Unhinged by Design: Sauve Qui Peut, Steven Keller & Shawn Mercier (S11E10)

(upbeat music) This episode is brought to you by Buzzshot, PG's Playhouse, The Reality Escape Convention, and Patreon supporters like you. The Reality Escape Convention is happening August 16th and 17th, 2026 in Le Val Quebec, Canada, just outside of Montreal. This is our convention. We've been running it since 2020, and this event is for professionals and aspiring professionals, and just people who love this industry. It is all about helping people elevate their business, make it more sustainable, and create more and better games. Come, join us, see all of the love and passion that our team pours into this event. We're making something special for you. I hope that you come and join us. You can learn more at realityescapeCon.com. I hope to see you at Recon. Welcome to The Reality EscapePod, your lifeline when you need to get away from the real world. I'm David Spira, alongside my co-host, PG Law. Together, we're exploring immersive gaming from all angles and we'll be joined by guests who really know their stuff. Today's guests are Steven Keller and Sean Messier of Sevkiper in Saint-Jean, Serrishi Liu, just a little southeast of Montreal. Over the years, Sevkiper has become synonymous with inventive and slightly unhinged Escape Room designs, plus some spectacular mural work. They have been featured on all three of our Montreal tours, have won two Golden Lock Awards, and are winning their third for their latest game, The Castle of Eternal Suffering. Welcome and congratulations, Steven and Sean. Hi, we just learned something new. I like doing that. It's fun. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thanks for the wonderful game. Yes, congrats. Your games are so fun. I haven't had the chance to play the very newest one, but I have played all of your other games a couple times, actually, because I like to come on the tours. And David is not wrong when he calls them unhinged, but also very inventive. And he always prefaces the talk on the tour when he talks about your Escape Room company. He talks about how different all of your games are from each other. And that has been a really fun thing to explore when coming to play at your company. Oh, thank you very much. Steven is the one who pretty much created all of the games. So he's the one he could maybe emphasize on what he did and everything. We're going to explore that, and all of the different things that you guys have been doing over the course of this conversation. But I want to start before we get too deep with the name, So Keeper, what does it mean? So keeper, if we translate it directly, it would be kind of like run for your lives. So it's like a French expression that means when you're in a situation, you have to escape, but I'm pretty sure everybody knows what one for your life means. So that's basically it. It's like something you would yell in an emergency. Yeah, exactly. And I'll also add that the way that Steven and Sean and now I am pronouncing this is Sofke Per with an R sound at the end, which is more in line with the Kebacquois accent. The way I would have learned it in French class would have been Sofke Per with a T sound at the end, but I have spent enough time around all of you that I just found myself saying it. And it's the right way of saying it. So every time we say your company name, it's like yelling fire in a movie. Basically, basically, there's an imminent danger and you got to run from it. So Steven, how did you find your way into escape rooms and founding SQP, which is how I will be referring to it from now on? Perfect. No problem. I have an engineering degree from the Gille. And I was working initially as an engineer. I went into my family business following that. And I started doing escape rooms, probably in 2016. The first ones had started coming out in Montreal. And after I did the first room, I was bitten by the experience. I said, oh, this is really cool. First time that I did in the escape room, I went and did a second one right away because I was on a high. And then I took a break from escape rooms for about a day, a couple of months because I was working. And then I did another escape room in the Montreal area. I was like, this is really cool. And then my wife asked me to prepare a kind of like homemade escape room for her staff party. So I said, sure, I'll try that. And I kind of did it. The people appreciated it. And I said, I think I could do this. I automatically right after I did my fourth escape room, I came back and I said, I'm opening up an escape room. And I started building the escape room before I even had my locale. I had a workshop and I just started building things for the escape room before I even had a locale. And then we found a locale fairly quickly and we opened up. I think that's a really smart way to do it because so many times I hear people say, I want to make an escape room. I already booked a place. And like in my head, I'm like, oh my god, you guys are already paying a rent. And you haven't even made the game yet. So I think already having made a game, having that under your belt and then crafting the rooms and the puzzles, either before or while you're looking for your location is a really smart move. And also I totally relate to wanting to play another escape room immediately after. And you mentioned that you're writing the high of playing escape rooms. But I think there's also a high connected with creating and seeing people enjoy what you've created. Exactly. That's basically where I kind of discovered my passion because I also have a construction company that I was working on for I would say five to seven years before I started with the escape rooms. At the beginning, I have to admit that I was somewhat annoying to have people beta test my escape rooms because I would be sitting in the room with them. And I would just get super annoyed if they didn't find out the solution to the puzzle like right