Great Gotham Challenge on Reality Escape Podcast

Great Gotham Challenge co-founders, Ryan Patch and Jon Seale appeared on an episode of the Reality Escape Podcast hosted by Room Escape Artist.

David: Welcome to the Reality Escape Pod. Your lifeline when you need a getaway from the real world. I'm David Spra, alongside my co-host Peih-Gee Law. Together we're exploring immersive gaming from all angles, and we'll be joined by guests who really know their stuff. Today's guests are the co-founders of the Great Gotham Challenge, Jon Seale, and Ryan Patch. Since 2014, they, along with their eclectic team, have been hiding puzzles all over New York City for the public to experience and all over the world for their private clients. Welcome Jon and Ryan.

Ryan: Thank you.

Jon: Glad to be here.

Peih-Gee: So our podcast producer, Theresa Piazza, also works with you on the Great Gotham Challenge, and I've heard so much about it. I have not yet had a chance to experience it, but I'm really excited to dive in deeper and see how it all runs. Let's just jump into the Great Gotham Challenge. You know, you're best known for your large public events, so how do you explain the Great Gotham Challenge? How does it work?

Jon: We often describe the Great Gotham Challenge as a mixture of elements that people are familiar with, like escape rooms and the amazing race and Sleep No More in New York City, which is an immersive, theater production that ran for many years here. And we like to think of ourselves as blending all those things. There's a real world puzzle hunt competition element, where teams of two to four players face off against each other, to find and decode a series of clues. The answer to each one, unlocking the next, and those clues could be anywhere or anything. They often involve solving puzzles, somehow interacting with, a mechanism or a person we use a lot of actors, so there's an immersive theater component as well, but our actors play real New Yorkers, so there is no story element to our game. Often our actors are hidden in plain sight and players don't know if they are part of the game or not. And that open world feeling that is created when people have no idea what could be part of the game or real life is part of what we love about the experience. So it's an event that we do for the public, usually just once or twice per year. And, it runs typically anywhere from two to five hours, depending on how fast your team is and how quickly you can solve. And then year round we create similar events for private clients and we also design other types of games immersive experiences as well for people who hire us to do so.

Peih-Gee: First off the bat, you named like three of my favorite things ever. Escape rooms, the amazing race and immersive theater. So I'm already sold on all of that. and also I love the fact that you said your actors are all set in the real world, right? So it's not like you're encountering Willy Wonka out in the universe, so its a little devious. You don't know what's part of the story or not. but I'm glad you spec that because my first question when hearing the name is, does this have anything to do with Batman? Why is it called the Great Gotham Challenge?

Ryan: New York City was associated with Gotham, hundreds of years before Batman, existed. it was a, nickname that, was given to, the city by Washington Irving. It had something to do with, goat's ham, like the Hamlet with goats in it. It's a little bit of a backwater, like insulting, element to it.

Peih-Gee: That's what I'm calling New York from now on go back to your goats ham.

David: That joke is gonna land real good these days.

Ryan: We'll take it. It's been a way that people have referred to New York City for. hundreds of years. And then it was actually, the fictional city of Gotham, which is obviously based heavily on New York City, was created, for the DC Comics, Batman. So has nothing to do with, Batman. And I'd say most New Yorkers know that.

David: I would say as a more or less lifelong New Yorker, we know it's called Gotham and we know it has nothing to do with Batman.

Peih-Gee: As a lifelong west coaster, I had no idea. So let's get back to like, how or why did you create the Great Gotham Challenge in the first place?

Ryan: Well like a lot of, great inventions in the world. not to put ourselves on too high of a pedestal, but it came out of boredom and unemployment.

Peih-Gee: Much like the telephone or electricity.

Ryan: Yeah. It came outta boredom and unemployment. I graduated college in the middle of,the great recession, 2009. So a friend and I, not John, we're just sitting around our house as we were scraping together our first, post-college jobs. I graduated with an art degree from NYU and film. They're not just handing out, film jobs. So we both loved New York City history and so we made something that we called the Great Gotham Challenge. And it was actually, um. to put it mildly, a complete disaster. Um, everybody got through probably about 40% of the challenge, but in, the six hours we had allotted, we were texting people,help. And eventually we were just like, okay, just go to the end. Just go to the end. And then everyone showed up at the end and just complained to us for several hours. But they were all our friends and so they all, we, we were a little concerned,but we were like, we think they all forgave us, but John was actually one of the participants.

David: And he's been plotting his revenge ever since.

Ryan: Yeah. Sort of.and it made a, impression on him that I, certainly didn't appreciate until probably five years later. And John, you can talk about kinda like what compelled you about it.

Jon: I was invited, I was one of the friends who was compelled to play this game, and I think part of what made it hard at the time was I think iPhone one was maybe out, but most people didn't have smartphones at the time and including me. And it made the game very difficult to play. There were some other elements about it…

Peih-Gee: The stone ages.

Jon: …yeah, exactly. but as a participant, I was really captivated. I remember. That the first thing you had to do in the 2009 pilot of the Great Gotham Challenge was you received a note and you were directed to approach, this halal cart where like a random halal vendor was making food and say a password and that person would give you an envelope that you needed to proceed.

