About a month ago, I was lucky enough to join my fellow Campus Times members Alex Holly, Brian Ly, and Aeneas Wolf on a trip to Rochester’s very own GTFO (Get the Fork Out) Escape Room. The owners of the escape room were gracious enough to give us a free run of their ’90s-themed room, and as someone who has done a handful of escape rooms before, I can pretty confidently say that this is the best one I’ve ever done.
Worry not if you aren’t a ‘90s kid — this room immerses you in the decade with familiar touchstone brands like Pokémon and Tamagotchi, as well as ‘90s TV staples like Seinfeld and The Simpsons. There’s even a soundtrack of classic ‘90s music curated by one of the owners as a backdrop for your escape — it’s a lot more fun to hunt for solutions to puzzles when Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy The Silence” thumps silently from a small radio in the corner.
The premise of the room is fairly straightforward: a kid’s bedroom from the ’90s, with various puzzles connected to the paraphernalia scattered about. However, as you progress through the various smartly balanced puzzles, you and your group will come to discover that there is more than meets the eye. While I won’t give away the storyline of the room or any of the specific puzzles both the room’s puzzles and narrative were clever, fun, and challenging without being a slog to get through. Not to brag, but we’re pretty smart over here at the CT. My coworkers and I cleaned up the room in a brisk 40 minutes, which is one of the faster times in which that room has been completed. While the standard time limit in which to complete their rooms is an hour, the owners are happy to give you a bit of extra time to finish the puzzles and even offer a time bonus if you find a certain clue. After we completed the room, I had the opportunity to sit down with two of the escape room owners, Xavier Weisenreiter and Zachary Gilbert-Mahoney, and talk to them about the experience of designing, running, and managing an escape room.
Weisenreiter and Gilbert-Mahoney are two of a rotating group of six friends who alternate various roles in the escape room process, from financing to advertising to the actual construction of the rooms themselves. The whole operation is managed by this group, so everyone wears a lot of hats. “We split up the roles in various ways, but there has been a lot of meshing of responsibilities and changing of the guard throughout the almost three years now that we’ve been open,” Gilbert-Mahoney said with a smile. Despite the unique endeavor of operating an escape room without outside assistance, he and Weisenreiter made it clear how much fun the job is, even with the challenges that come with it.
The idea for the escape room came together almost out of the blue. “We have a group of friends that kind of just meet up every year,” Weisenreiter explained. “And we’d always talk about fun business ideas and stuff that we can do. But we were like, ‘Let’s actually take seriously one of these things,’ one time during COVID.”
“We like escape rooms. We like the idea of designing something. We think we have the ability and the intelligence and know how to run a business. Let’s actually put it into practice.”
In the years since, the group of friends has made themselves a staple escape room destination in Rochester, expanding to dozens of bookings a week.
“One of the bullet points [when coming up with the idea] was that it was such a unique business […] it was a niche,” Gilbert-Mahoney said when asked if it was hard to get the operation off the ground.
Weisenreiter elaborated on the formation process: “The major thing was planning a location that was in downtown Rochester…There’s a bunch of other escape rooms on the outskirts of Rochester but being a part of downtown Rochester, being a part of the college scene was huge for us.”
We also talked about the process of designing the rooms themselves. Currently, GTFO has two operating rooms: the ’90s-themed room that we did and a prison break room, as well as a third room that is currently being developed. Weisenreiter explained how even the finished rooms are constantly in a state of improvement. This definitely came through in the room from my experience – there were so many fine details and subtle puzzles that were clearly the product of much testing. The labor of love to make it the best room possible was tangible throughout our conversation.
I think the biggest takeaway from completing the escape room and talking to the minds behind it, is that it is possible to do what you love for a job if you put your mind to it and have the ingenuity and good fortune to make it happen. A group of six friends who knew each other in high school came together, most of whom had little prior experience with escape rooms and the work it took to maintain them, creating a great, sustaining staple in downtown Rochester. Perhaps my favorite thing said in the interview was from Weisenreiter, who fondly remarked, “Passion projects [and] the ability to express yourself creatively, [to] create creatively, [they] just don’t die.”