away. And I would always edge them on and I would be spending hours and hours with the other people talking about the experience afterwards. And even when we finally opened up, you couldn't get me out of the business. I would just sit there and talk to people as soon as they came out of these escape rooms. And I was just really interested in how they perceive their experience. So what I wanted to do is first of all, I was getting their reaction. So I was super happy when somebody had fun. But it was also what did they like? What didn't they like? How can we improve customer experience? Often a lot of this suggestion would come from the clients and I would be like, yeah, that's a great idea. And then we'd implement it pretty much almost instantaneously. And I would say that anybody who has ever visited Surfkeeper while you are there, Steven knows that you are very eager to talk about their experience. That has never gone away. No. I am curious, you do have two locations, the Saint Jean location where I have spent literal days of my life and your other location in Quebec City, which I have only ever walked past. And I know very little about it. What's the story and the difference between these two locations? So I opened up the Saint Jean location in 2017 and I actually had the idea to open up the escape room. I would say in January 2017, I started building it and by the end of May, our first three rooms were open and our official opening is on my daughter's birthday, which was the second of June. So I would be working on the escape rooms while the other ones were open and the fourth escape room that we opened up, I think was opened up for Saint Jean at that list. And then by the end of the summer, we had a fifth one and the eighth fixed one opened up pretty much all in the same year. I continued working on other scenarios and by the time I finished my full first year, we had seven rooms open. Wow. Then what happened was I started to do more escape rooms because initially when I opened up my first seven rooms, I would say probably my first four rooms. I had only experience, I'd say about five escape rooms and I purposely didn't want to do anymore escape rooms because I didn't want to get influenced by what I saw. I really wanted to create my own experience out of pretty much nothing and not being influenced by another room that I did, which is a mentality that I know you ultimately changed over time. Yes, I eventually changed over time because I thought I was super, super original making a secret passage out of a library or a fireplace or creating an Egyptian theme to escape room. I thought I was like, wow, that'll be new. Where I quickly found out when I did lots of escape rooms, I realized that okay, it wasn't that original, but we were able to put our special twists on what we produced. By the end of the first year we have some of the escape rooms opened in the day. Now we're working on our eighth. And I decided to take a pause because I realized there was a lack of escape rooms in Quebec City. So I was going down to Quebec City to find a locale that would suit us. And at the same time, I was building everything that I could possibly think of to be prepared to open quickly. So when I finally found the locale in Quebec City, we were able to, upon signing the lease, we were able to open up the six escape rooms. And I think you were seven or eight weeks that were able to accomplish that. So basically the Quebec location was all of the same rooms as the Stage allocation. But I was able to improve certain aspects of certain gains. And I was able to construct it much more solidly. So I was able to eliminate any sort of errors that I had in my first attempt. So it was actually pretty fun rebuilding the same room, but improving on what your first build was. [LAUGHS] I wish we could all have two overs in our own lives. So Sean, how did you enter the picture at SQP? I was originally at school, and then I was working in a restaurant, and then I saw this escape room place. And I was like, OK, let me-- and on Facebook, I wrote to them, I was like, are you looking for anybody? And they're like, yeah, we're currently hiring. I'm like, OK, great. And I sent my CV. And the first attempt, I had no answers to it. So a year after they opened up, I retried, because I tested one of the escape rooms. I did the Dender Secret as my first escape room. This is an SQP game. Yes, it is an SQP game. And so it was my first escape room. And then I did another one at the D equation, which was also at SQP. And I spoke to the employee there, and I was like, are you looking currently at Brandy Buddy? Because it's really fun. And I really love all the puzzles and all the tech works. And can I work here? And I was like, yeah, sure, bring your CV in. And I did an interview with Adda Time. It was Steven's daughter, Kellyanne, the manager at the time. So I did an interview with her, and I got a call up. And I got hired at Soapkeeper. And then I was working there as a game master, doing game master stuff, reset, bringing clients in. And since I'm really self thought on most aspect of the thing I did, and I'm really hands on with tools and repairs and electronic and stuff. And I started doing more and more repair, more fixing, and getting more and more involved into the escape room world. At one point, Steven and Kellyanne were like, OK, well, this is a really good employee. So eventually I become manager after-- I think you said, Steven said, you waited for me to have three months or six months of being there. And then you put me up as a manager. And then slowly me and Kellyanne, we built together and became manager of Soapkeeper. And I've been here for second of July. It's going to be my eighth year. Shawn didn't really give me the choice to promote him as manager because he was just basically a game master. But he was so curious on how all the mechanisms work. He would be going in to repair the mechanisms, even though he didn't