And I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I was like, I can't believe I'm about to approach this street vendor and say a code word. And this person who looks like the halal guy that I see every day is a part of this game. And that one moment stuck in my mind. And about five years later, Ryan made an announcement to his friends, like, Hey, I'm moving outta New York City. I'm gonna move to DC. It's been a good run. looking forward to seeing you all down the line. And I was like, wait. Before you go, can we try rebooting the Great Gotham Challenge from five years ago, because I haven't been able to get it outta my mind and I think I could help maybe make the vision come to fruition a little more, seamlessly? And so Ryan was like, oh, well it's cool that you remember that and sure, let's give it a try. So his final summer in New York, we rebooted the Great Gotham Challenge and once again, begged our friends to come play. And this time I wouldn't say it went off without incident, but I think people really caught the vision in a way that encouraged us to keep doing it.

Ryan: People, finished.

David: That's a big deal.

Jon: Yeah, so basically we were like, okay, this is fun enough that we should keep designing it for our friends, at least once or twice a year to do. We really have a great time creating the game. and so we did that for several years and then somehow someone reviewed us on Yelp and used the term this would make a great team building activity. And in came all these inquiries into our inbox about people who wanted to hire us to do team building activities for them.

And so we were like, I guess we have a business here.

Peih-Gee: All that from one Yelp review.

Jon: At the time, Yelp was king. We became the number one, listing on Yelp for New York City team building activity. And, because of that, people assumed that we were really well established, but, uh, in reality it was just, we used to joke, we were like, should we incorporate?

And I was like, I don't know. What are we gonna call our company? Two guys with laptops, LLC, and, uh, yeah.

Ryan: I mean, that's true of pretty much any, entrepreneurs that's their story. like, who would actually pay us to do this? we're just a couple people, and that's very much our story as well.

Peih-Gee: Okay, so let me get this straight. You started off running this for just a bunch of your friends. Now how many people are we talking about here?

Ryan: Maybe 10 teams of four. I think we probably got 40 people to show up the first time.

Peih-Gee: Okay, so that's not like a small number of people to manage. Between two people. If you have a hundred friends each and you can convince one five to come. Yeah. We offered a cash prize the first time too.

Jon: That was helpful. Yeah.

Ryan: We've since depreciated the cash prize, but, people kept coming 'cause they come for now the puzzles instead of the cash prize. But I think that was,not insubstantial.

David: That's why they were all complaining when they didn't finish.

Peih-Gee: It's diabolical. okay. So then when you started running these events, for team building for companies, am I correct in assuming it's probably the same size of people that you're running the events for?

Ryan: We do everything from eight people to ,I think our biggest has been about, I guess technically several thousand, but, something that we do on a regular basis. Yeah. 350, which is usually about the size of our public events as well. We do a public event across two different weekends, and each weekend we get about three to 400 people. Our normal event, for a private group is somewhere between 50 and a hundred people.

Peih-Gee: Okay, but that's quite a big jump to go from 40 people to 400 to even a couple thousand. So how did you work up to scaling?

Ryan: It was a gradual experience where we just learned how the bottlenecking works and what breaks and, good crowd control tricks. And we also do on these bigger events, release people in waves. So if you've ever done a, foot race or something where you've released, five or six minutes apart, we release our teams 20 minutes apart. And so, that, really helps. 'cause we do want every team to have our ideal experience would be you don't see any other team, while you're playing. that's the ideal. And so we work really hard to, as much as possible, keep that feeling. Now obviously people do see other teams, but, we do try to create this situation through different crowd control tactics or, routing people a certain way, to make sure every team feels like they're having a unique experience.

And on the other hand, one of the great parts about the Great Gotham Challenge is it does scale pretty well. The 50 or a hundred people or 200 people. it's not necessarily a linear amount of scale up work as you invite more people, which makes it really unique in both the puzzle and the team building space in that it does that.

Jon: Yeah. I think the other thing is our experience is mediated by a puzzle hunt app that we created and that we've been through several iterations of over the years as we've learned about how to, avoid the pitfalls we encountered early on of like bottlenecking and routing teams and how to deliver hints and that sort of thing. And that makes scaling, much easier as well.

David: I was really impressed by your software as a software guy. I usually find that when I'm out doing these kinds of things, it's laggy, it's slow, it doesn't work the way you want, it doesn't work reliably. And I think that was the first thing that grabbed my attention when I went out to do GGC was like, oh, okay, the software actually works. That seems like a sign. I'm sure there are bugs, 'cause that's all software, but at least for my play through I was really impressed by how smooth it

Ryan: Thanks. I mean, it is version four. We've had other versions of this and some that have failed spectacularly. And so it really is 10 years of work where when we sat down to write the current app, we had a, very clear idea of exactly the way we wanted it to work. It's great because it's built for us, only for us. We don't have to share it with anyone or, serve multiple user bases. It is, ours, and we just make it work really well for what we need it to do.

David: On the subject of making things, I wanna take a moment and get to know each of you as creatives, because I think that's the roots of so much of what you're doing. Ryan, you've mentioned earlier, you're a filmmaker. I'm curious, what aspects of filmmaking do you feel translate well into the production of immersive events, and what aspects maybe lead to false starts or issues when you try to pursue them?

