Choose your own adventure: Chapman alumni raise the bar for escape rooms

Tyler McCusker and Jonathan Katz, founders of Breach Escape Games, are set to launch “U.S.S. Destiny,” a choose-your-own-adventure-style escape room, in July 2021. Photo courtesy of McCusker

Back in 2016, Tyler McCusker and Jonathan Katz — Chapman University alumni from the class of 2011 — converted a 30-foot school bus into a high-tech, fully automated maximum security vehicle that transported elite hackers to prison. 

Well, not quite. 

Rather, the pair transformed the school bus into an Escape Bus, which simply simulates that situation. Participants play the role of a detained hacker and must solve clues and puzzles to escape. 

With a love for innovating worlds like these through setpieces in which users can immerse themselves into a larger puzzle, McCusker and Katz are the co-founders of Breach Escape Games in Lake Forest, which features several different escape rooms for visitors to tackle. The duo is nearing completion of their biggest project yet: the “U.S.S. Destiny,” a choose-your-own-adventure escape room with multiple storylines, rooms, puzzles and endings that depend on the decisions participants make.

“We always aim to go for these more innovative, out of the box escape room ideas,” said McCusker, the CEO of Breach Escape Games. “(The U.S.S. Destiny) ought to be one of the most unique and interesting escape rooms in the world.” 

The U.S.S. Destiny takes place on the bridge of a docile spaceship in the distant future. Participants play the role of surveyors that come in contact with a hostile alien ship and must choose to deal with the conflict by either communicating, fleeing or fighting. 

“A challenge for us is being able to design a game (both) for people who have never played an escape room and for people who have played 200,” said Katz, the lead game designer. “The market for escape rooms has matured. The escape room enthusiasts are more informed and the stakes are higher because people are expecting a higher quality of game.” 

Prior to launching Breach Escape Games, McCusker and Katz traveled to several different countries, participating in various escape rooms. They noticed many of the games were simply an assortment of puzzles that lacked a strong central story. Now that the duo has worked to solve that issue, they hope that U.S.S. Destiny will also solve the common issue of replayability. 

“Right now, when you go play an escape room, there's no reason to go play again because you know all the answers,” McCusker said. “In our game, people will play at least twice if they want to experience every single facet that the game has to offer.”

Katz, who minored in mathematics, credits his Chapman education for preparing him to succeed in the escape room business. 

“My path of study led me very well to a unique corner of the entertainment industry where you need storytelling and you need mathematics to create puzzles,” Katz said. “What I learned at Chapman made me a unique person to create in this industry.” 

Similarly, McCusker, who also founded KX FM Radio in Laguna Beach, told The Panther his Chapman experience offered him the connections and community to succeed in several different fields. 

“I (got) a little bit restless after a while and I (wanted) to start something new,” McCusker said. “That’s how the Escape Bus was born about five years ago. Something in the Chapman experience gave me the restlessness and ambition to believe that I could do a little bit of everything.” 

Recently, McCusker and Katz brought on Noah Dains, a Chapman alumnus from the class of 2019, as the set designer for U.S.S. Destiny. The duo said they often reach back to the Chapman community for employees, because they know they share a common foundation.

“Asking the Chapman community for people is something we consider very early on every time we’re looking to expand on business in some way,” Katz said. “There are thousands of great schools all over the country, but because we share the same one, we have an understanding. We often go back and tap people from Chapman because we know we’re going to get quality people.”

A Kickstarter for U.S.S. Destiny is open to the public, allowing donors to contribute money in exchange for prizes, such as the opportunity to contribute in alpha testing while the game still contains areas of incompleteness or earning four lifetime passes for U.S.S. Destiny. McCusker and Katz expect to begin beta testing for the nearly complete project in June 2021 and hope to make U.S.S. Destiny available to the public in July 2021. 

“I want (Chapman students) to think it’s one of the coolest things they’ve ever done,” McCusker said. “I want people who have done a lot of escape rooms before to be surprised and energized, and for people who have not done an escape room before, I want this to set the bar and leave them wanting more.”