know how it worked. So he would open it up and try to fix it without bothering me. And all of a sudden, quickly he became super fluent in all the reparations. He was always present. He's super curious. Sometimes I would have repairs done on some of my mechanisms without even knowing that they broke. And sometimes he would take my mechanism and improve on it. And I would walk into the escape room. And I'm like, I didn't build this. What is this? And Shawn's like, yeah, I kind of fixed it. That was my impression over the years of visiting Soapkeeper was when I first started going, Shawn was a very good game master. And then he was like running things. And then he was very running things. And then he was just rebuilding things. And I want to add to the shi-bat. Yes, I was fixing stuff, but it was like, for the escape rooms to work. And Steven at the beginning was like, well, you really got to tell me when you're fixing stuff. Like, look, I'm like, it's fixed already. But did you use the right glue? Well, I used that one. He was like, oh, OK, well, that's the right one. And then so on and so on. He caught use to the fact where I was not telling him I was doing repair. The trust got more and more. And then at one point, it was not even telling him it was changing stuff. If I was changing stuff, the core mechanism, the core riddle was still the same. It's just improve on sturdiness, reliability, and stuff like that. [MUSIC PLAYING] So David, BuzzShop Bookings has some really cool features to help you sell some more bookings. They have upselling and an additional bookings feature. So basically, when someone books a game, BuzzShop Bookings will automatically show them the available slots for other games both before and after. Now, not only will this help you sell more games, but as a customer, as a player, I find this immensely convenient. It's so helpful to know that there are other games that will conveniently fit before or after the game you just booked. It'll save you a lot of time if you're booking multiple games in one day. I've talked about this before, but I think that one of the essential goals of a booking system is to communicate to players that it makes sense. It is encouraged as even great to play more than one escape room. And this is another one of those subtle ways that is communicating to your guests, that escape rooms are not just a one-time thing. It also is just great for anybody who wants to maybe extend their day out. And the fact that BuzzShop makes it easier for both players and owners-- that's just fantastic. Yeah, and this is because BuzzShop Bookings is designed for escape room companies. So that's why it's so customized to your business model. Jordan Kouch of Just Escape Room has this to say, BuzzShop Bookings is a must. There are useful features here. I've never seen in any other booking software. BuzzShop is the secret weapon powering escape room businesses, and they're now offering a booking software. BuzzShop is truly a one-stop shop for running your escape room. Their booking system fully integrates with their waiver management software, creating a seamless ecosystem that's both easy for your employees to master while giving your customers the best experience possible. Best of all, it's a flat monthly rate with no booking fees, and they don't take a cut of your ticket sales. Streamline your marketing and grow your escape room business. Repod listeners get an extended free trial and 20% off your first three months with no setup fees or hidden charges. Visit BuzzShop.com/repod to learn more. We'll have link and details for you in the show notes. In my opinion, there are three defining characteristics of a Sevky Per game, an unusual underlying concept, commitment to the bit, and beautifully painted murals. I'm curious if you both feel like my description is accurate. It is pretty accurate. Yes, I agree. Anything you'd add or change? No, you've got the three concepts. We've got the core. We've got the funky stuff and the wow effect. You've got everything. You've been here for years, David. I know my way around. You've studied, you've done, yeah, you do. I want to explore all of these. Let's start with the murals. I often find painted murals in escape rooms flat and underwhelming, but never at Sevky Per. What's the story behind the muralist? The person who does a painting is an artist, a local artist, that I've actually been dealing with for years and years. He does excellent, excellent work. His name is Danny Richie-Anne. He's an artist, so you have to let him cook. Let him cook. So you kind of have to tell him what you need done, but you can't really pressure him into when he's going to do it. At what speed he's going to do it. And often we'd have discussions because he would adapt my idea of what the mural was. And I would have to explain to him, no, I needed that on the mural because it is one of the riddles. And he goes, I put butterflies instead of numbers. And I'm like, no, we need the numbers. He does beautiful work. He works with airbrushes and also paint brushes. And oftentimes he will spend hours and hours and hours just sitting and looking at the wall and researching and looking at his iPad to kind of get inspiration. And I'll be like, it's been three days and you haven't even taken a paintbrush. And then he's like, yeah, I'm not inspired yet. And all of a sudden I'd go to bed and I'd wake up the next morning and he has this huge, super elaborate mural painted, completely done with an incredible amount of detail. And you're like, when did you do that? And he goes, oh, I started around midnight and I worked all night. A true artist. And he works with black light. He works with invisible paint also, which is a unique aspect that we do using our riddles sometimes the way he integrates them into the mural makes it invisible but also pretty to look at. I just want to note that a lot of the Canadian escape room creators tend to use the word riddle when we would consider