and the movie distributors produced a locked room game called Escape from Room 404, giving the company a huge additional boost in name recognition.
Thanks to the thriller-like plot and the star power of the film’s leading man Masuhara Fukuyama, Escape from Room 404 sold out every session, four sessions a day for two straight weeks. In fact, the response was so overwhelming that plans to call it a day at 8 p.m. were scrapped, and new runs were added well into the night. Over 3000 people played.
Following the success of 404, major companies started to show up at RMT’s door. Big names like Yahoo and Fubon Bank began commissioning RMT to design scenarios specifically for them, games designed to build a spirit of teamwork and camaraderie. Thus far, of the more than 40 games that RMT has designed, about 60% have been tailor made for corporate activities.
In April of 2014, RMT decided to challenge themselves to take their “game” to the next level, and came out with their largest scale ARG series yet: Quests Through Time and Space. It offers 12 different scenarios, including science fiction and medieval themes, transcending limitations of space and time, and each game permits three teams at once to play. Still running today, each month the venue attracts over 600 players.
Once RMT had successfully proven that there is a market out there for ARGs, like-minded businesses began popping up. Also, large amusement parks like Leofoo Village began staging their own ARGs. At present there are at least six enterprises in Taiwan—workshops or teams—putting on games on weekdays and weekends. The increasing density of the events on offer has even prompted the website books.com.tw to add a special ticketing header for “Real Escapes” to meet the demands of a burgeoning clientele.
ARGs test teamwork and creativity, skills that corporations value. Many big firms send their personnel to play RMT’s games.