For Charlotte, it’s a new escape room — sort of — where both winners & losers get ‘slimed’
“Ready to get blasted today?”
It’s not the type of greeting you’d expect to get upon walking into an establishment that caters to guests as young as 8 years old. The place does have a full bar, but it’s also not the way you’d figure to be welcomed into even the wildest of local pubs.
This, however, is neither a Chuck E. Cheese nor a place trying to sell you as many $5 jello shots as possible. This is a newly opened “interactive social gaming attraction” in Charlotte’s South End called Beat The Bomb, where when its staff asks you if you’re “ready to get blasted,” what they mean is: Are you prepared to let a paint bomb, a foam bomb or a slime bomb explode right in front of or right above you?
The central conceit of the entertainment purveyor — which also has locations in Atlanta, Brooklyn, N.Y., Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. — is that it allows patrons to step into a real-life video game played using RFID wristbands, touchscreens and, well, your whole body.
Making a complete mess of things is really the main selling point, though, in a lot of ways.
“You see our Facebook ads, it’s all, ‘Come get paint-blasted!,’” says Beat The Bomb founder and CEO Alex Patterson. And when asked if he first came up with the idea of teams of four to six players engaged in a “real-life video game” — inspired by escape rooms, he says — or if he first came up with the idea of them donning hazmat-like suits so they can get “slimed” and still make a clean getaway, Patterson admits it was the latter.
“Yeah, I guess I worked backwards from that. I thought, If someone said, ‘What’d you do over the weekend?,’ and you went through (something like this), you would have to be sleeping not to say, ‘Oh, I went into this crazy fluorescent paint room and got blasted by paint — and by the way, I can show you the photos and videos right now on my phone.’”
On Tuesday, Patterson walked us through the concept during a tour of the new facility, which opens Friday in an increasingly cool Tryclan Drive corridor that also includes Gilde Brewery, Phat Burrito, SupperClub SouthEnd and Yama Loso.
We also played tackled the full roughly hour-long complement of “missions,” and, yes, we indeed got blasted. Here are the highlights.
Patterson was originally a tax lawyer before joining hardcore obstacle-course-race company Tough Mudder, as its in-house counsel. He eventually transitioned out of legal and into marketing, then took charge of creating new obstacles, then of its culture, and finally its branding. He loved it, but left in 2015 with the wheels turning in his head.
“I was like, All right, I love this teamwork experience that we provide for folks. But what if you could put it in a box, and put it in every city in the world, and not make it dependent on the ability to run?” he recalls. With Tough Mudder, he says, competitors also had to “be able to do long rows of monkey bars, or climb over walls — that was intimidating — and you’ve got bruises, and we put you through ice, fire, electric shocks; that was very much almost a ‘Fear Factor’ kind of thing. I said, ‘What if we made it just kind of fun?’”
He initially imagined “a city-based adventure, almost like a version of the Michael Douglas movie ‘The Game.’ … Or, like, an ‘Amazing Race’ through the city. But I just thought, Oh, the logistics of this would be difficult — the throughput, the volume. So, what if I rented one place and essentially came up with my own maze of rooms and my own challenges that I think bring out the best in a team and make ’em work together?”
He went on a mission to try every escape room he possibly could, for inspiration, and enjoyed plenty of them. “They were cool,” Patterson says, “when you went into, like, a killer’s basement, or a jail cell, or a submarine, or the White House Situation Room. But I realized, once you do one, you can never do it again. It’s like maybe watching a Broadway play (whereas) a movie theater is just a screen, and you can go back to the very same movie theater ... over and over again” and always have a different experience. And I began to think, Is there a way to create a high-tech escape room — -ish — where all your rooms are using (video-game-like coding) and touchscreens?”
Whatever it was going to be, Patterson figured, it needed a showstopper of a climax. “I knew I wanted it to end with (something) wild. I mean, Tough Mudder was wild. So I wanted something that would cut through and basically market itself, where it was like, ‘Wait, what did you do over the weekend?’ We’d seen The Color Run, and how many people posted photos of being blasted with color as they ran through this thing. I was like, What if you created this kind of adventure-esque escape-room thing where at the end you were trying to disarm a bomb, like a Bruce Willis movie, or ‘Homeland.’ Or Jack Bauer — remember, at the end of every episode (of “24”) it’d be like, Beep, beep, beep. I’m like, OK, that’s how the experience will end.”
But first, you and your friends (or family members, or colleagues, or classmates) have to work your way through a series of four different game rooms. The first three are 10-by-10-feet and involve heavy teamwork, including one that’s kind of like the old electronic short-term memory game known as Simon and one that uses volumetric sensors to play a kind of a human tic-tac-toe in which you also have to dodge virtual fireballs. The fourth game room is 10-by-20-feet and sees players trying to carefully maneuver through a laser maze a la Catherine Zeta-Jones in “Entrapment.” Each game runs for 10 minutes, and based on how well your team performs, you’ll earn time on your “bomb clock” — maybe 30 seconds for one, three minutes for another, and so on — and after the four games you’ll have X number of total minutes earned that you’ll use to play the “final boss”: one more team game in the bomb room (and it’s the one most like a traditional video game).