them like a puzzle, right? That's true, that's true, yeah. I'm referring to a puzzle when I say riddle. All of your games are built around an underlying idea that was novel at least at the time that the game was new. My impression is that your approach to design in the early days is pretty different from how you view things today and you've already talked a little bit about this. Talked about where the inspiration for a specific idea came from in the early days of Sovkeeper. I kind of still apply my philosophy of creating escape rooms, whenever I create a new escape room, I always start with a base idea and the base idea is often a wow factor or something really cool that I want to happen in the escape room. So what I do is I start with that and I kind of apply a theme around that really cool thing that I want to do and I just start building. I never finish writing the whole storyline or the whole escape room until I actually start building and I'm physically in the room and I get inspired. What I've learned is that we actually do the inverse of what most escape room owner do is that escape owner will plan, will lay out, will make sure they have all the puzzle figure it out. They will know the theme, they will know the name, they will know the story and stuff, but still in a piece, he does the complete opposite. The story is the last thing we do. The name is the last thing we do. Everything that's supposed to be plan at the beginning is the last thing, but that gives us the flexibility of having creativity and not being bound by what we have planned. So if we want to maybe add something funky after and that wasn't planned before, we could figure out the story around it later. That's what we do. We flip stuff around. You guys are playing jazz, improvisational jazz. Yep. What you're doing is you're building mechanics first. You're building all of the mechanics and then you're figuring out how you wrap that in narrative and flavor later on. Exactly. That makes sense. It's a perfectly viable way and you're not the only people who do it that way. I really have to be inspired and for me to be inspired, I actually have to physically be in the room and feel what somebody would feel in that specific place. So I actually build it and sometimes I'll finish a whole section and I have no idea what I'm going to do in the next section. Then I'll just walk around the area. I'll sit down. I'll think and I'll figure everything out as I go. I don't hold myself back by how I was supposed to do this. So I have to do this. So if I were to go and visit another escape room and I saw something that I wanted to put into my escape room, then I would kind of change direction and I would try to go into another direction. We've talked about this early collection of games that you had that I'm going to call kind of your pre-falder on forest collection of games. Question for each of you. Is there a game from those first few years that each of you feels best represents early surfkeeper? A room that really represents surfkeeper as a company that wants to make stuff different and cool. I would say it would be final exam for me because you have a physical aspect in it. You have some technical aspect which at the beginning when surfkeeper opened up, escape rooms started doing but it wasn't really mainstream, maglock or computers or program and stuff like this into the escape room. So I feel like this would represent surfkeeper's idea of good escape rooms. And the final exam is an unusual and physical game. There's a fair bit of climbing, a whole bunch of crawling and I must say, unlike any escape room I've ever played, is the kind of game that you are either going to love it or you're going to hate it. Exactly. And I would say most people would love it. Yeah, I would say most people do but I also think that there are certain body types, there are certain levels of physicality that some people would go and say, oh no, I regret signing up to play this. Exactly. And that's okay too. Not liking a game, it's okay too. It's accepted. A lot of the times I think it's better to have a game that people really love or people have no interest in than it is to have something that everyone's okay with. Steven, how about you? It would be difficult to ask me that because especially at the beginning, I really wanted to offer completely different experiences for every single one of my games and actually I took pretty big risks at the beginning building certain games. Some of them aren't necessarily completely family oriented. If I had to go with one game, I would say the secret of Dendera because it was actually my first game and there was actually no locks in that game. Everything was built with sensors and I had no idea how sensors worked. I had no idea that a magnetic sensor existed. I had no idea that 12 volt current. I knew about it. I wasn't fully comfortable with working with all of those things but I just went in and I built it and I went to an electronics store and the owner spent three hours with me explaining to me my blocks and magnetic sensors and I'm like, oh my god, I gotta put this into a game. I'll say that for me, I really enjoy secret of Dendera. I think that the core mechanic that it's built around is something that I personally really enjoy, especially at the scale that you have built it. Thank you very much. I relate a little bit to this because it's a little bit like, oh squirrel, oh, butterfly. Let me go chase after the next interesting thing that crosses your path but I totally get it. I think it's a completely legit way to kind of invigorate your design process and you just incorporate whatever excites you at that moment and I have a fair amount of that as well. And so speaking of a wide and varied range of interest and themes, you have games ranging from family friendly to what I can only describe as extremely adult themed, like mature themed escape rooms. Do you ever find that clandestine bar which is your adult