Kudos to you if you recognise the reference; it doesn’t start at the beginning of a line, for a little additional special difficulty.

There are already a few attempts to try to create a global list of exit games; EscapeFan is one with a lot of style, though not so many listings, and Intervirals was the first try. It’s always been particularly strong on the Asia Pacific region. Another new attempt is Escape Room Directory, by Dan Egnor. Dan is a long-time veteran of the puzzle scene, has long run the invaluable Puzzle Hunt Calendar, did a corking write-up of his team’s crawl around six exit games in a single day and is generally known to have a brain the size of a planet. Keeping a list of one country’s sites is exciting and challenging enough; trying to keep a global list is a work of dedication and bravery!

One of the exciting things about Dan’s directory is that he has found a variety of other national exit game sites. The English-language ones are really well-written and it’s a joy to add them to the blogroll on the right. (More about them soon.) As much as there are sites in countries all around the world, there are non-English-language blogs as well, about which this site is insufficiently talented to comment. Nevertheless, it’s exciting to note that there are exit games in at least three dozen countries; every continent is represented except Antarctica. (It would be so delightful to be wrong on this last point!) This makes the exit game, truly, a global phenomenon – almost an Olympics-class global phenomenon. That’s really exciting.

One of the most exciting links is to EGA China. Running this through a machine translator, it looks very much like a Chinese exit game directory, and more. There’s a remarkable horizontal bar chart at the bottom, with exciting numbers like 91 and 155; machine translation suggests that this represents the number of exit games in different cities – and, looking at the map, while this cannot be confirmed, this may actually be the number of sites, rather than the number of games, let alone the number of rooms. This implies that there are 155 exit games in Beijing alone. That’s remarkable.

This site’s first ever post linked to an article in the Wall Street Journal, which suggested last December that Beijing had 120 exit games. Truthfully, as much as the WSJ is reputable, this seemed a remarkable claim that required some degree of substantiation. This is exactly that substantiation… and evidence to suggest that the genre may still be growing. It was always hugely impressive to see exitgames.hu list dozens of sites in Budapest (44 in March, 59 now…) – it’s slightly mind-blowing to think that China has at least seven Budapests and at least five more Torontos as well.

Has the exit game industry in the UK and Ireland come even close to hinting at what it might be possible to achieve over time? Nowhere near!