For those parents who have trouble prying the video game controller out of the tightened grasp of their offspring in favour of a real world experience that will get them off the couch to interact with others, Richmond’s Justin Tang offers some hope.
Tang’s company, Exit Entertainment, has created what he is touting as the world’s first , interactive, arcade-style video game.
Exit is known mostly for being the first in North America for developing escape room games where players are locked inside a room and have to decipher numerous clues, sometimes in elaborately themed game settings and scenarios, to gain exit from the game and room.
Now, the company, which was launched with one location in 2013, is branching out to offer a game that combines elements of a video game with real life action.
“Essentially, we wanted to bring virtual entertainment into real life,” said Tang, 30 who, as the company’s CEO, guided Exit to a Richmond Chamber of Commerce Business Excellence Award in 2014 for innovation of the year.
Today, there are 11 locations, two in Richmond that are considered corporate stores, and nine other franchises — seven in the Lower Mainland and two in Alberta.
“Video games offer a great experience. However, while they seem to be connecting people by allowing you to play with people online, it also pulls people apart through decreasing social experiences with their friends and families,” Tang said.
Tang knows this first-hand. He was an avid gamer growing up in Richmond where he graduated from Steveston secondary. He would spend hours playing just about anything he could, especially role playing adventures. But he recognized the problems of too much screen time and followed his vision of a facility where video games were brought to real life.
“That way, when people wanted to play, they could do so, physically, with their friends,” he said.
He started the business with the escape room scenarios since they were the simplest to develop. And when they were successfully received and subsequently mimicked by other businesses, the time was right to up the stakes a notch and introduce the real life arcade game experience concept.
Tang said he sat down with his team of employees and threw the challenge out to them to brainstorm what the next step would be. And this spring Exit rolled out Biohazard: Left For Dead.
Just like video and arcade games, the players are given three lives to try and survive. In this case it’s a zombie hoard trying to break into the “safe” area of a laboratory where you and up to two other players are placed.
“People had stereotyped us as an escape room company, so no matter how we explained this new concept, they thought it was just an escape room with a zombie in it,” he said, adding the goal is to try your best to not leave the room.
“Basically, in this game you want to stay in the room,” Tang added.
In order to do so, players have to successfully carry out a number of tasks inside the darkened confines to keep the undead hoards from breaking in.
Among the tasks, which need to be done in a specific amount of time and order, is making sure a hand-cranked generator is energized to maintain your link with an artificial intelligence character, called Elle, who is displayed on a big screen TV and helps guide you through the game.
Then there’s a hand scanner which determines if you have contracted the zombie virus.
All the while, you have to fend off, with a pistol, animatronic zombies randomly breaking into the room. If they do, or you fail to keep the myriad of tasks completed, you lose a life.
Keep things ticking along and remain uninfected and your game can stretch up to around 20 minutes.
“It can be chaos,” Tang said, adding most players new to the game can get dispatched quite quickly. Thankfully, they can purchase subsequent game time for half the first-time cost of $12, and try their luck with the experience and knowledge they gained.
But as players progress through different levels, the challenges get tougher.
“We wanted to create a new type of experience for those who didn’t want to do puzzles or riddles like in the escape rooms. This is more like an action game,” Tang said, adding he sees this as just one step in his dream to develop an entertainment facility with an increasing emphasis on live action game play.
To that end, Exit will be rolling out a host of virtual reality-based games at its second Richmond location on Beckwith Road — a two-storey, 10,000-square-foot facility — by the end of this year.
“Customers will be wearing virtual reality goggles and play in a large theatre,” he said, adding while Exit purchased the licences for a host of virtual reality games, the long-term plan is to develop them in-house.
One of the virtual reality games will be a version of Flappy Birds, the challenging smart phone app-based game which has players navigate their way around a series of obstacles.
“To stay aloft people will have to actually wave their arms, just like a bird flapping their wings,” Tang said laughing.