themed escape room? Does that ever cause any troubles for you? Not really. Initially, the reason why I built the different themes was actually to surprise or have people talk about the actual escape room, whether it was positively or negatively like, oh my god. Sensationalism. Yeah. And it was just basically to create experiences that people would come in and say, what just happened? What did I just experience? Mission accomplished. I love that actually. I love being really shocked by escape rooms. Delight is a way to do it but also being shocked is another way to create that sense of I guess wonder in a way. Like I wonder why he did. Different kind of wonder. No, but I love it. I mean, seriously, I do love all the different weird escape rooms and weird ideas out there. And I think the shock factor, again, is also totally valid way to draw people's attention and get people talking. It does draw people's attention. They are questioning why this room and that's a question we still get today, even though this room has been open for seven years now. Why is it 18 plus? Why is it only adult? And we can't really talk about it because it will spoil everything. But people have to play it to make it so it's the unknown that really drive the client to like, okay, well, book it. And then we've had situation where we're like, okay, well, I'm just going to try and ask if my kid can go and like, no, no, no, but why will he's 14? It's a legit 18 plus. Even if everybody's over 18, it's not the kind of game that I would want to go in with, you know, my parents. This is not R rated. This is NC 17. Okay, folks, all of you out there, let of your 10-year-olds watch rated our movies. This is not that. With Fender on Forest and later Castle of Eternal Suffering, you have slowed down the pace of production substantially. How are you approaching things these days? When I first started opening Escape Rooms, we're talking about beginning of 2017. I had no idea of the lifespan of an Escape Room. So I built my Escape Rooms on a budget and I kind of gave it a two-year life line before having to change it. So when you're running a Escape Room and you think it's going to be around for two years as a businessman, you really have to calculate how much money you could put into the Escape Room in order for it to be profitable. Right now, I believe the first Escape Room, which I started constructing, was the secret of Dendera. It is still our most fully booked room after nine years. So when you realize that your lifespan of a room increases, what you want to offer is you want to offer better experiences and you can increase the budget and you can kind of go in a different direction. Well, there were other companies that were offering better experiences. better experiences. Shout out to Jonathan who pretty much inspired me to kind of move forward and put more investments into my rooms and take more time to actually develop everything to make sure that the experience is perfect. That's Jonathan Driscoll and Sasha St. Dennis past guests on the show twice actually from Escapearium. Yes. And we'll link those episodes in the show notes for you. There are really people who are driving the industries and pushing us more and more and bringing more wow effect and special effects because also we're building Escapearium with a really small team which we're able to do great things while integrating production special effect like other Escaperooms are doing takes a little bit more time because we wanted to do it correctly. I'm not a person who works with wood itself so it takes a little more time to learn and to build what we want and have the final result that we want. So that's why sometimes it takes a little bit longer. Also with Jonathan what was really annoying is he was building Escaperooms relatively quickly and every time he would build an Escape Room we would often at the beginning come out with an Escape Room pretty much around the same time as he was at the beginning and I was improving on my Escaperooms and then Jonathan would come out with an Escape Room that's just like wow what did he just do and then I'm like okay let's go back and try to one up his new room and then we we were like oh I think we did it with this one and then he'd come up with a new room and then all of a sudden no no no no he was he was basically my inspiration to challenge myself on I'm offering the best room possible with more and more effects. And it's a friendly competition. That's very clear that's coming across very clearly. Someone recently was having a conversation with me about why they didn't support us on Patreon and it was really surprising to me. He was very bothered by the fact that there was this big tech corporate entity in between the relationship and I'm glad that we talked about it because from our perspective Patreon is wonderful. First of all we have been on Patreon since like 2018 we get so much from Patreon. The fact of the matter is that Patreon is constantly building new features and functionality and we looked into replicating all of that ourselves. We looked into rolling our own. We really really did and the truth is it would cost us so much more money to build that and we could if we ever really needed to we could do it but it is not worth it. The truth is that Patreon frees us from managing all of that tech and allows us to just build the content that we care about for you, our audience, our listeners, our readers, our guests at our events. Patreon has enabled this and the people who are backing us on Patreon, that is what allows us to do it. It allows us to live. It is so difficult being an independent creator, independent media, a small business in this day and age and the fact that we have people who like what we're doing enough that they are willing to put their money behind us on a monthly basis, it means the world to us. Thank you so much to everyone who has our backs and is supporting us and for those who can't afford to, thank