It was recently Breakout’s second birthday as a company, this tends to be a time where we sit back and consider the year and our time in general. For those of you that have been with Breakout Liverpool since our beginning, you may remember that we are the second Breakout centre in the UK; we actually started in Manchester with two games (John Monroe’s Detective Office and Virus), three members and staff and a director. For those of you that have only found us more recently, that was genuinely where we began.

What people may not know is that John Monroe was a franchised room, as we wanted to make sure we started the company with a game that worked and we couldn’t mess up. We’ve just regenerated that game so it’s no longer the original game we franchised, but recognising our starting point is important to us and really serves to show how far we’ve come. We started with 2 rooms in an old hair dressing academy in Manchester city centre. By the end of August 2014, we’d opened up a new room (MADchester) which from concept to completion was completely internal. We designed MADchester to be fiendishly difficult and with nervous anticipation opened it to the public to see if we got it right. We definitely had, nearly two years later, MADchester still retains its average of a 10% success rate. From developing MADchester, we went on to open Sabotage, another 5* room, this time our director worked with staff interested in game development, so they could see what that entailed. Despite its difficulty level, Sabotage remains one of our most popular games, something about stopping a missile launch and saving the day must really appeal to people.

It was our next phase which really saw us cutting our teeth on something new. We created a pop-up site further down Deansgate in Manchester at the Great Northern. Not only was a pop up a potential risk, but the two games it held were identical. That might seem like a silly idea, but we actually created the concept of a race game, where teams could book both rooms at the same time and directly race each other to the endpoint. Again, people seemed to jump on this idea and Classified remained popular for the entirety of its existence. As Classified was coming to an end, we weren’t willing to slow down our development and rebuilt the very large Virus room, making way for the new Infiltrate as well.

Our next adventure was even more exciting and scary than the Classified project, we opened a whole new site in a whole new city. February 2015 saw several of the, now, well established Manchester team head to Liverpool to open a new centre here. Unlike when we opened Manchester, we were no longer brand new to the game and opened with 3 games, two from Manchester (Sabotage and Classified) and a brand new one exclusive to Liverpool. We quickly opened a fourth room in Liverpool with The Facility, a horror room and our first to have an age restriction! Again several months later, Liverpool opened its fifth room, Wanted, and now matched the flagship Manchester centre in size.

This fifth room in Liverpool was not only well themed, but also had another new twist that we’ve never seen anywhere else. Wanted is a really fun Wild West theme, but, without giving anything away, you also pick a side before entry and play a game based on that. You can play Most Wanted twice and play a completely different game each time!

After a few months to finally breathe, sit back and realise what we’d manage to create in 18 months, we jumped straight back into development and opened a whole second site in Manchester on High Street. Unlike the Classified site, this site is not a pop up and we intend to be around for as long as the contract allows. We opened High Street with three games; another Monroe’s Detective Office, Vacancy and Facility X (a similar theme to Liverpool’s The Facility game, but with completely different game play and puzzles). We didn’t stop there though and within two months opened Most Wanted (again, a similar theme to Wanted’s popular theme in Liverpool, but that’s where the game’s similarity ends). Most Wanted saw another new concept for Breakout as it introduced a leader-board and our first game where escaping is not the only objective. Hot off the heels of Most Wanted, we then launched Cursed Carnival in Liverpool, another creepy room with brilliant theming. Cursed Carnival’s opening also means that Liverpool is now the biggest Breakout Centre, with six rooms.

When you see this all written down, it really does make you sit back and realise how much we’ve achieved in such a short space of time and how much we’ve grown as a company and as professionals. Every promotion within Breakout has been internal and all our higher management, including franchising, training and development, PR and centre managers started as game operators. Even outside of management, Breakout allows people to push their potential. When I mentioned Sabotage before, I stated how the director worked with staff in its creation, but from Classified onwards he allowed people with a passionate idea to create rooms they had interesting concepts for and he would consult on these. From here though, a game development role was created so that people creating rooms had someone to go to in order to make sure the theming of the room was on point, this expanded to a game development team and we even created a secondment of ‘Puzzle Master’ so that there’s a person to consult with to make puzzles to suit the type of game you want to create.

There’s so much development happening all the time, and it hasn’t stopped now. Even as I type this there are people developing two new games at our High Street site, that we’ll announce soon (#Teaser), and a team in Cardiff about to open our brand new centre there tomorrow (this means we’re international now, yes?). Cardiff is starting life with our Sabotage and Classified games, but no doubt will start to grow at the exponential rate Manchester and Liverpool did. We can’t wait to get to know the new additions to the Breakout family.

All this. ALL of this started from two games, in a site without signs that no one could find, with a concept no one understood. We started with Virus, we started with John Monroe, we started with three young members of staff and after all of this, it’s important for the 1 director, 13 managers and 55 game operators to remember those lovely, tiny beginnings.