Ryan: Hmm. What a great question. Coming from a film background is, something that certainly helped me into the Great Gotham Challenge. And Jon and I both love film and love, similar types of films, heist movies and thriller films and those sorts of things. And so you can really feel that kind of embedded into the fabric of GGC. And one of our guiding lights is we wanna make people feel like the protagonist of their own film. That's definitely a guiding light and something that we really focus on that I bring from film. Obviously there's all of the logistical things making a Great Gotham challenge. I joke is like producing 10 very small films all across the city. 'cause each puzzle is kind of its own little production.

But from a creator standpoint, that's a great question, ‘cause I think that something that's really served me well is not just coming from a craft perspective, but an art school, learning all those things like Greek myths and Shakespearean tragedies and thematic relationships. 'cause we really think about things,not in terms of plot, but in terms of theme and feeling and tone and vibe those are kind of our guiding lights when we create something. As opposed to which might be the answer to your question, where might you go the wrong way, is focusing too much, on plot, frankly, because, part of watching a movie is watching a very specific character respond to very specific situations. Horror movies wouldn't exist if characters didn't make dumb decisions,

Peih-Gee: Don't go down there. Whatcha thinking?

David: No one makes dumb decisions in real life.

Ryan: Well, but every decision that you make, you think is rational because you're making it right.And so part of the, thrill of watching, Macbeth, self immolate is just that, it's not a decision that you would make. You'd be like, oh, I would've turned around, 10 days ago I wouldn't have, this was a horrible idea. And so, if you try to get too fancy about actually making people, feel like they're solving a mystery or in our opinion too, immersed in a story or interacting with characters that are, supposed to give you just the right information, just the right time. We feel like it does start to feel a little cheesy and a little trite. Whereas if you more set up a environment for people to play in and discover themselves, is what we've found works really well, and I think that's mirrored in kind of the success that you see in something like Sleep No More, which, it doesn't really concern itself with a lot of causal relationships. Doesn't really concern itself with Plot a ton, but they're high on vibes. They're high on location. They're, high on, a personal interaction, but You're not able to necessarily affect the plot or you're not made to feel like you're affecting the plot.

David: It sounds like what you're trying to do is create a sandbox where all of the toys in that environment are thematically tied together, but the story that you're going to leave at the end of the day with is the story of you and your friends going off and doing whatever it is you're gonna do with those toys.

Peih-Gee: I just had one quick follow up question, which is, you talk about putting the players in the role of the protagonist. So does this play kind of like a larp? Are the players expected to improv and, chat, and take on a character?

Ryan: No. So we don't, like the feeling when people feel like they need to play someone else or they need to project. We love to create this feeling of expansiveness in the city of Gotham where anything is possible.

And, we find that people are really able to respond well to that if they are playing themselves and they're genuinely discovering things that they never knew were hidden in the city like that Halal vendor one of the things we also have brought from film is the idea of a reveal that kind of changes your perspective on things.

A good twist in a film, should always make you go, oh my gosh, I never saw that coming. But now that I see it, it was obviously completely inevitable. And so it has to be unexpected, but inevitable. And we like to think of every interaction that our players have is that way where there's this aha moment where when you solve the puzzle or you understand where you're supposed to go or how a key fits in a lock once you see it, you're like, oh my gosh, this is, of course, this is the way that this works.

It's so elegant and perfectly fits, hand and glove. But I never would've, seen that.

David: Jon, you come from a music background and your production company, Mason Jar Music, has worked with some incredible artists, including Chris Thiel, Andrew Bird, Feist, Roseanne Cash, the Wood Brothers, and two of my personal favorites, banjo legends, Abigail Washburn and Bayla Fleck. What do you find exciting about working in the rootsy music space?

Jon: Yeah. So my story is that I actually didn't grow up in America, for the most part. I, grew up in South America and my parents were medical volunteers with indigenous tribes, on the border of Venezuelan and Columbia. So grew up among tribes and moved to the US as a teenager and had a lot of culture shock.

But that helped me connect to my American identity and to the idea of finding my own tribe was discovering traditional American music and feeling a real kinship there. So I ended up pursuing a career in music, not espionage, which I, at one point, considered pursuing. My uncle was a CIA operative in the seventies during the Cold War and, I thought like I'll follow in his footsteps. He convinced me not to, and my backup career being a musician, is what I ended up moving to New York to pursue. However, I do feel like I get to, flex some of those espionage impulses in the context of the Great Gotham Challenge.

David: Dead drops. A dead drop.

Jon: A dead drop is a dead drop. Yeah.

David: So how did roots music become the thing that you were building a production company around?

Jon: Great question. I think my work coming out of college found a lot of resonance there. My ancestors were part of the Jamestown settlement and then migrated across the US in a covered wagon. My family is southern and I understand the music and I think that helps my work find footing there.

David: because of the nature of the Great Gotham Challenge being this largely outdoor experience out in the world, you don't have control over the music or soundscape. The city kind of dictates the soundscape, based off of the background that you have I'm, curious to hear what you think of that and if there are any ways that you would love to be able to sculpt that more.

Jon: This isn't exactly the question that you're asking, but when I think about what I understand from music that helps me in this world of game design, I think, every good piece of music is a result of tension and release. You build to a climax and you relieve the tension.

