REPOD S7E12: Dreaming & Betting Big: Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp & Tommy Wallach of Hatch Escapes

Peih-Gee Law

May 28

"Where Terry and I live is between games and theater."

If you ask any escape room enthusiast to recommend a must-play game in Los Angeles, you'll hear about Lab Rat. When it first opened in 2018, it was ranked #8 in the world on the TERPECA list. It has maintained a ranking in the top 100 games ever since, which is no small feat. Hatch Escapes' highly anticipated new game, The Ladder, has wowed the escape room community with its unique, replayable mechanics and branching narrative.

Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp and Tommy Wallach, the creative minds behind (and owners of) Hatch Escapes, join us for a deep dive into escape room storytelling. They spend a remarkable about of time thinking about how to craft stories with interludes – a skill they developed while writing musical theater. They approach escape rooms from a writer's perspective, with an eye towards unique interactions, but always with storytelling at the heart of the experience.

"When we played our first escape room, we realized immediately: oh, this is a medium that captures, in some ways, the best of both worlds."

Hero image for Season 7, ep 12 of REPOD with Tommy Wallach & Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp of Hatch Escapes. Man with glasses, man buried up to his face in a white ball-pit, bearded man looking intensely into the camera, asian woman in safari gear holding a machete, smiling.

Terry and Tommy are constantly iterating on escape rooms as a medium for narrative. I especially enjoyed hearing their analysis of what makes for good storytelling, and the details of how they advance plot and characters in their work. They muse on including plot twists or moments where the stakes change. Terry and Tommy are truly excited about the future of escape rooms as a medium and the ways in which it can evolve, and that excitement is contagious.

If you enjoyed this episode, don't miss their talk at RECON LA titled:

The Hatch Escapes Championship Title Bout: "Tell Better Stories vs. Stop Telling Stories"

A debate between Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp and Tommy Wallach in which the ultimate fate of the medium shall at last be determined.