The first locked door
In 1988, an English programmer, John Wilson, released Behind Closed Doors on the ZX Spectrum, under the Zenobi Software label. No graphics: a text adventure, written with The Quill, where the story reads like a novel and is played by typing commands.
The hero, a big lad nicknamed the Balrog, wakes up locked in the outside loo at the bottom of the garden. His only equipment: a newspaper, a stub of pencil and his common sense. It’s modest, it’s funny, and yet it’s the birth certificate of a genre.
Until then, adventure games did exactly the opposite. In Mystery House (Sierra, 1980) or Maniac Mansion (LucasArts, 1987), the hero starts out free and looks for keys to open doors. Here, he starts out locked in.
The genre fits in one sentence: the hero isn’t trying to get in, he’s trying to get out.
Puzzles take over
The 1990s didn’t talk about escape games yet, but they laid down their grammar. Myst (1993) turns an entire island into a puzzle machine: every lever matters, every scribbled note will come in handy sooner or later. Resident Evil (1996) locks its doors with crests and keys, and adds an ingredient our rooms know well: pressure.
Search, understand, open, move on. The game loop is in place; all that’s missing is being locked in as the starting point.
MOTAS: one room, one way out
In 2001 came Mystery of Time and Space, MOTAS to its regulars: a free Flash game, playable in a browser. The principle is pure: one room, a single exit, locked.
Sometimes the key is under the rug. Sometimes you have to unravel an endless chain: the crowbar found in the fridge lifts a floorboard, under which lies a knife, which unscrews the fuse box, into which you slip the fuse taken from a padlocked drawer, whose key was hidden behind a poster… And behind the door? Another locked room. The game kept gaining new levels for years.
Crimson Room goes global
Crimson Room, by Japan’s Toshimitsu Takagi, came out in 2004. A room with red walls, almost empty, and a player who has to make something out of next to nothing, often by using objects for something other than their intended purpose. It was a worldwide hit: the game was ported to handheld consoles, then to computers ten years later.
Imitators came by the dozen, then by the hundred: 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors on the Nintendo DS in 2009, The Room on smartphones in 2012, and a whole line of descendants you can still see by opening any app store.
It was these games, played in a browser in the early 2000s, that gave a man in Kyoto an idea.
Kyoto invents the Real Escape Game
In Kyoto, SCRAP was then a small publisher. Since 2004, the team had been putting out a free magazine and, to keep it going, organising events inspired by its own articles. In 2007, an issue devoted to puzzles gave rise to a simple idea.
What if readers could really escape from a place?
Takao Kato called it the Real Escape Game. To date, it is the first documented real-life escape game: players, a venue, a time limit, and puzzles to solve together to get out. Kato says he wanted to write his own adventure, then invite people to step inside it.
The Japanese format was nothing like a small locked room: some Real Escape Games bring together hundreds of players in a stadium or a concert hall, with every team working on the same giant puzzle at the same time. The escape game was born as a show before it became a room.
Its success took everyone by surprise. Sessions moved into schools, disused hospitals, theme parks, stadiums and churches, drawing thousands of participants. Japan devoted a TV series and films to them. Then SCRAP opened a permanent venue in Kyoto: thirty minutes to get out of a room.
Budapest opens Europe’s first room
In the summer of 2011, a Hungarian named Attila Gyurkovics opened ParaPark in a Budapest cellar. He had never heard of what was being played in Japan: he reinvented the idea on his own, with players forced to cooperate to get out.
It was Europe’s first escape room. Budapest, with its ruined buildings and modest rents, became the capital of the genre: within a few years, the city had dozens of rooms, and tourists came to play as much as to sightsee.
London, then Paris
The concept swept across Europe at full speed. HintHunt, a company founded in 2012 by Hungarians, opened in London, then arrived in France. In December 2013, in Paris, “James Murdock’s Office” became France’s first escape room.
A year later, there were a handful in the country. Three years later, several hundred. Word of mouth did the rest: people went with friends, then with family, then with colleagues.
Enigma Escape opens in Toulouse
It was on this wave that Enigma Escape opened its doors in 2015, on avenue de la Gloire in Toulouse. A second venue followed on rue Bayard in 2016. Then, in 2023, came Enigma City: a giant escape game on route de Launaguet, an entire retro-futuristic city built indoors.
Ten years on, that adds up to 12 missions across 3 venues, rooms voted best game and best set in Occitanie at the Escape Game Awards, and a place in the worldwide Top 100 of the TERPECA rankings.
Want to live the next chapter of the story? Our 12 missions are played by 2 to 6 players, in Toulouse, in sets built by our own workshop.
From padlocks to mechanisms
In ten years, the genre shed its skin. Four-digit padlocks gave way to electronic mechanisms, sets became film sets, creation budgets followed, and players grew demanding: many had already seen it all, or nearly.
The game also left the rooms. Puzzle boxes moved onto living-room tables — EXIT in 2016, Unlock! in 2017 — while enthusiasts created their own worldwide awards, the TERPECA, from 2017.
Then came 2020. Rooms closed, sometimes for months; puzzles moved into people’s homes, in boxes or by video call, and some businesses never reopened. Those that held on reopened to a bigger audience than before, and an even more demanding one.
Those who don’t keep up close down: in France, 423 businesses have already disappeared since 2013. Running escape rooms has become a job for set designers, mechanics and scriptwriters as much as for game masters.
890 businesses, 2,626 rooms
In 2026, France has around 890 escape room businesses spread across 638 towns, with 2,626 rooms and more than 2,500 different scenarios, according to the ongoing census by the reference website escapegame.fr. The country is one of the densest in the world.
The French market has one particular feature: more than three quarters of businesses are independent. No big chain setting the rules, but hundreds of creators building their rooms their own way — which explains the sometimes dizzying gap between two rooms in the same town.
As for the name, it’s very French: “escape game” is an anglicism coined in France. English speakers say escape room, and the Japanese still talk about real escape game, the original name.
Above all, escape rooms have become an everyday outing: a birthday, an evening with friends, a hen or stag party, a company seminar, or simply a night out for two. In twenty years, a free Flash game has become a leisure industry.
Tomorrow: bigger, more immersive
What comes next looks more and more like a theme park. Spaces are getting bigger, missions are played by several teams at the same time, sometimes up to sixty players in a single play area. Sets are no longer bought: they’re built, made to measure, in workshops.
That’s the direction taken by Enigma City, an entire indoor city whose streets, shops and neon signs come out of our workshop. The rest of the story has yet to be written: it’s played every weekend, stopwatch in hand.