How we build an escape room
The default in this industry is to buy the room. A design gets licensed, the crates arrive, the thing is assembled to a manual, and copies of it are running in a dozen other cities under different names. There is nothing wrong with that model. It is simply not the one any of our sixteen came out of.
Ours are drawn, engineered and constructed by our own people here in Melbourne, and have been since 2014. Over the life of a room we spend more upgrading it than a lot of operators spend buying one in the first place.
What decides that a room gets built
We collect feedback and data through our waivers, from thousands of players a year, and that is where the decision comes from. It tells us what is missing from the range and what people want more of, which is a more reliable guide than whatever the industry is excited about this season. Chasing that produces rooms that feel like everybody else's.
What we are aiming at is immersion and memory. A room somebody can still describe accurately to a friend two years later has done the job it was built for.
We design to the space, and our spaces are Melbourne buildings
We tend to end up in older buildings that do not suit traditional retail foot traffic, which is how we came to occupy some genuinely iconic Melbourne addresses. The first floor of 100 Barkly Street in St Kilda. 160 Toorak Road in South Yarra.
Those buildings have character we could not manufacture and would not want to remove. Where another operator might strip a space back to a blank shell and impose a design on it, we work with what is already there, because the quirks of these places have repeatedly given us things no designer would have thought to draw.
To be clear about what that involves: this is set design and fitout, not construction. We do not put up walls or change layouts. We work with the building as we find it.
A cupboard over a much older door
It's Nightmare, South YarraSetting up at 160 Toorak Road, we found that a previous tenant had built a floor-to-ceiling storage cupboard directly over a far older doorway. Rather than take it out, we made it the way in, so players enter the room through the back of a cupboard.
A trapdoor onto the street
Game of the Dragon, South YarraLifting the old carpet to lay reclaimed hardwood, we uncovered a trapdoor opening onto the street. It was a wonderful thing to find and we chose not to use it, on the straightforward grounds that a concealed exit onto a footpath is not something you want in a room full of players.
A walk-in safe
St KildaOne of the St Kilda rooms came with a full walk-in safe already installed. We built it into the game as a cave behind a very heavy door, which is a thing you cannot fake convincingly and do not need to when the building has already provided it.
Where the things in the room come from
Puzzles get built around what we can find, and we look locally first. Melbourne markets, antique dealers and local retailers, partly because an object with real history reads differently to a prop, and partly because we would rather the money stayed in the city we operate in.
Over the years that has brought in a theatre electric chair, hundred-year-old doors, old radios and CRT televisions for the retro rooms, and a full arcade machine that we rebuilt into a puzzle.
Plenty is not reclaimed at all, and the reclaimed material is not there to save money. The toilets, baths and urinals in HackSaw: Remastered are brand new, which you would not guess from the set dressing. The Alice in Wonderland throne was a special-order build from a furniture company out west that has since closed. The plinths in Secret Agent Man were made by the same sign fabricator who has produced every Rush sign over the years, because we would rather keep working with people we already know than find the cheapest quote.
The horror rooms are their own sourcing problem. The bodies and body parts come from Dapper Cadaver, who also supply Hollywood studios, since at that level of realism a cheap substitute is worse than nothing.
What we buy, and what we make
Nobody manufactures their own microcontrollers and we do not pretend to. The brains are bought in: ESP32s, maglocks, the standard components every builder in this industry uses.
Everything downstream of that is ours. We wire the puzzles, we write the code, and we fit the electronics into upcycled and restored set pieces so that the technology disappears into the room. The difference between a bespoke room and a kit room has never been about where the components were purchased.
Immersion decides the technology question
We do not build technology puzzles for the sake of having them, and nothing in our rooms solves itself for you or moves you along a rail. Some operators design that way deliberately. We would rather the room waited for you.
Where electronics genuinely add something they earn their place, and where they do not we leave them out. Occasionally the best thing in a room is an entirely acoustic puzzle with no circuitry in it whatsoever, because a physical object responding physically builds a kind of tension that a sensor cannot. Da Vinci Down Under is the room to play if you want to understand what we mean by that.
Who builds them
There is a core build team, a project manager and a head of tech, and beyond that we bring in our game masters wherever the work allows, across art, murals and puzzle concepts. The tiles in HackSaw: Remastered were done by a game master.
We do it for three reasons. It gets people more hours in a job where hours matter. It teaches skills the role does not otherwise offer, and gives them portfolio work for whatever they do next, which for a lot of them is a career in design or fabrication somewhere else in this city. And the people running the rooms have then helped make them, which is visible in how they run them.
How the work is sequenced
We work the way a digital game studio does, in an agile loop rather than a linear plan. There is a core structure, a narrative flow and a puzzle map, followed by a great deal of adjustment as the room becomes real.
That is a consequence of the method rather than a lack of discipline. You cannot fully specify a room whose set pieces you have not sourced yet, or whose walls you are working around rather than moving. We settle the immersion, the feeling and the narrative flow first, then design to those and to the room in front of us.