you so much for listening, liking and sharing our content. However you can help it's enough. Faldoron Forest was a massive leap for you, integrating an immense amount of technology and creating no shortage of challenges along the way. What have been the positive and negative lessons from this game for each of you? I could start talking about Faldoron because we are making Faldoron better at the moment. The plus of it was having a fully automated room which didn't need a employee to manage or watch or activate something or just run the game in general. It was a fully automated game so that brought in a lot of challenge, a lot of hours in recording studios because we needed to figure out every possible action a player could have done and we needed to have a voice line or something to tell the player how to help them in a specific situation without to have intervened into the room using a traditional radio or something like that. So that's the plus of it. The negative of it is that more tech usually involves more developing time but also creates more opportunity for bugs or stuff to go wrong or stuff to break or stuff that are maybe less intuitive for a new player who are not experienced with that much technology. I pretty much agree for us Faldoron was like Sean said it was a kind of a project that tried to develop a fully automated hands-free room. A very very very big step I guess towards escape rooms and what I realized while we were building it is that it was way bigger than I anticipated. So what was for what I wanted with Faldoron is it reacts not necessarily based on the amount of time in your room it reacts to the progression that you have. So to create no downtime in the room even if you're going quickly through the room and you get stuck on a puzzle if you're stuck on the puzzle too long it'll help you out and even if you're going super slow it'll always give you the chance to try to complete that puzzle on the difficult mode. So it actually adapts to the different players but not based on time which is in retrospect think that having a game master actually manage the room would have been so much more simpler and it probably would be the option that I would go to today. Humans are really powerful technology. Yeah but at one point during the development we kind of realized that we were too far into it so we kind of said let's play it out we're already at this point let's go ahead and like Sean said we just had to add an add soundbites because people were doing silly things and stupid things and you're like why would you even think of doing that. You know like now we have to go back to the studio and add another soundbite for somebody who actually tries to do that. So it was the big project and the other thing that I realized is that you put all of this money effort time into creating something that if it works well the person won't even notice that something actually even happened. So the fact that the room was adapting and it was doing it so well people just thought that's the way the game was it didn't even realize that it was actually checking things the whole time and adapting and being self-reliant and when we opened up also we didn't have any overrides that also was a huge problem. Overrides are important. Your latest game Castle of Eternal Suffering is massive and alternates between being very cerebral and puzzly and also very physical and having physical challenges for players to overcome with the few surprises along the way. If I'm not mistaken I think that this game took you the better part of three years to complete and now that it's open how do you feel about it? We're super super happy and excited about the final product. It was a long time to develop but we really put in the effort into trying to offer exactly like you said someone who likes puzzles. I think we have very original and great puzzles for somebody who likes more visual decor. We went the whole nine yards for somebody who wants a little bit of dosage of emotion and scaring. We go in that direction. Somebody is more physical. We also offer something for them. So we mixed a whole bunch of things together and we're really proud of what was created and Sean did a great job with sound and lighting and yeah we're super sighted and proud and the reaction has been pretty much unanimous. Everybody comes out of that game asking what just happened. David you talked about it took us three years to build it. In a way yes we took three years to build that room and maybe yes if we would have did some other stuff differently would have maybe come out with the room sooner but I think it's for me personally I'm really picky on how everything works and I want to make sure everything works correctly because I want to give the best experience to the player. I think it was a good thing that we took a little bit more time to polish and learning from Father on to from the opening of Father on having made that was tested and heavily tested but not quite there yet. I think it was a good thing that we took the time off have a little more time to polish up the bugs and after the room has opened I can say that it was the easiest opening of a new room that we've ever did it was a smooth this opening ever and owners knows that when they open up a room, it is really stressful because you don't know what's going to go wrong and Murphy's Law, everything's going to happen and what you don't want it to happen. And I would say Castle just went super smoothly. There's nothing major. Everybody had the great experience. So it was worth it to have a little more time to polish everything up. A quick shout out to Sean because actually the castle was the first escape room that he was involved in from beginning to end. More than initially plan, I think. The power and the curse of being competent. Yep. But Steven, when I first met you, my initial impression of you was that you were just filled with joyful chaos over the years. I've gotten to know you