ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
Derek Thomas attempts to escape from Sheepshank Prison Cell Block 4 at Wicked Escapes in Saugus.
BY BRIDGET TURCOTTE
SAUGUS — Most people want to stay out of jail, but others are willing to pay for the privilege of being locked up.
Wicked Escapes opened its steel doors this month and for $30 you get a chance to escape from jail.
“It’s the best time anybody could ever have in prison,” said co-owner Skip Dylen.
The adventure game involves locking participants in a room and giving them 60 minutes to solve a series of puzzles that lead to their escape.
The puzzles are designed by Dylen, who has experience in the amusement park and haunted house business and has worked on sets for Ocean Park in Hong Kong, Busch Gardens in Florida and Spooky World and Nightmare New England in New Hampshire.
Dylen said he realized escape games were becoming extremely popular in the past few years. There were 200 such parks in the U.S. at the beginning of last year and by year’s end there were 2,000, he said. But many of them lacked authenticity and featured plastic elements, he added.
“For me, as a designer, that just doesn’t fly,” he said. “We needed the real, sliding metal doors and stainless steel bunk beds. The toilets look all rusty, we painted them that way.”
The business is also owned by Derek Thomas and Michael Aiden, and is located in the Roller World building on Route 1.
The team set out to create a game with sets and props that could be considered Hollywood level quality, he said. The bunk beds, which retail for about $700 each, were shipped from China and had to be picked up at U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.
Almost everything found in the cell block was designed for a real prison, he said. All labor was completed by the business owners and their friends. To re-create the room at another location, Dylen said the cost would be about $70,000.
When customers arrive, they dress in orange jumpsuits and can opt for a full-sleeve of fake tattoos. They follow a storyline that sentences them to life in prison on littering charges. They’re locked into four different cells within the cell block and, following the legend of a former prisoner who found a way to escape, search for clues to lead them to the same fate.
“It’s designed so that no matter how smart one person is, they can’t do it without working with the other people,” Thomas said. “You physically need three to four people to all work together.”
In the four weeks that it’s been open, the fastest group took 56 minutes. Others have finished with as little as 7 seconds to spare. The success rate is about 20 percent. Dylen said the tension rises because suspenseful music and sound effects play in the background.
“It’s designed to have a high challenge level,” Dylen said. “The levels of elation and sheer chaos when they escape at that last second and they run into the lobby is great.”
Thomas said many corporate events are held during the week. The game is used to teach collaboration to employees.
“We’re able to provide feedback about who delegates tasks, who worked together, who took the leadership role,” he said. “It’s all stuff that human resource managers love to learn.” Sheepshank Prison Cell Block 4 is up and running, and two other escape rooms and an interactive lobby are in the works and can be expected to be open within the next few months.
Rave Escape 3-D will involve more physical challenges with hands-on puzzles, Dylen said. Special paint and technology will be used so that when participants wear 3-D glasses, the wall art appears to be floating around the room.
A third escape room will be called the Great Museum Heist Caper Job. It’s set on the first night on the job for a security guard. A cat burglar stashes the prize exhibit somewhere in the room so he can come back and find it later, and frames the players by setting off the alarms. They then have an hour to find it and put it back in its container.
Dylen said his inspiration comes from a lifetime of video games and visits to haunted houses.
Participants are invited to DJ Unstable’s house for an after party, when he loses his mind and sets the turntables to explode in one hour.
“When the beat drops, the room goes boom,” he said.
Bridget Turcotte can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @BridgetTurcotte.