I think that's cheating: Thief heists heist-themed Vancouver escape room

There’s a bold new strategy in the world of escape rooms: straight up burglary.

A break in at G.U.E.S.S. HQ in Gastown last week had a burglar sneak his way in to ‘The Heist’, a theme room which usually sees paying customers solving puzzles and disarming traps to “break in to” a museum vault to steal a priceless artifact.

The spoil sport criminal couldn’t be bothered to play by the rules, entering the premises after dark with a bandanna mask, flashlight, and a bag of tools. Security footage shows the man walking through ‘The Heist’, seemingly attempting to figure out where he is.

“That must have been a bit weird,” says Adrian Duke, Executive Director and founder of Immersive, the parent company to G.U.E.S.S. HQ. Duke says employees arrived the next morning to find the doors wide open, and the (non-game-related) spoils missing.

“We sort of found it ironic,” says Duke, laughing. “We have this place we let people break in to, and someone broke in to.”

The burglar ended up making off with several thousand dollars worth of cash and electronics, but despite the setback Duke says G.U.E.S.S. didn’t miss a single booking the next day.

Following the incident, G.U.E.S.S. employees have increased security. It’s a shame the man didn’t come a day or two later, say Duke, as they were in the process of installing a sentry gun – a nerf gun attached to a motion sensor.

“He left that, thank god. We’ll be installing it as an extra measure.”

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