And I think most good pieces of art that have relationship to time, like they take place over time, like a movie or a song or a poem or a book, there's often a tension and release element. And our game certainly, does take place over time and I think that helps a lot. It's true that we don't control, the soundscape of New York City and its entirety, but we actually do find quite a few ways to incorporate sound and music into our games and, I think that's something that we think about quite a lot actually. We have puzzles that involve hearing music, reading music, listening to music. We have a puzzle in one of our games where you're in Central Park and via the app on your phone, you control the bird calls that are coming from the trees in Central Park and to every other pedestrian or park goer, they assume that those are real birds, but in reality you're the one controlling it. And I think that's a fun example of how we use the idea of the idea of the soundscape in our games. But yeah, I would love to control it all if you're offering me a way.

Ryan: But I think part of it is that, that the lack of control means that when things do happen, they're all that more powerful. And so people know that they're not locked in a room. They're not in a very controlled space. People know instinctively that they're on the streets of New York City and anything can happen to them.

And so when they walk into a space that we have, perfectly set up for them, and that does include some sound and music cues it's a part of a, larger cloth that feels a lot more authentic, if that makes sense.

David: On a related note, I'm curious, how do you go about mitigating the many, many infinite risks of running an event in plain sight in such a busy city?

Ryan: Try really hard.

Jon: Yeah, I wish Theresa was here to answer this question for you. She's our resident, risk mitigator.

Ryan: and since Theresa has joined us, we have certainly, had much better experiences, matching what we intend because she does red team it in a sometimes brutal way.

Peih-Gee: What do you mean by red team? It.

Ryan: Red teaming is a phrase from military and espionage, which basically means you have a, another team that basically works against you and tries to break it.

Jon: I think you should know, and probably the listeners of this podcast should know that among creators, I think we have a uniquely high tolerance for risk. We do try risky things, sometimes, and that's part of I think our brand and what people, what many people like about our games, I won't say all. We've had some people, maybe surprised by the risks involved, but, we try to mitigate risk where we can accept the ones that we can't.

Ryan: if something needs to make sure it doesn't break, we just stay there outta sight. Outta mind and just make sure it doesn't break. And when it does, we step in and fix it. Our app is designed to be extremely flexible. It can be changed on the backend with a moment's notice in an invisible way to all the participants. We've developed a lot of tricks both on the ground digitally, and psychologically for our participants.

And also planning, making sure that things fail elegantly, that's a huge thing from software. Like if this doesn't work, how does it work? To your question is how do we control for this? Is we just, we try really hard and it's because we have pocket knife of tools.

David: I'm a big fan of graceful degradation as a way of mitigating risk.

Ryan: Yeah.

David: This is something that we certainly do quite a bit of with our event planning at Room Escape Artist and our two businesses, as have come up a couple times now, have this sort of relationship by marriage, if you will, of our producer and one of my personal favorite people. Theresa Piazza, also being your chief operating officer. As I was preparing for this interview, it occurred to me that I did not know the story of how she got that job. How did that go down?

Ryan: Great question. Theresa will love that we're telling this story because when we first hired the first person for our company, outside of Jon, me and someone else who does our corporate sales, we're looking for other people to clue master. And Theresa was like, I want to do it. She had just done one of our events. She loved it. She's I wanna do it. We're like, okay, are you available? Like, you know, in the middle of the week to do these for corporate events? She's like, no, but I'll take time off work. And we're like, ah, it's not really, we want someone with like, where we don't feel bad for asking them to skip their job.

And she's like, no, I wanna do it. And I was like, basically I don't believe you. She carried a lot of bitterness in her heart about this for a while. And she continued doing our events. Fortunately during the pandemic it was Room Escape Artist that brought us back together. 'cause she, wanted us to do an event for, RECON, I believe it was the first RECON. We were at a point in our growth where we were experiencing a lot of, pandemic related growth and just needed someone else to help us. We knew that our company was kind of at the breaking point. And, at the exact same time that we were just like, how are we gonna scale our company?

We had this person from Room Escape Artist being like, Hey, are you on track? What do you need? So I have these deliverables set, and we were like, wait a minute, maybe this person has something that we need.

Jon: Yeah, she's the only person who succeeded in managing us, throughout the process of trying to get us to present at this event. And I was like, wow, this woman is managing us so well. She might have the missing stuff that we need to make our company run like a real company.

David: It's also worth noting that at that time she would've been managing dozens of other things for that event.

Ryan: Right.

Jon: We know. Not to mention having her day job at a very large startup at the time.

David: Yep. She is very good at keeping things and people on the rails. And especially I would say things in people who inherently want to fly off the rails, speaking from personal experience.

Ryan: Something else that I take from film is the idea there is natural tension on a film set between the director and the director of photography and the assistant director. They keep each other in check and it's almost like it's the director of photography's job to be like, I want five days to light this one shot because I want to make it as, good as possible. And then it's the assistant director's job to say, okay, you have 20 minutes. And but it's each of those people's job to fight for what they want and that's kind of what makes our team a really strong team is one of us is pushing for the best experience, and one of us is pushing for the best business and one of us is pushing for the thing that can actually get done on time.

I won't say who's who in that situation. And then we come to something in the middle and it works really well

David: On that subject of producing things, hiding interesting objects in plain sight is a hallmark of your work. And then when I say that, I mean things that look like they belong, but you made them, they look like they're part of the environment, but they aren't. They're doctored, they're adjusted, they're altered. They're doing some alternate thing, they're making bird sounds, whatever it might be. How do you go about fabricating and sourcing the wide variety of things that you have to produce to make the Great Gotham Challenge?

