Eric Spring in ‘t Veld: Behind the Scenes Under the Dome

CHARLIE MELCHER:
Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher. Welcome to the FoST podcast. Today I have the privilege of sitting down with Eric Spring in ‘t Veld, the founder and creative director of escape room design company Mama Bazooka. Eric and his team created the first ever escape room in the Netherlands in 2013, as well as the award-winning Girls Room experience, but it’s their third room, The Dome for which they are most famous. The Dome has been on TERPECA’s list of top 10 escape rooms worldwide since 2019 and was ranked number one in the world twice in a row in 2019 and 2020. I heard so many great things about The Dome before I finally got the chance to experience it for myself just a few months ago, and I can honestly say that it more than lived up to my expectations. In fact, I was blown away. It is an incredibly immersive, beautifully produced and exceptionally fun shared experience for me and my group.
The premise of The Dome is that you and your team are participating in a research trial that goes horribly wrong. I won’t say anymore about the content because I don’t want to spoil it for you. Just trust me. You should go and do it yourself. Escape rooms at this level are not about beating a clock, solving puzzles or escaping. Instead, they’re a new form of story. Doing that is fully immersive, embodied and responsive, and wonderfully social as they require working and playing with others in order to succeed. Eric and his team have created something truly special with The Dome and I’m excited to go in depth with him into the room’s development, design, and evolution. Please join me in welcoming Eric Spring in ‘t Veld to the FoST podcast. Eric, welcome to the Future StoryTelling Podcast.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
Thank you, Charlie. It’s a pleasure.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
Some weeks ago I was in the Netherlands and had the opportunity to come and experience The Dome with three friends and it blew my mind. It was extraordinary. So first of all, Bravo. Congratulations. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I’d love to start by first you telling us what you feel comfortable in sharing about The Dome, because I realize you don’t want to give away everything that happens there and then also tell us about a little bit the response people have had to it.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
Well, yeah, it was an interesting journey to build a dome. It took us two years to build with a brainstorming about the concept and work it out and building. After two years, we had to open The Dome because there was no money left, not to spend on the project. But yeah, when we opened up, it was not a success immediately. We had a lot of bad reviews actually people were disappointed in the experience and so that was quite a bitter pill after working so hard for two years with me and my team. And for me it was a bit painful that we cannot deliver what I wanted to deliver. I decided to go on long holidays to Asia, so I really shut down everything with all the connection with my company, I really needed to detox from this whole project. So I went into a lot of meditation courses and that’s was what I needed to find my key.
After those months when I came back to Holland and came back to my company and I was playing The Dome with my team to see how it felt and then just things clicked. I understood like, okay, this needs to be done. And we worked for a month very hard to get it done. And then from that moment on we saw that internationally we gained more attention. People came to play The Dome and you thought something is happening here. And the reactions of the people that played The Dome were also completely different. People were very enthusiastic and they loved the experience. Yeah, the story in a nutshell of the development of The Dome and

CHARLIE MELCHER:
Then you started to get positive reviews and then you got a huge honor, the award that you won, tell us about that.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
TERPECA an award, we can call it the Oscars of the Escape Room Awards. It’s something we all watch every year and we know that the rooms that are in the TERPECA list there’re something to reckon with. There was a very, of course an honor that we are the first place and especially after that really shitty start we’d had. So it was really cool. Of course lists, it’s not about the lists, but still it’s nice to have this acknowledgement of people that, because that’s what we aim for, to come with something to make the people enthusiastic about real life escape games. People get spoiled very quickly and easily and what we strive for and still striving for that. We keep this industry thriving

CHARLIE MELCHER:
And it’s amazing how young a field or a medium it is.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
Oh yes.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
Tell us about the history of escape rooms as you understand it.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
Well, from what I’ve heard is that it started at Silicon Valley and Tokyo that students were building escape rooms in their student dorms. So that was not a commercial thing, it was not something like as it is now. Then 17 years ago in Budapest it started to be more commercialized that it’s for people that they pay in entrance free. So that was a new kind of concept. And my back then girlfriend, she was from Budapest and she knew very quickly about this new trends and one of her friends started, I think the second escape room in the world. So he invited us to play his room and then we thought, this is interesting. I was not sold yet, thought maybe we can do some things differently with maybe some special effects, some music to make it more immersive. And that was my field as a child. I grew up in a very creative environment because my parents were in an artist agency as a young child, always walking in the theaters backstage and all saw all these things, how they build up the whole set with the lights, with the production.

