Metro Spirit - 09.14.17

V28|NO37
IMMERSE YOUR
SENSES IN A GAME
Source Code Escape Games new
destination for entertainment
By Amanda Main | Photos by Joshua Bailey
A NEW ESCAPE ROOM BUSINESS is coming to downtown Augusta, and it has all
your senses covered.
Source Code Escape Games is owned by Vinnie Ingallinera, who is excited to be
opening up on Broad Street in downtown Augusta. But Ingallinera’s background
makes Source Code more than just an average escape rooms business.
“I’m actually a military retiree, so I did 20 years and I learned a lot of cool tech stuff
when I was in the Army,” he said. “Before I joined the Army, I was an art major. I wanted
to figure out a way to put my tech and art together, and so I made escape rooms. Our
escape rooms are crazy high-tech. They’re fully automated and put pretty much any
smart home to shame.”
He plans to open Source Code Escape Games later this month, with two escape
rooms ready to go and a third, more physically challenging one, still being worked
on. The first two escape rooms will be called Asylum and Hacker’s Headquarters —
and the rooms are more expansive than a single open room, allowing for up to 10 to
12 people to play at a time. Because Ingallinera had been building props and escape
rooms for a while before deciding to open his own, he has had time to think up aspects
that make it special — from the high-tech manipulation his team will have from the
control room, to piping in scents that really immerse the player in the experience. For
the Asylum escape room, for example, they will be piping in a mixture of a scent called
Hospital with a little bit of scent called Mildew.
Ingallinera has been working on escape rooms and props under an Augusta-based
business called Puzzle Props. He started Puzzle Props about a year and a half ago but
had been building escape room props before that.
“It just kind of formed out of, I went to my first escape room while I was in the Army
with a group of soldier buddies in D.C.; we did this escape room and it was awesome,”
he said. “And we were like, ‘man you know what would’ve been cool’ — and that’s kind
of our new phrase at the shop. If you ever hear that phrase, everybody pays attention
because ‘you know what’d be cool if’ is kind of our motto. And then whatever comes
after that is like, ‘ah, yeah, we’ve got to do that.’”
“So we actually pitched an idea to the guy who owned the place — ‘you know what’d
be cool,’ and he was like, ‘yeah, you know somebody who can build that?’ and I was
26 METROSPIRIT AUGUSTA’S INDEPENDENT VOICE SINCE 1989 14SEPTEMBER2017