Ryan: What's great about the type of events that we do and our design philosophy is that our elements actually don't have to be that amazing, but the context in which you encounter them is what kind of blows your mind the most.

We have a fantastic puzzle that's baked into a pizza box, not baked, that is just, that's print that's printed on a pizza box. And that's a pretty easy thing to, to go figure out. I mean, it took me, a couple days and three vendors to figure out the right relationship and then, a couple days to, work with an artist to get the chef drawing just right.

So it, it's not that hard, but when you walk into a New York pizza restaurant off the street and you say the right words and not only do you get served pizza, but you get it served inside a box that has a puzzle embedded in the box that blows your mind just because there is another world here that you can't see with your eyes that you have to have special knowledge to access.

And so an object that might be pretty ordinary that sure it takes, you know, a couple weeks to figure out how to do and some hard work, but it takes that object and it transforms it into like almost a relic of this other dimension.

David: So let me come at this from a different angle. 'cause I think that's a wonderful example. Are you asking yourself the question: New York is known for pizza among many other things. I want to use the pizzeria as design space to produce a puzzle and an interaction. Or are you coming at, well, pizza boxes are something that thousands of companies have to get made. So I know I can get pizza boxes. I know pizza boxes are a thing you can get done in a custom way. Like which way are you coming at this?

Jon: 100% the first way. We're thinking about experiences first, what experience do we want our player to have and then how do we reverse engineer that? Ryan, I think your example is a good one, but it's also maybe underselling some of the stunts that we have to do to create the experiences that we want to create.

Ryan: I intentionally picked a bit of a bland one, but yeah, about something more awesome.

David: That did explain really elegantly. I'm appreciative of it, but I'm curious to hear what you have in mind.

Jon: Yeah,so we'll be designing a game in Midtown and we'll walk through, Times Square and say, what can people expect to encounter in Times Square that they will overlook or that they would never expect us to have access to? And how can we choose those exact things to gamify and camouflage 'em so that they fit perfectly.

So as examples from years past, we were like, wouldn't it be cool if people looked up to one of these giant jumbotron billboards and one of our clues was there and they had to solve a puzzle that involved looking up at one of those. So we went about figuring out like how do those ads get sold?

What companies have access to them? How does the whole ecosystem of you know, the billboard advertising, world work in New York City, and how can we do that? Then once we do that, what is the formatting for these ads? How do they work? What are the ones that are currently on the boards look like and how can we emulate exactly what's there so that our work blends seamlessly in?

And then, someone like Ryan who has an outsized technical capacity, learns how to use the software that's necessary to create, the graphics that move and the, you know, all the parts of the ad that make it feel real. And we'll also look around and be like, oh, these costume performers that are like Minnie and Mickey Mouse and the Statue of Liberty.

What if people were approached by one of those characters and kept shoeing them away, but it was actually that character that they needed in order to solve the puzzle. So then we go about figuring like, how do the turf wars work between all these different,

Peih-Gee: The turf wars.

Ryan: The Times Square Elmo, turf wars.

David: Oh, it's, it's a real thing and it gets ugly.

Jon: Yep. how can we ingratiate ourselves into that community? And then, choose a character to inhabit in this world that's gonna be non-threatening and doesn't step on anyone else's beat. I'm just imagining your poor performer getting beat up by a bunch of Elmos and like silver spray painted robots.

David: Yeah, the Elmo Mafia.

Peih-Gee: Yeah, get out of our territory.

Jon: It's, not far off from, uh, things we have put our performers at risk of, but, luckily no one has sustained an injury from Minnie Mouse, at this point.

Ryan: want to clarify it is not far off from something that a performer could have been put in if we had not taken mitigating action and been very careful.

Peih-Gee: It sounds like you work with a lot of talented immersive actors from the New York City immersive scene. And so how do you go about hiring and training performers?

Ryan: Fortunately, everything that we're asking someone to do is so much lower, than the bar, that most New York, immersive performers have to hit when they're acting in these things like life and trust or sleep no more. So it's really child's play for them to be a, comic book seller or a disgruntled businessman on the side of the road.

Our scripts are very short. And so we just basically only hire people that come to us via, strong personal recommendation. We do short,training with them, but these are all very accomplished, New York City actors. So there's not any training that we have to do, on a craft level.

Jon: We do only employ actors who have, significant improv experience because, every time they do a scene, they're riffing 80% of it. We will write out a script for them. That's like our best guess as to how an interaction might go with a team that's playing one of our games.

But, it's really on the actor to figure out how to guide anything that comes at them towards a specific point that the game needs it to happen. Towards that reveal.

Ryan: And if there's any training, it is. if they ask you for the clue, you have to tell them you don't know what they're talking about.

Peih-Gee: but it sounds like you are also maybe using real life people like the halal cart guy. Is that also an actor or is that an actual halal cart guy that you've hired to hand out clues in between making kebabs for people or, whatever it is that they're selling.

Ryan: It depends, but we definitely use normal, vendors as actors, non-actors, street actors, and if they're down. But if there's some venues that are like, look, I'll rent you my store, but I don't wanna be a part of this. And so then we'll put our own actor in there.