And my mother was a puppeteer for 15 years, so I was always involved in her production. She was always rehearsing at home and it was quite a big production as well because she was in the theaters and it was also with special effects, with lights of strokes, with smoke, with a cepi sign and with a story. So that’s where I start to think about these things already and I found that very interesting because I thought, okay, I’m not so much of a gamer, but I do love experiences and to create experiences and that’s where somehow that connected.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
Eric, that’s fascinating to hear that you grew up in a family where your mother was a puppeteer because in a way you’ve become a master of puppeteer, but instead of puppets, it’s your guests who are playing, you are designing a whole experience for the puppets except it’s us.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
That’s what it feels like. In a way. They are the puppets, but as well they’re the audience at the same time simultaneously. It’s not something that I thought over too much, but since people ask me this question, how did you come up with these ideas and why you’re making these decisions that you make and where does this creativity come from? I think it’s also some part of me to be creative, to love to do things, but I can see that it’s really, if you as a child grow up and this environment it, it’s normal thing to think like that. I dunno. How about you? Did you grow up in a creative environment or how did it come to you?

CHARLIE MELCHER:
I did not particularly grow up in a creative environment. My mother was a business professional. My father was a business professional. I think maybe my interest in going towards creative things was a response to find my own path and do something different.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
So you felt this necessity somewhere deep down. It turned out to be very important for me for how I grew up and the decisions I make right now.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
So first of all, I just want to make the point as a medium, escape rooms are something like 18 years old. Yeah, I mean that’s incredibly young for a form. Really the whole thing’s been in your adult lifetime and you’ve been there on the ground floor as one of the people influencing the evolution of this wonderful medium. Tell me about how important stories are for the design of your escape rooms.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
Of course, very important. It starts with the story, although the story of The Dome, we wanted to do something that people were hallucinating, and this is not a spoiler, of course, because it’s written on the website as well. So people are hallucinating and things happen with them that they don’t expect due to the intoxication. So that’s where it started. That’s what tickled our brains to come up with what we came up with.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
I’m also fascinated about the design of experience you’re designing to get people to physically move and do things in the spaces in the different rooms. How are you thinking about designing for people’s physicality for their bodies?

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
Sometimes you have these loose ends because you’re creating something and to fill in these gaps and it still makes sense or you get the story round. You have to be open to receive the right elements from somewhere. Some teams are really good in playing puzzles and solving puzzles, and some teams not so good, but still I want them to have the same flow somehow so that everybody can experience that, and that’s what we always try to aim for and tweak with the experience of The Dome. And to this day, I like to tweak to find that nobody is bored and that it just feels right, and that’s just on the right moment, on the right timing. What makes it fun for me as well, to keep evolving and tweaking the room because the version of The Dome seven years ago is different than 6, 5, 4, 3 or two years ago have changed quite a few things. Makes it fun for ourselves as well, but I also believe if we have a better idea or cooler that we should change it because why not?

CHARLIE MELCHER:
Why not? It’s a living form.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
It is, exactly. Yeah.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
I’m a huge fan of escape rooms in part because they’re designed for social interaction. You can’t play alone.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
No.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
So there are things you have to do together and it forces a kind of communication, a rhythm between players. I played it with three friends and we just naturally started to break into pairs and have two of us do things together. There’s things happening at different times with the group, and yet you develop a kind of natural communication and problem solving and collaborative process, and there aren’t really, I think any other storytelling forms that are so dependent on collaborative communication and collaborative play. Are you literally designing intentionally to get people to be better as a team, to work as a team?

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
For me, the most important thing is that people have a really awesome experience that they’re involved, but that they believe their experience is somehow real or that they believe in what they go through and not like, okay, I’m here in our case, in Bosco, above a shop in an additional area where we’re situated. So I want the people to just really buy the whole thing. That’s the most important thing for me, that they let their guard down because they get out their role that they’re used to in the daily life. That’s also a strong connection because people just have to somehow go to the core and not only because challenging and they’re working with their brains in a different kind of way, and because it’s teamwork as well, because otherwise you cannot go any further. That’s really a beautiful thing to see from a social point of view as well.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
I really do think that when you get people in that moment of suspension, of disbelief where they’re in a different world, but they’re fully in it, and it’s not just with their brains but with their bodies, it changes them. It changes who they are and it changes how they interact with each other. So I could absolutely see it where dad might’ve had the authority in the family, but all of a sudden the daughter’s the one who’s solving the puzzle and she is taking control, and it changes the dynamic and in so many fun and wonderful ways. And there are great moments of that joy in The Dome where we’ve each sort naturally taken a role and we’re now synchronized doing something with very detailed timing, even very inspired by gaming. For example. I don’t want to give any rooms away any details, but we are all working as one, and there’s a sense of accomplishment for us as a group that, again, you don’t get that often in our world where we tend to watch alone instead of play together.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
That’s another thing people crave for this feeling of community together and to go through something together that they can have a stories from years from now. You remember this moment. And yeah, that’s something that I sometimes get back from people that they talk about, one of the experiences and that they said, we still talk about that particular moment, and that’s years ago. If you go through something together and you both have the same kind of emotion together,