Eleven years in the Melbourne scene
Rush was part of the first wave of escape rooms in Melbourne, and therefore in Australia, though we were not the first. Escape Room Melbourne got there before anybody, starting out in a family granny flat, and the credit for that belongs to them.
What we have instead is continuity, which is rarer. The person who runs the hostile walkthrough on every new room has been here since the beginning without ever being an owner, and has had a hand in building every room and every iteration since 2014. Very few people in this industry stay that long.
It means somebody on the build has watched the whole arc of the format in this city. The early adopters who came for the puzzles, when a room was largely a container for locks and codes. The same players a few years later wanting a world and a story instead. The Mystery Rooms arriving and lifting what a Melbourne room was expected to be. And the technology moving with all of it, from classic lock and key, through cheap hardware-store digital safes, to actuators, lighting states, sound design and microcontrollers.
We have also been part of shaping that. Melbourne has become one of the better cities in the world for immersive experience, and it got there through a decade of operators pushing each other, listening to what visitors and locals actually responded to, and steadily raising the floor. Being in the room for that is why we can usually tell which puzzle in a new build will feel dated in two years, and why a fan favourite that starts going flat gets rebuilt rather than defended.
Seven years between two games
September 2026A group came in to play Da Vinci Down Under at Chadstone. They had played the original version of it around seven years earlier, at a different venue, in what was effectively a different era of this company, and they asked whether the game master who had run that first game still worked here.
He did, and he ran their game. The first proposal we ever hosted was in a room called Lost in Paradise, which was retired years ago, and the same continuity applies there.
Testing, in four stages
- Table testing. Every puzzle is tested off the bench before it goes anywhere near a wall.
- Installed testing. The puzzle goes into the room and gets tested in place, where it invariably behaves a little differently.
- The walkthrough. Every surface in the room gets handled, and things are grabbed, dropped, yanked and deliberately misused, because a room has to survive a group who has decided that pulling harder is the answer.
- Beta play. We invite players who have done enough of our rooms to know what good looks like, and they play it free. Then the room opens slowly to the public and the improvement cycle begins immediately.
The testing never really finishes, because a puzzle that was a favourite for years can start to feel flat as expectations move, and we treat that as a signal to upgrade rather than something to argue with. No room here is running exactly as it opened.
How long it takes
About three months for a room, on average, and there is usually something in progress. The longest has been six months, and that was with rooms running concurrently.
Two to three weeks for a single new puzzle or an upgrade. Testing has to be stricter for a retrofit than for a new build, because the room closes for a day to install it and cannot reopen with a fault in it.
Two things that went wrong
The water vase, It's Nightmare
Retired after six months and several attemptsPlayers watered a flower, the water filled a vessel, and the level triggered a maglock. Three volts, entirely safe, properly designed for the system. What we had not accounted for was that water carries minerals, the minerals collected on the connectors, and the connectors rusted. Rust adds resistance, and the resistance meant the puzzle would fail with no warning at all.
We iterated on it for six months before retiring it, because a puzzle that works nineteen times in twenty stops being a puzzle and becomes a maintenance problem.
Da Vinci Down Under: Remastered
The plan did not survive the roomThe intention was a faithful recreation of the 2014 original. Two things got in the way. The space at Chadstone was not quite the same shape, and the original puzzles turned out to be simultaneously too difficult and not impressive enough against the standards players bring to a room now.
So we adapted while rolling it out, installing puzzles, playing them, feeling how they actually landed and changing them, which is the work that earns a room the word remastered rather than simply reopening under it.
Why we publish any of this
Nobody plays a room twice. The product is the not-knowing and it is spent the first time, which changes what is worth keeping quiet about.
If another Melbourne operator reads this and builds something better, the person who plays it does not stop playing escape rooms. They go looking for the next one, and we have sixteen. A stronger local scene grows the habit that feeds all of us, and Melbourne being known for this is worth more to us than any single trade secret. Design thinking is a giveaway rather than a moat. Spoilers are a different matter and there are none here.
Rooms do not stay the same either. Rooms we rebuilt covers what happens when one gets stripped and made again instead of retired.
Questions
Are your rooms bought from a kit supplier?
No. Components are bought, as everybody's are. The design, the wiring, the code, the set and the puzzles are ours.
Do you renovate the buildings?
No. Everything we do is set design and fitout. We do not move walls or alter layouts, and in most cases the building's own character is the reason we took the space.
Do you build for other organisations?
Yes, including campus installs and transportable builds. Those are covered on brand activations.
Has a room ever had to change mid-build?
Regularly, and the Remastered example above is the clearest one. Building into a found space with sourced objects means the plan meets reality on the way through.
Where does the work go, locally?
Into local suppliers, fabricators and dealers wherever we can manage it, and into our own game masters, who get paid build hours and portfolio work out of it.
Knowing how they are made is one way to choose one. Knowing what is in them is faster.