We did one great, puzzle at a rare coin emporium. People went in and it was a much more, character driven experience where the person had to, usher them in and show them several different coins and be like, oh, you want the really rare stuff? Okay. And then go and get the coin in question that was a part of the puzzle. And something like that will, liaise with the shot, but then bring our own actor.

Jon: But it doesn't get any more authentic than getting to work with the actual pizza creator to deliver our clue if we have an opportunity to seamlessly blend in with New York by just using regular New Yorkers, playing themselves, doing what they do every day. But in our service, we jump at that.

David: We have no shortage of characters around here.

Ryan: Yeah, exactly.

Jon: And that's part of what makes the game, I think, really intoxicating to play from reports that we get from our players often is it's very common that at the finish line, we'll talk to people and they're like, how did you get this person to be a part of it?

We would've never expected that. And we'll be like, that was not a part of the game. you just encountered a crazy New Yorker and they did their thing. And that's part of the magic of the game is all the elements that make New York City a dynamic place to be in as just a regular person.

Take our game from, something that two guys with laptops could create to like a production value high above anything we could ever afford. Because New York is just adding its magic to the experience.

David: Before we move on from how you're shaping your events, I'm curious, in a city like New York, there are so many interesting little oddities, and I know you love incorporating the history and the landmarks and the fabric of the city itself into your games.

What makes a perfect real life oddity to build a puzzle or event around?

Jon: Ryan alluded to this earlier, but a big part of our whole design concept and what we're drawn to, I think Ryan and I both as people, but also especially in the context of this game. Is that we believe that so many of the great stories, in our world that we as humans love involve this idea that beneath our world, beneath the world that you see every day that can sometimes feel banal and boring or that you get accustomed to and you lose sensitivity to, there's a deeper world that's much more magical and it's available there all the time if you just have eyes to see it.

You think about Harry Potter people on the London Train platform are walking past, the portal on platform nine and three quarters where, all you have to do is know that you just need to walk through it and you've accessed this incredible world, but we develop tunnel vision because of the mundanity of our lives. And we fail to just take those opportunities to see the magical underworld. And so that's how we see Great Gotham Challenge. When we think about actors for instance, and how to incorporate them, a question that we often ask is, what is a type of person that people are trained to ignore?

Because that's exactly what we can take advantage of in order to kind of arrive at this end effect that we hope to grant people. And I think likewise, similarly, but a bit differently, one of the reasons we're drawn to New York City history, is that, there are all these vestiges of previous times that are present to us all around us that we, might pass by every day and never notice the cornerstone of this building was part of the original. I'm thinking about London now 'cause we've designed some games there. You know, like this particular stone has been here since the 2000 year old Roman, Londinium, the Roman version of this city. and it just looks like a regular rock. But if you know enough to look at it, all of a sudden you're entering into this 2000 year old story and you recognize your part in that.

So I think when it comes to locations and types of New York City trivia that we like to fixate on and design our experiences around, we're often looking for the, piece of what's a detail about the city that we would never expect or guess, that connects us to, this whimsical moment in history that we would not otherwise have ever been aware of.

For instance, if you've been to New York City, you're probably accustomed to seeing construction sites with wooden barriers, that are often painted green. And on those barriers, wheat paste advertisements, in other words, these big posters get posted.

And if you're a New Yorker, you likely pass those every day. Never think about them. In fact, maybe try not to look at them.

So we were like, wouldn't it be cool if you were walking past and you didn't know to look, but once you realize this was a part of it, you're like, wow, I can't believe that they are the ones that put these poster up in and though it looks like a normal advertisement, it's actually a part of the game that I've been initiated into.

David: So we've just spent a lot of time talking about really your design philosophy, but mostly the public games that people can go and play annually or semi-annually in New York City, produced by the Great Gotham Challenge. You also have this whole other part of your business that we've alluded to over the course of the episode where you do custom events for private clients. What does that work usually look like?

Ryan: The private work that we do is first of all, trying to serve our customers best and, give them what they need, which is a unique shared experience amongst their team that both, brings their teams closer together, as well as creates an amazing, group experience that they're talking about for, hopefully years to come. And sets their company apart is wow, we do the biggest, loudest, hardest, coolest, adventure in New York. And we try to push those as far as we can. the corporate, events have less of an appetite for a lot of the things we love. So hard puzzles, risky endeavors or like even stepping outside of your comfort zone, or even the length of the event.

We do serve a huge range of clients, and so part of our job is figuring out who our client is and what they want. Do they want something that's like a fun, happy hour? Or do they actually want our hardest, most intense, biggest wow factor, moments. And we, we try to deliver those and it's a really nice, relationship between our public games and our private games that we've created because, the public games allow us to dream big and do the noisiest, funnest, coolest things and premiere them for an audience that is looking for those things and then we can take those things and distill what's cool about them and figure out a way to maybe do them on a more recurring basis that's a little less time and effort intensive. Those trickle down into our corporate games in a way that's,very repeatable, and we know it's gonna land because I mean, as I'm sure you've talked to dozens, if not hundreds of puzzle creators, some puzzles, you make 'em and you test them and in the end, they get into the world and they don't land. But, we can offer our corporate clients something that we know is gonna be great and then being able to sell these to corporations, basically pays our bills so that we can offer, what we do, to the public at essentially cost. One of the things that we're really proud of is that we, don't really make any money on our public events, we want as many people to come as possible because we are doing this, because we love it. not because this is how we make money. And so, we love doing it for the public it's a great kind of symbiotic relationship, and business model that allows us to have a career and in this, and be thinking about this 12 months a year and thinking about great puzzles and pushing the limits and simultaneously being able to give both our public audiences and our private audiences, what they want.