CHARLIE MELCHER:
That’s really cool. One of the things that I find very interesting is I am a huge escape room fan, but when I talk about it to certain friends, they have an image of escape rooms that’s sort of set in the first wave of them, which was a room, a clock, an hour to undo a certain set of puzzles and locks and get out. And it was very stressful for people because they felt the time pressure, because they felt that they weren’t good at that kind of problem solving and they were afraid of failure basically. And I have to remind people of a few things that they’ve really evolved now. One of the things that’s happened is that escape room designers seem to have come up with ways to not let people fail, right? There are ways to give hints to make it easier to monitor how people doing and adjust the room to the skill level. Can you tell me how you’ve thought about that?

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
Well, yeah, you can feel The Dome, but if you’re not a super seasoned player, it still, you can go far. And that’s all about giving the right hint on the right time without making it feel too much as if it’s a hint. That’s of course, because then you could get people out of the vibe or the story or the flow for The Dome. We’ve been heavily working on actually programming the past seven years, so much so that the game can make a decision. So we’ve built in some intelligence. The computer knows if this team is going well or it’s not going so well, if they’re stuck too long or if they are not stuck too long and it can make a decision what kind of hint to give if it’s just a pointer with light or if it’s a sound somewhere or if it’s an audio hint. So there’s so many layers, but as an escape room creator, you also don’t want the people to have the feeling that you just let them through. People like to solve things and have the feeling that they did it, and that’s really one of the big reasons why escape rooms are so popular as well.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
That’s a great insight that it’s literally from the challenge from having to work for it, that the reward is more meaningful. Another thing I wanted to say is one of our group had never done an escape room before. He was actually the oldest in the group, and he had said to me beforehand, I’m a little nervous. I don’t really think escape rooms are for me. And I remember looking at him during one moment and his eyes were so wide, and here’s this man in his mid sixties who looked like he was a 6-year-old boy. He was so excited with joy, and it made it much more happy for me to be able to see him having this ecstatic moment and realizing he was so happy. It was just a wonderful moment for all of us. Of course, we told him afterwards that unfortunately we’ve ruined him for all other escape rooms because we started with The Dome.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
It’s not like the escape rooms from 16 years ago, but it’s nice that we can create new fans of escape rooms like that. It is always nice to hear their experience, what they’ve been through, and also what you said, it’s funny because you saw something in the eyes of your friend. Maybe you have not seen that for a long time. So that’s also, in a way, very intimate to see somebody in a different kind of way.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
I’m also curious about the economics of escape rooms and this as a business because I think you’re maxed at eight people at a time. That’s not six, normally six, six even less. So tell us a little bit how the economics work.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
Yeah. Well, if you want to get rich, you should not start with the escape from industry. You might if you have 20 rooms all over the place, but I don’t know, of course, if you really are really passionate and you want to build something extraordinary, it’s quite a difficult business model, but it’s possible to make a living. I’m the living proof that I make a living out of it and I’m enjoying it. But still, you take a lot of risks. And our first room, the laboratory, which already is almost 12, 13 years old, of course is not booked. It used to be slowly you see a decline in bookings because in the area, so many people have already played it, but there are also people that don’t want to play this room that’s maybe not on the level, like computer games. We used to play this computer game like Super Mario or Tetras and The Game Boy, for example.

