Escape room creators bring video games to life in new immersive environment
Activate Games gives Winnipeg gamers real-life setting to team up, conquer challenges without controllers
Controllers and a couch cushion with well-worn butt grooves often go hand in hand when it comes to traditional video gaming, but a new venue in Winnipeg is taking challenges and landscapes native to the digital world and bringing them to life.
On Thursday, Megan and Adam Schmidt opened Activate Games on Portage Avenue. The live-action experience boasts 11 gaming rooms with complex tasks to be solved in teams, including one room where the floor is a giant illuminated grid and game board.
The opening comes a few years after the pair opened The Real Escape Canada just a few blocks away.
That escape room venture was meant to be a side project, because both had careers — Adam was a commercial pilot, Megan a physiotherapist. As luck would have it, people loved paying them money to sweat it out and problem-solve at The Real Escape, so the couple quit their day jobs and are now focused on gaming full time.
Enter: Activate Games
The couple wanted to create something new with the profits from the escape room business.
"The problem with solving a puzzle is once it's solved, it's solved forever," said Adam. "We wanted to make an active, replayable facility."
The couple spent a couple years brainstorming ideas and manufacturing their big games in a warehouse with a team of about 65 employees.
"We knew we had the talent here to produce any of those rooms," said Adam.
"We had to determine whether that's fun, whether it's fun for people and whether or not young people can play it and old people can play it."
Each gamer creates their own player profile that is saved and accessible for every future visit.
"Your scores and your achievements are tracked until the end of time," said Adam.
After signing in and receiving a wrist band, guests head down a dark hallway with glowing purple murals illuminated from black lighting. Eventually gamers see signage for each of the 11 playable rooms.
One game has players climbing, while another has them gingerly stepping, ducking and crawling around a field of lasers. There's an arena setting, a basketball area and beats zone, among others.
Although the new venue just opened, Adam said the team already has its sight set on bigger plans. They're considering using their warehouse manufacturing space to build and export more of their gaming experiences to other cities.
"When you go into a room and you play it, you're not only playing against your friends and everyone else in Winnipeg, but soon your scores will be compared throughout the country," he said.
Activate Games costs $25 for a 90-minute session for groups of between three and five players. Most games are best suited for adults but work for kids 10 and up, the Activate Games website says.
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