03/06/2021
Hi everyone! We are Seva and Tasha, the creators of Project Avatar.
We would love to share our escape room business journey with you because we are in love with our business, and it inspires us every day.💞
🏫We first visited a quest room in Kyiv in the winter of 2015. It was a quest room dedicated to the KGB, an infamous soviet state security agency. Though we had zero expectations and treated it as just another type of entertainment, we were simply blown away by the complete immersion and the atmosphere of nostalgia that the game created. The objects and the interior of the game reminded us of our soviet childhood. It was as if they were taken from our parents' old apartments.
🕰Playing a quest was so fascinating that 60 minutes just flew by. What impressed us the most was the feeling of complete immersion that we never got while playing video games. We also loved how everything in the quest room depended on our decisions, even as small as moving the door keys or discovering a number combination.
🎱When we left the KGB quest room, Seva immediately decided to start an escape room business and dedicate a large chunk of his life to it. We sold our retail business and left all of our job commitments to devote ourselves solely to creating escape rooms. At the time, it was crazy, but the gut feeling told us it was the right thing to do.
It took us three months to develop our first escape quest room, Tesla. We had to start everything from scratch without any previous knowledge of scriptwriting, technologies, or gameplay.
👷♀Building the Tesla quest was a big step for our personal development because of how many different challenges we had to solve. Luckily for us, it was even more interesting than entering the escape room as a player. While Seva was responsible for technologies and the game world, Tasha created the design of the location, including the wiring diagram.
💡Tesla was a 2-room 30m2 location, and it became a second escape room in Lviv, Ukraine. Before launching, we ran preliminary testing and were extremely happy to hear from satisfied customers who shared their emotions with us. This motivated us to move forward.
🔝Over the course of 18 months, we opened 11 escape room quests in Lviv, which gained us the most significant market share in the city. Our quests became well-known for their quality and plot in all of Ukraine, including the hot spots like Kyiv, Odessa, and Kharkiv. Quest room junkies from all over the country came to Lviv just to try our quests.
🧬 One of our most well-known quest rooms was Cooking Bad, a game that followed the plot of the Breaking Bad TV show.The players had to cook sham m**h for an imaginary customer. The lab that we built closely followed the designs in the TV show.
🇪🇸One day, a customer informed us that he would like to buy Cooking Bad from us and build it in Spain. This set us on a whole new business path of franchising and creating unique projects for customers, which we will tell you about in one of our future posts.
To be continued...
