Remembering Glitch
As we grow older as a small business, and as we understand more how to improve escape rooms, we retire the ones we have in order to provide even more exciting experiences for you. We’ve always aimed to keep being the best birthday party idea or date night location for an exciting adventure, and sometimes that means change. With our newest and most-anticipated room open, the Edgar Allan Poe themed one, we had to retire one of our rooms to make space. It was a difficult choice, but we’d chosen to retire Glitch.
Glitch was one of our first two escape rooms here at Escape Room Arlington, and our first room to retire. Our sister location in Richmond, Ravenchase Escape Room RVA, had a version of Glitch early in its lifetime that they were kind enough to let us use when we first opened. Being the inventive sort that we are, we adapted it with the insight of being several years in the future, and made it better! It was artistically and conceptually a very cool space, a fun room to build, and an even more fun escape room to play. We hope you got to play it while it was here, but if not, read on!
The first room players find themselves in is a blank white space. There’s nothing here… or is there?
Glitch was loosely inspired by a well-known, groundbreaking science fiction movie trilogy of the 90’s. In our version of events, players were trapped in a virtual reality simulation and had one hour to escape before they’d be trapped in the computer forever.
Players started in a room reminiscent of the movie’s “The Construct” – a blank white space. There appears to be nothing to look at, but as you start poking around, you’ll slowly find clues and transform the space into something far different. In addition, we offered players a choice between the red pill and the blue pill as the game began, and these pills contained a clue to help them get started. (We’re not sure why, but the blue pill was chosen more often). Eventually, players would find themselves in a second room – an all-black surveillance room, and they would escape from there after solving even more puzzles.
We had a lot of memorable props and puzzles in Glitch. One was a rotary telephone which referenced how these were used in the Popular Science Fiction Trilogy. An unfortunate downside of the rotary phone was the realization that fewer people know how to use them than we’d expected. (I might be old, but I’m not that old yet, right?) Our other favorite puzzle involved a reference to “The One” learning Kung Fu, and our staff getting to watch players try their best at Kung Fu inspired poses.
The surveillance monitors in the secret room provided clues to escape from the simulation.
We do miss Glitch, but we still have all the great memories of the space and we hope you do, too. We’re more glad, however, that Poe’s Chamber is open – we’ve taken Glitch’s space and done some very innovative things with beautiful construction. If you never got to play Glitch, you should consider stopping by for your next team building idea or just a fun night out – when it’s time to build an even newer room, we’ll have to retire another one – so these won’t be around forever!