And it was so much fun and we could lose ourselves for hours, but now you don’t see anyone playing with the old game boy. Maybe some nerds like myself sometimes love doing it, but it is 1% of the people because now you play online or with your vr, and you have these immersive worlds where you lose yourself and you lose track of reality completely. So that’s the same goes for escape rooms, I think because this is also evolving just alongside the other industries. For example, if you have a movie with the drone shots and everything is just evolving all the time, you can make the craziest stuff. And ai, of course, I mean, it’s mind blowing what’s possible right now. And I think also the escape room industry has to keep up with that.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
This is still a field that is very much what we would refer to as a mom and pop, where it’s individual creators or little teams of people making something. It’s not run by the big corporations. It’s not been standardized and homogenized. It’s very much individual creators with a passion going out there and seeing somebody else’s room and thinking, damn, that was good. I wanted to do better. And just watching these as they are so rapidly iterating and evolving, and I was blown away by the production values, by the music, by the lighting, all of these things that have gotten so much more sophisticated so quickly from the early days of escape rooms when it was literally padlocks and keys. I will say that I think that these days, people are hungry for those kinds of social peak experiences for something that they haven’t done before.

And I think just that idea of having such agency, I mean, we grew up in a world where almost all of our media was passively consumed. We literally sat and watched or listened. Then social media and gaming came, and people started to realize that they could have some agency or some ability to contribute. But still, very few of our forms of real storytelling have give any agency. And so here now again, escape rooms are this form where they are ag agentic storytelling, where you get to control and decide, or at least feel like you do. And you do. Yeah, you do. Yeah, you really do. And to see as it’s evolving into new forms, even escape room is in many cases, no longer the right term. They’re live playable games. So I just see that there’s an evolution happening in this very unique medium, maybe in the same way that there isn’t millions and millions and millions of dollars from one room, but you also often don’t have to spend millions and millions of dollars. So there’s an accessibility. The barrier to entry is not so high still that somebody with a passion and some friends can’t still enter the field. And I think that’s part of what makes it so dynamic. Yes.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
Yeah. It’s funny when you say that everybody can enter the field in that sense. I totally agree with, it’s the same with music nowadays. If you have a laptop, you can create your own music or your art and get it out there as well. And I think the same goes for escape rooms as well. I do think that you can create a room, but to be commercially successful somewhere, I think it gets more difficult. It’s still possible if you have something in mind, but maybe the production is not super expensive to build. But then you have so many actors and everybody, so the productions from that point of view are more extensive. So it’s interesting. And still I’m very happy that the corporate big businesses, it’s not for them. This is for the creators and for the artistic people, and what’s possible is amazing.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
What have you learned that makes for the greatest reward or experience for people? Is there some insight that you’ve had about escape room design from having done three of them now and some of the best in the world?

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
What I’ve learned is that if you want to come up with something new and fresh, it’s impossible that on day one, when you show it to the audience that everybody will love it instantaneously because you take a huge risk and you still have to work and tweak and find your voice through the reactions of the people somehow and what you want to tell. So when writing a book, it is the same, right? You let it read by people and they give their feedback, and you are shaping. Reshaping is the same. I’ve known now for escape rooms and any creator, just be sure that people will criticize it or have some opinion about it that maybe for your ego is not the best thing because it can be painful if you put so much blood, sweat, and tears in something. But if you learn how to overcome that and to just feel that it’s part of the process, keep believing in what you’re doing. That’s what I’ve learned. So if you copy something that is successful already, then people will love it. Let’s say it, but it’s going the safe way.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
Well, I appreciate so much that this medium, this art form of yours is a responsive one too, because you can take feedback from people who go through it, and then as you said, you can evolve the room over time, over years. And as you said, you’re designing now to build rooms that can be responsive in real time to people as they play it, which I think is just amazing that the story can have that level of responsiveness, that traditional, linear, fixed media can’t. Personally, I think it’s evolving in a way that is taking us back to something more organically human. I think all storytelling started as social, collaborative, responsive, co-created, people sitting around a campfire telling stories to each other, and then it all got fixed and linear and set in stone, and now it’s coming back to this age where it’s more alive, more human.

ERIC SPRING IN ‘T VELD:
Cool. I like your approach. It resonates with me very much.

CHARLIE MELCHER:
Well, Eric, thank you for creating an experience that gave me and my friends such incredible joy, such incredible delight. I have tremendous respect for what you’ve built and can’t wait to come do it again and to see what comes next from your puppet master’s mind, go. Thank you so much.

I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the FoST podcast. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please consider subscribing on your podcast platform of choice and sharing it with a friend. And if you’d like to learn more about immersive entertainment across media from escape rooms to immersive theater, check out our website at fost.org. There you can listen to more episodes of this podcast and subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, FoST in Thought.

The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts and Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.