Fail, and depending on what flavor of challenge you paid for, you’ll be painted, foamed or slimed, and once that’s happened the cameras start rolling for photos and a team dance video. But even if you “beat the bomb,” which roughly 20% to 25% of teams do, you can ask for it to be set off anyway. And virtually every winning team does just that, Patterson says.
“In fact, there’ve only been two teams I know of that decided, ‘Hey, we won. We’re walking out clean.’” And one of them was pretty famous: Usher, the R&B superstar. “He and his friends won, and one of the friends was like, ‘We’re out. No, no, we won.’ So he went along with it. ... As a result, we have dance videos of hundreds of thousands of people now across all the locations, yet one of America’s most famous, entertaining dancers (came through and) we do not have a dance video. ... The social-media gold of (Usher dancing at Beat The Bomb) would have been awesome. But it’s still kind of a funny story.”
The suits are thoroughly cleaned immediately, but the two bomb rooms themselves often just get light spray-downs. “You kind of mostly let it go all day,” Patterson says. “It’s almost a cathartic thing to wash things, I think. But I just always have to keep telling the team, ‘Hey, leave it that way.’ I always say, ‘If I were a killer and you came to my basement and it was splattered with blood, you’d be really freaked out.’ I want people to come into this room be like, ‘Wait, what?’ Seeing the outlines of the people who just got blasted and whatnot.
For right now, the games in each room will always be the same, with just some variability in their patterns. But because the gaming interfaces in each room are reprogrammable, Patterson says he envisions “almost like a karaoke room, where you can choose the games you think that you’re gonna be able to do best at to beat the bomb in the end.”
(That’s already what’s going on over in the rentable three-sided game bays, which feature 20-plus mini-games that can be played individually or in teams while enjoying items off of the establishment’s food and bar menus. For probably obvious reasons, you can’t eat or drink in the enclosed game or bomb rooms.)
Also, FWIW: Non-participants can watch the action in each of the enclosed game rooms on CCTV monitors placed in Beat The Bomb’s main areas, while the bomb rooms have glass walls so the slimings, paintings and foamings happen in full public view. There are two identical sets of these connected four-room blocks and two bomb rooms, to allow BTB to accommodate more players at once — as many as 600, Patterson says, on the busiest weekend days.
What types of people does Beat The Bomb attract? “We see a lot of corporate groups during the week, at 4 o’clock, 5 o’clock, 6 o’clock,” he says. “Then on weekends, during the morning, it almost kind of plays like one of those trampoline parks — it’s a lot of kids, a lot of kids birthday parties, a lot of parents with the kids — and then come 3, 4, 5 o’clock on a Saturday, it turns into pretty much all adult groups.”
Patterson continues: “Our core customer is a 25- to 34-year-old female, often bringing a group of guys and girls, or just group of girls. ... Which surprised a lot of people, because they say, ‘Well, it’s gaming,’ and they just have a stereotypical image of young male gamers sitting in their parents’ basements or something, on a massive multiplayer game. But this is a social game. This is more like going out and playing darts, or shuffleboard, or playing a game that’s like a Trivial Pursuit.
“Then, of course, it’s such an Instagram- and TikTok-worthy ending.”
Lastly — and perhaps most importantly — is playing Beat The Bomb fun? We were a little skeptical, and like any game you’ve never played before, it takes a few minutes to kind of get acclimated to the rules and the flow of things. Some rooms are more interesting than others; the first one, which revolves around reading commands off of one of six touchscreens and executing those commands on another, is a bit tedious. But human tic-tac-toe and the Simon knock-off are engaging, and the laser maze is a blast of an adventure whether you’re nimble and acrobatic or ... not.
And while the actual experience of getting doused with paint or slime is, kind of, what it is, the visuals it yields are admittedly pretty epic.
I can show you the photos and videos right now on my phone, if you want...
Beat The Bomb
Location: 3638 Tryclan Dr, Charlotte, NC 28217
Opens Friday, Nov. 22
Hours: 3-10 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday; 11 a.m.–1 a.m. Friday and Saturday; and 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday.
Pricing: $44.95 per person for standard tickets (minimum four people per group), which include free photos and videos; $59.95 for premium tickets that add a Beat The Bomb T-shirt and one drink ticket. 20% discount with code “CHARLOTTE20” if you book by Friday.
To book, or for more information: beatthebomb.com/locations/charlotte.
This story was originally published November 21, 2024 at 5:15 AM.
