Buzzshot is 1,000 years old today!

Wait, what? How can that be possible?

Well, if you add up all the months our subscribers have been with us, it comes in at 1,000 years. As of right now, Buzzshot has been used in escape rooms for a whole millennium. Not looking too bad for our 1,000th birthday, hey?!

As we celebrate this momentous anniversary, it’s a good time to look back at some of the impressive numbers that make up Buzzshot’s history.

Buzzshot through the ages

Since our founding in the year 1023 (just kidding), we’ve seen a lot of players. Did you know that so far over 2 million escape rooms powered by Buzzshot have been played. We’ve also seen 6.3 million players come and go, and hosted 2.2 million photos of those players on our platform. If you think about it, that’s a lot of escape rooms, a lot of memories, and a lot of “We Escaped!” celebrations.

Speaking of escape rooms, let's take a moment to appreciate the total amount of time our players have spent in our rooms. If each player played for just one hour, the time spent in escape rooms would add up to an incredible 720 years.

But wait, there's more! Let's talk about those 2.2 million photos. If we printed them all at 8"x10" size for framing, which many escape rooms using Buzzshot do for a fun souvenir for the teams to take home, the photos would cover a surface area of 160,579,584 square inches. That's about the size of 19 American football fields.

Now, let's talk logistics. If we were to line up all our 6.3 million players, end to end, assuming an average height of 16.5 meters, they would span a distance of 10,500 kilometers. That's about the distance from London to New York and back again. Talk about a big queue around the block for an escape room!

Or perhaps we could ferry those players to and from an escape room in double-decker London buses? Well, it would take around 50,000 buses to fit in every single one of those players. I don’t think the London transport system is quite ready for that kind of influx of passengers just yet!

Silly calculations aside, we wanted to take a moment to thank our customers, and all their players, for making Buzzshot what it is today. Over the years we’ve released countless features to help accelerate escape room businesses across the world, and through it all we’ve had one goal in mind: to make sure your players are happy.

Highlights from the first 1,000 years

…And what a 1,000 years they’ve been! Here’s a look back on some of our favourite moments and achievements from Buzzshot history:

Buzzshot officially launched way back in November 2016 as a software for checking in escape room teams, signing waivers, and snapping those all-important end of game photographs.

Then, one year later in November 2017, Buzzshot 2.0 launched as an all-in-one player management system, which is closer to the version you know and use today!

From this point in, we continued to improve on the system, with integrations with booking platforms, kiosk mode, statistics and signatures on waivers arriving in 2018.

The following year in 2019 we added a number of options to allow for escape room owners to print out team photos in-venue in a variety of formats so that venues can sell merchandise to their players. In fact, you can read this interview with Phil Harris, owner of Pier Pressure about how this software has superpowered their business.

Then… 2020 happened! We all remember it, escape rooms across the world suddenly had to shut down overnight, as the world went into lockdown. It was around this time we launched our sister company, Telescape.

Telescape is a platform designed to bring physical escape rooms to live in the digital era. With an easy drag and drop builder, advanced inventory system, and free credits to get started with, all an escape room owner needed to do was capture their room in photographic form and they could continue to sell tickets to players all over the world. In fact, we designed it in such a way you don’t even really need a physical escape room to create something magical online.

After lockdown, the escape room industry mostly returned to normal. As restrictions eased, escape rooms were once again able to open up again and begin in-person bookings and Buzzshot was there to support them every step of the way.

With the industry hurting, we looked to new ways we could support and celebrate the global escape room industry, and our next highlight was to launch Escape Industry News - a monthly newsletter covering the biggest stories in the industry, new room openings, and important industry events for your diary. Escape Industry News has now been live for over 2 years and is published once a month. You can sign up here.

Then towards the end of 2021, Buzzshot released a brand new feature: the Post-Game Survey. A new tool to create, manage, and automatically send  post-game surveys to players after their escape room is an invaluable tool for any escape room's marketing efforts. You can read more about how they work (and why you should be using one) here.

Which brings us to now!

Earlier this year we had the pleasure of visiting the TransWorld Interactive Entertainment Show, the US’s largest conference for the interactive entertainment industry - and yes, that includes escape rooms!

Not looking too bad for 1,000 years, hey!

And from one conference to another - as regular sponsors and attendees of RECON (Reality Escape Convention) we had the pleasure of visiting in person at the end of last year, and can’t wait to see everyone again virtually this year.

We proudly sponsored the excellent Reality Escape Pod too! We love hearing our customers interviewed and discovering what everyone is working on. And special thanks to everyone who provided our amazing Buzzshot testimonials for use in the podcast sponsor slots – your kind words and recommendations are always welcome – thank you!

So, what’s coming in the next 1,000 years?

Well, in the coming months, years, and even centuries of Buzzshot, we have a lot of exciting things planned. From brand new features for Buzzshot and Telescape, to a few exciting escape industry projects. 

Buzzshot users will be excited to hear that we're currently working on broadcast mailing features and marketing automation for email, as well as better support for large corporate group events. We can't wait to share them with you soon. In fact, if you'd like to try them out early - please do get in touch.

Until then, here’s to you! Our clients and all of your players. We can’t wait to see what the next thousand years have in store for us.