better. And what I've seen is more of an unusual balance between chaos and maybe not perfectionism, but a deep desire to execute on a very specific vision as close as possible. I'm curious. What's driving those extremes in you? You're absolutely right because I'm super extreme. Whenever I try to do something or whenever I go into a certain direction, I guess it would be passion. And I'm also very focused on one thing at a time. I don't multitask. So when I have an idea, I really have to follow it right to the end. But then I got to go into the next section and I got to become super focused. I guess it's possibly because I'm not good at multitasking. I don't know if that answers your question. Works for me. Sean, you're completing a degree. What have you studied and what are your plans with it? Actually, I have two degrees now. I have one in telecommunications. So everything that's related to Wi-Fi related to tech. And I just completed a degree in security and computers and how to handle like networks and stuff. So learning all that skills will allow me to build more and more complex escape rooms and with new technology and make it super reliable because in the server and in the tech industry, everything needs to be super reliable. If there's a fail, there's always a backup and the user is never affected. So for an escape room, the client can only do the room once. And if something happens during the room, the experience, it's not good. Something happened. So with all this knowledge, it would bring fail save to bring everything back and make sure every client in every possible scenario has the same and the best experience without any hiccup, any bumps. And if there's a bump, they will not even know about it. They will never affect the end user. I just also want to give a shout out because we are recording this today on Sean's birthday. Yes. Thank you very much. Happy birthday, Sean. Thank you, thank you. And also, I was completely shocked when you told us how old you were because you are way younger than I thought I'm turning 26 today. I made 2000 kid. I was just so impressed because you're so ambitious, you know, even the degrees that you're studying for, you're so ambitious, but also single, mindedly focused and investing in this career in the escape room industry. And especially at such a young age, so organized. And I just wanted to give a shout out to you for that. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to hear. So Steven, you used to own a bar and your wife currently owns the fantastic restaurant, the doorchester, which is about a block down the street from SQP. What lessons from the bar and restaurant business were most valuable when operating in escape room? Well, my parents actually started the bar business back in, now it's a 87. What my parents taught me in business is that as a business owner, you don't count your time. You always have to be present. You have to follow through with your employees. You have to make sure that they're doing the proper thing. So in business, any business that you do, whether it's escape room or a bar or restaurant, it has to do with how you actually manage or run the business. Sean, it feels to me like you have sort of grown up in SIFT Keeper. Looking back at the past few years, how do you feel you have changed SIFT Keeper and how has SQP changed you? It has changed me. I have become more organized. I have become more autonomous on certain tasks, but I've also brought a lot of stuff into SIFT Keeper. I'm really a tech savvy guy. I'm really oriented to tech. I think I've brought automation to SIFT Keeper. I've brought new stuff that wasn't there. Quick parenties, Stephen didn't even know what a laser diode was until I showed him to him. Dummy. He was really impressed about that. I don't know what that is either, Stephen, so don't feel bad. He was doing other stuff to make it work, but there's an easier way of doing it. I bring a lot of tech wise and I really always want to improve and make sure it's reliable and tech wise and just make stuff greater and use today's current technology. I think that's what I bring to SQP. We hear businesses sometimes, they're old school and work with papers and stuff. No, that's not my style. I want everything to be automated. I want everything to run smoothly and be easy and just it works. Gotta hire the young ones, the ones that are post 2000. Hey kid, you like some puzzles? We got some puzzles over on PG's Playhouse. Our podcast celebrating wordplay, brain teasers and trivia, all with some pod friends. In episode 34, Jordan Sorcery joins us to talk about hero mancy. Today's game is called Get and Shredded, where players must figure out the name of the cheese. The clue is, I'll be brief, this cheese has no ending. Stay till the end to hear the answer. Today's topic is divinely cheesy. Throughout the ages, humans have always tried to foretell the future through different types of divination. These have included the more well-known types of fortune telling. Today we're talking about hero mancy, divination by reading cheeses. I'm not joking. We're available on Apple Podcasts. Spotify wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for PG's Playhouse or click the link in our show notes. Did you get the answer to, I'll be brief, this cheese has no ending. It's "bre cheese." You take the word "brief" and remove the last letter to get "bre." Join us now on PG's Playhouse and Play Along. I'm curious to hear, Steven. What's the status of the dance troupe and how's your leg doing? Oh, thank you. We just got off a weekend in Quebec City. We just did the biggest dance competition probably in Canada. What kind of dance? Adult hip hop dancing. You do hip hop dancing. That's so cool. Recreational hip hop dancing, but we actually do competitions. We are like a bunch of parents of dancers that get on stage and we offer a fun routine, a fun show. What we lack in dance technique we make up in enthusiasm on stage. Yeah, we