Peih-Gee: So who is an ideal client for GGC?

Jon: We find that a lot of the companies that resonate with our ethos and our product are mostly tech companies and hedge funds are what's keeping paint on the walls at GGC HQ. There are plenty of other groups that like what we do, but I think those, two industries definitely attract the type of mind that enjoys puzzle solving and, the type of person who's highly competitive, which I think that's the alchemy that makes for the perfect GGC player because our games are competitions and they can be, and very demanding, we think in a good way.I think the types of clients that really enjoy hiring us agree, but it's not everybody's cup of tea.

Ryan: That being said, we have in the last couple years really tried to make a couple shorter challenges that, maybe cater to, both public groups and private groups that want something a little more, sane. And so those are like, instead of being three to four hours, they're 90 minutes to two hours.

David: There's nothing wrong with a lighter experience that does an elegant job of delivering people to a really cool bar.

Ryan: Right. Yeah. Ex Exactly. And, for a while, we were pretty. Hung up on like, the GGC experience. Like it can't be shortened. It has to be this way. And then it was years and years of mainly our salesperson saying, are you sure we can't serve this audience? Are you sure we can't do this?

And we were like, okay, we'll try. And then we created, these 90 minute games that, are designed for smaller teams that can be run for, less money so that we can serve smaller teams and people love them. And so we were like, oh, we were wrong on that one. But the good news is it has been opening up. These are pretty new, courses. These are only a year old. And And so, we've seen a,broader diversity of people be able to come in,and play these.

Peih-Gee: Is every corporate team building event custom built, or do you have like a set package?

Ryan: No, we have three different, tiers, and they're named after suits, which we feel is very like,spy. But we've got our off the rack, which is like,it's set. There's few different configurations. There's five different courses around the city.

There's a basic, premium, and ultra premium, and that's set, it's very value forward, and it just allows you to do it. Then we have what we call our made to measure, which is, customization of your starting and end locations, your themes, integrating company mottos, logos, inside jokes and practical jokes, CEOs, themes, messaging. That's where a lot of our customization happens in that made to measure, status. But it can rely on puzzles from our library that we've reskinned using mechanics that we've invented before or used before and re-skinned for the thing.

And then we have truly bespoke, which is our highest level, which is, we guarantee you no one has seen these puzzles before. So these are ones that the hedge funds buy where their employees are doing the MIT mystery hunt, are doing, every one of our events have done all this other stuff that we can't just, pull stuff from. So we legit have to reinvent the wheel for those people. And that's the equivalent of a Savile row suit, of puzzle hunt.

David: Talk to me a little bit about Compass, the annual event that you run.

Jon: Over a decade ago there was, an event created within the kind of financial services, industry by a person who was an enthusiast of an 80s movie called Midnight Madness. And this movie, is about an all night puzzle hunt.

David: Midnight Madness is the movie that kind of created the entire puzzle hunt movement. All of your puzzle hunts basically are in some way being pulled from Midnight Madness.

Jon: Thank you, yeah. Interestingly, Ryan and I had no relationship or knowledge of the movie. When we started making Great Gotham Challenge, we thought we were the first people to ever think of anything like this. So it was interesting to learn later, like, oh, there are people that make things that are kind of like what we make. So that event, has happened for many years and, for a long time the way it functioned is that companies can sponsor a team of their employees for a very high dollar amount. The amount has changed over the years, but it's been anywhere from 30 to $60,000, to register a team. And that money, part of it goes to the budget of creating the event. but the greater part goes to a charity, and the idea was that, in the spirit of the Midnight Madness film, people would play an all night puzzle hunt, around New York City that would grant them special access to these kind of landmark locations and, it was very catered to, the man who has everything, if you will, the most elaborate kind of experience that you could ever want, dressed in these very complex, difficult puzzles. That event's been going on for many years and has changed hands over the years, from design team to design team. So over the past two iterations, this event has recently been happening every, two years. 2021 and 2023, we were asked by the games then current designers to come aboard as hired help.

'cause someone on that team had played one of our smaller events and said, it seems like this company has a handle on how to run a puzzle hunt without making your wife and kids hate you, because of all the time and effort that you're putting into it, which I think was their particular frustration at the time.

So we got brought on just to kind of help grease the wheels, make things run a little more efficiently, take some pressure off the people who are designing it just in their spare time. And as of this year, we have been asked to take over the designing of the event. So it's currently at this point in time, it's called Compass.