just finished the dance competition, like I said, it was the biggest one in Canada. We won our category with a hit of the day from the judges, which is kind of like they. I'm going to use a French term, a "couvert car," kind of like a golden buzzer, or from the judge saying that when they like the performances, I've been dancing for probably about eight years now or nine years because my daughter pushed me into doing it. Right now, my daughter owns a studio. She just bought it last year. And she's doing really, really, really well. And she coaches your troop, right? Yes. My daughter is my coach and according to her, I'm a very bad student. I'm not very disciplined. Look, always stay on brand. I'm curious what comes next for you both. Well, currently we're revisiting Paul Launfortist. We are bringing it up to date and that's me. I was like, "Okay, we need to bring it back to today's tech and we need to add stuff that wasn't added previously." And after that, I think it would be to go and redo some old rooms. I think that's Steven's plan, but he's the only one who can confirm it. I will follow. Like Sean said, we basically took all of the tech from Fowler on and we replaced it for something more up to date. So the code is being rewritten. It's going to be different, but at the same time with much more directly related to exactly what we wanted in Fowler on because obviously, I started Fowler on without knowing where I was going. And we kind of adapted the tech to make it work. But now we took Fowler on and we're like, "Okay, this is what we wanted to do and we're replacing everything." By finishing Castle, we also developed our own tech in Castle that we know and have been tested and it works great. Now we can take that tech and then retrofit. the run. Yeah, basically. And for self-cuter, like Sean said, we're going to be attacking some of our old rooms. And we are going to bring the room to the 2027 standard. And we'll be changing riddles and we'll be adding a lot of different effects and tech into the actual storyline of certain rooms that we believe have a good theme and a good decor that we can work with. I played Faldor on Forest when it first open way back when pretty much like alpha testing it. So I'm really excited to be able to come back and see all of the changes and improvements that you've made to it. And so if any of our listeners want to follow along, find out when the new and improved Faldor on Forest is released and things of that nature, where can they do so? On our Facebook page is the best and most up to date information. Mailing list is also a great place to go. I may be a tech guy, but I'm not a social media guy. So Facebook will be my only platform for now. I'll have links to that in the show notes. Sean, Stephen, thank you both for joining. I've known you both a very long time. And it's kind of strange how long we've known each other at this point. Every time I come to visit my appreciation for what you both do and what you both bring to Sevkipper grows. You both have such incredible generosity and kindness in the way that you host every single guest that comes through. And it's not just the two of you. It is your entire staff. I have spent so much time with your team and the character that you both bring. It just permeates the whole organization. It's incredible to see and it is so much fun to be around. I am so thankful for what you both do and cannot wait to play the rebuild folder on and whatever comes next. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much, David. Thank you. Thank you. This episode of Reality Escape Mod is produced by Teresa Piazza with support by Lisa Spira. We're edited by Steve Ewing of Stand Inside Media, Music by Ryan Elder, logo by Jeanine Proc, and all of this is brought to you by roomescapeartist.com, your home for well-researched, rational, and reasonably humorous, escape room, and immersive gaming content and events. Thank you to our highest tier Patreon supporters, Derek Tam, breakout games, Escape Arem, Pat Tupant of Olivier Escape, the Ministry of Peculiarities, Chris Loughlin, Jeremiah Seismore, Rex Miller, Mark of Key Stone Escape Games, Byron Del Monaco, Mystery Unfolds, and Andy Mincer. Thank you so much for your ongoing support. If you've listened to the end and you love what we're doing, or even just like it, please go over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast and give us a five star rating. And if you got a little bit more time, just write a little review, say something nice. These reviews go so far in terms of giving us leverage to attract more guests. It's the kind of thing that allows us to show that this podcast is real and that it's worth visiting. Your reviews matter not just to the algorithms, but to the guests who look at them before they say yes. One day I was a manager, I don't know how long I was, but I was in the back in the workshop doing something and I was hearing this talking noise all the time. And I was like, what's happening? And it was coming from the site and I was like, what is happening? And I'm like walking a little bit faster all the way to the front to the cameras. And I'm like, what the hell is happening? Can you check what's happening in the room? And by the moment I say those words, I go and look at the camera and the only thing I see is somebody with a door in their hand looking at the camera and thinking that they have solved the puzzle, but they actually remove the hinges off the door. While the puzzle was really simple was just to put a little square thing inside the square hole and turned to open up the door, but they instead used the provided key to remove hinges. And the funny part of this story is that it was Stephen's brother-in-law that did it. It was somebody that Stephen knew and he knew all the way along and that he knew he was there that did the most absurd thing I've ever seen. I don't think anything has stopped that story yet. Always your own family. [Music]