Ryan: So we were able to come into this team and really understand what made this event tick. And, I guess we did well enough because, after two years of collaborating on it, and being co-creators, we have been given the opportunity to move into the primary creator role and take all of it on and now create this event. The next part I'm gonna say, will be firmed up by the time you release this episode, but as a part of us taking it on, we really wanted to go back to the original name and call it Midnight Madness again. The Compass name was used to kind of differentiate the creators in case there was any, sensitivity about who created which event but really, the lineage of the event has now changed hands. I think we're, might be the fourth generation of creators. And so everyone knows there's been a long lineage of different people creating and, one of our collaborators, that we've worked with before now is a Midnight Madness event in London. We're really excited to be the primary creators. this year. It'll be happening in.October, and we're looking into models that might make it possible to move that to every year because that would allow us to raise even more money for the charity. You know, and I, I gotta say, you know, it does sound like a lot of money.

I know, but it's,you gotta remember that for these big charities, this is what a normal table at a gala costs.

David: And this is way less boring than the galas are.

Ryan: Right. Exactly. And so the model is look, instead of like just buying a table and filling it with your rich friends and eating a meal and listening to speeches, what if you bought a team? It's actually kind of funny 'cause a lot of times the really rich people buy a team and then they don't even play. It's almost like they're staking, then they go and like recruit the best puzzle people they know who compete for their own glory.

Peih-Gee: Oh, I'd the volunteer as tribute.

David: I'd say it's very feudal.

Ryan: look, if we're raising millions of dollars for the underprivileged children of New York City, I'm, fine with it.

David: Agreed. I'm on board with you.

Ryan: And so it, it allows us to really take our biggest swings. You know, we thought it would help us generate a lot of content that then would trickle down into GGC, which hasn't always been the case because it's so big and so complex and so hard to adapt. But it's been incredible. It is painting on on a bigger canvas. That's really fun.

Jon: Yeah. Budget wise, I can remember Ryan and I in the early days of GGC, we came across an article online about Midnight Madness, and we were like, oh my God, these people do what we do on several orders of magnitude greater. And the budget that they have to work with…if we could one day have that kind of budget to dream and design experiences, like who knows what we would be capable of.

And it's interesting. Theresa, I think was asking us recently, what's the biggest dream that you could dream for GGC? And I was like, for a long time it was like, if we could be in charge of Midnight Madness, that would be about as big as we could dream. And so here we are this year getting to, what that's like.

Peih-Gee: Yeah. Time to start dreaming bigger.

Ryan: Time to go bigger.

Jon: Yeah.

Peih-Gee: All of this sounds super fun. I can't wait until I have a chance to play it. For anybody considering participating in the Great Gotham Challenge, what should they know about it?

Ryan: As we've gone through, we strive to make everything safe, but it is difficult. It does require you to be in the real world. It does require you to take some, perhaps interpersonal risks, you might not with every, stranger on the street. You wanna have a balanced team of people who maybe, you know, only one or two people that are great at grinding at kind of maybe those, traditional puzzles and maybe one or two people who are great at New York City history or, are just an outgoing personality and are the type of people that notice things around them. It is a full day. It’'s a good three to four hours long. And, I'm able to announce that we'll be having our, yearly what we call our flagship challenge, this summer.

Ryan: Hope to see you there. It does sell out every year. You do want to get on our newsletter to make sure to get tickets. We're also gonna be repeating what we call our summer series, which is where we take some of those mini challenges that we were talking about that are a little more approachable and running that every other, and by every other, I mean, not, every two weeks. But I mean, all the weeks that we're not running the flagship challenge, we'll run one of these summer series, they're challenges with puzzles that, we're not guaranteeing are brand new, like the flagship challenge. But, are the set courses in Central Park, Grand Central and new for this year, Hudson Yards, and doing those. So you can come and do those.

Peih-Gee: That sounds fantastic. So what comes next for you guys?

Jon: We're excited this year to be designing the Midnight Madness Compass event, which we've talked about. That's a huge amount of work. Typically the reason that it's happened every two years is because it takes two years to design. So we're, putting in a lot of, hours these days.

We're also excited to debut some new things. Releasing a new Great Gotham Challenge every summer, which is, the name of, the puzzle hunt we've been talking about. For the public to play and that's what's happening in June. But we are developing a new concept for a game that's a bit different than what we've offered in the past.

And I don't know how much I wanna reveal about it, but it's a different type of game. It does involve some puzzling, it involves, being observant and rather than taking place over the course of four hours, we're thinking that it's gonna take place over the course of maybe more like 24 hours. So it will start and end, with a mass event. And in between people will have to strategize about how to find as many of our hidden Easter eggs as they can around New York City.

Ryan: What's the best way for people to follow your work, or to connect with you?

Best way to follow us says on Great Gotham Challenge, is our Instagram handle where our, uh, fellow co-creator Emma posts, delightfully and New York-y and unhinged things, regularly.

And the best way to find out about upcoming events is just to sign up for our newsletter on our website. Just google Great Gotham Challenge, or go to info.ggc.nyc and click on the public events tab. And if you want to do a Great Gotham Challenge sooner, just click on the private events tab and get your company to pay for it.

Peih-Gee: We'll have links to all of that in the show notes.

David: Jon, Ryan, thank you so much for joining us and for helping to go and put a little bit more magic into the world. I think that was the thing that I really took away when I experienced your work was that I felt a real kinship to what you're doing as someone who loves history and the oddities of New York and somebody who's always trying to encourage people to just look up every once in a while, because it is a remarkable place, and I love the way that the Great Gotham Challenge kind of shakes you and makes you do that and makes you see how strange and beautiful the city truly is.