Technology is rapidly changing how the types of attractions and immersive experiences that we are now able to enjoy ranging from sports-based simulations like Topgolf to experiences designed specifically for social media like the recent Van Gogh exhibit. One of the reasons that the video gaming industry has been so successful is because they are able to design flow and immersive experiences that can engage all five senses. Beat the Bomb, an operator of immersive social gaming experiences that blends sophisticated technology with thoughtfully designed physical space, combines these two elements masterfully. The company’s signature experiential offering is a 1-hr experience played with 4-6 players that interact with a number of devices across five unique settings/rooms for a common mission of disarming a bomb through collaboration and teamwork. Think of it as a tech-enabled and far more engaging version of escape the room that caters to your senses, designed to drive immersive resonance by integrating gaming dynamics through space and time. The company currently operates one highly-successful location in Brooklyn that opened in 2017 and is now expanding to new markets nationwide with DC and Atlanta slated next. The cost per person starts at $44.95.
AlleyWatch caught up with Beat the Bomb CEO and Founder Alex Patterson to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Beat The Bomb raised $7M in our Series A earlier this year (2022). Our primary Series A investors were CVC2 and Otium Capital. The Series A also included participation by individual investors, plus friends and family members who had joined a previous Seed Round in 2019. Prior to that the company was self-funded and then bootstrapped.
Tell us about the product or service that Beat the Bomb offers.
Beat The Bomb is the world’s first immersive social video game company. Our main game is a 1-hour activity in which 4-6 players go through 5 high-tech rooms working together to play multiplayer games delivered via touch screens, motion sensors, RFID readers, projection walls, and laser maze hardware. Performing well requires teamwork and gains time on your “Bomb Clock.” In the 5th and final room, the Bomb Room, hazmat-suit-clad players must defeat the final game to disarm a Paint Bomb before their Bomb Clock runs out… or else #GetBlasted! The Bomb Room then becomes a photo and video booth to capture the memories!
We have had over 150,000 players since we opened our Brooklyn location in late 2017. The company’s customers range from friends celebrating occasions, to school class trips, to families getting together, to corporate team-building events. While 93% of teams fail to ‘Beat The Bomb’ on the first attempt, players can come back to try again or play altogether different game sets delivered on the same technology, with alternate special-FX endings like a Foam Bomb. They can also compete head-to-head in Battle Mode and qualify for Pro League tournaments with cash prizes. Upon the launch of our new Atlanta & DC locations, the game system will be programmed to facilitate digital gameplay between teams across locations.
What inspired the start of Beat The Bomb?
As a kid, I grew up both playing video games and participating in sports. As a grown-up, I wanted to combine the two. The concept for Beat The Bomb was developed in 2016. As background, from 2010-2015, I was an early executive at obstacle course events company Tough Mudder. Starting as the company’s lawyer, I went on to lead the marketing department, and then as Chief Creative Officer, my team designed the obstacles. After 5 years, I wanted to create my own company, with a ticketed experiential product aimed at a much bigger addressable market.
In early 2016, I spent 6 months studying dozens of other concepts, including escape rooms, television game shows, arcade games, haunted houses, immersive theater, action movies, and esports. It was clear to me that there was an opportunity to use video game technology to create interactive social gaming experiences, and to engineer meaningful human connections among the players. What I envisioned was a technology-enabled reprogrammable room, driven by Unity game software, with games that tested teamwork skills and brought the players together as a group. It would end with players being covered in paint from an explosive paint bomb, filmed in slow-motion and purpose-built for word of mouth and social media sharing.
This would also solve a number of problems that I had noticed with escape rooms. Their gameplay was not fun for most people; it was very puzzle-driven and an each-person-to-themselves experience. Their endings were also anticlimactic. Despite the pretense of being trapped in a “Jail Cell” or a “Haunted Cabin” or a “Zombie Lab,” when you fail, nothing actually happens, they just let you walk out without consequence. Worst of all, once a customer played a room, they could never replay the same rooms ever again.
Beat The Bomb would solve these problems, as an immersive real-world gaming platform, with an endless library of multiplayer games that could test team performance and be set to competitive play modes, and with an exciting ending that would almost guarantee you had a blast! The result — Beat The Bomb — is now a tech-enabled gaming concept that can scale to every major city in the world.
How is Beat the Bomb different?
We are the world’s first immersive social video game company. We have built a proprietary software platform for playing room-based digital games, a custom hardware stack that includes touchscreens, RFID readers, 3d printed laser maze tech, and projection walls, and an expanding library of multiplayer Unity-based video games centered on teamwork and shared social experience. When you add the novelty of putting on a hazmat suit and facing off against our special-fx “bomb” endings, including the world’s largest pant bomb, the experience of playing our game is world-class. As proof, we have 7,000+ Google Reviews at a 4.9-star rating for our Brooklyn location. The result is that Beat The Bomb appeals to a very broad customer demographic. We see millennial and Gen X adults getting together on weekends to celebrate birthdays and have drinks, we see teenagers coming to compete in Battle Mode, we host 8-13 y/o birthday parties, and we get a lot of school groups and corporate team building events. No other entertainment attraction brings people together in the way we do.
What market does Beat the Bomb target and how big is it?
As a destination to go and have fun, we compete in the out-of-home location-based entertainment market. According to Market Watch, the location-based entertainment market is currently a $3B market that is projected to grow at 30%+ annually and reach $24B globally by 2028. Competitors for our adult customers would include Dave & Busters, Main Event, Topgolf, and the entire escape room industry, plus even activities like iFLY indoor skydiving. Competitors for our younger players would involve concepts like Urban Air Adventure Parks, Skyzone from Circus Trix, iPlay America, Andretti Karting, and regional Family Entertainment Centers.
But in our minds, we compete with anything that you pay to go and do with friends, from the $10B U.S. bowling industry, to the $18B U.S. movie theater industry, to even the $50B U.S. concert industry. We even consider newer ticketed experiential ‘Instagram museums’ like Meow Wolf, Museum of Ice Cream, Illuminarium, Candytopia, Color Factory, and Museum of Illusions to be our competitors. Plus, as a technology-enabled experience, we compete with the new crop of location-based VR attractions like Dreamscape, The Void, and Sandbox VR.
Finally, it’s worth noting that $250B is spent in the U.S. annually in restaurants and bars. With our new Bomb Bar offering, Beat The Bomb will be competing in that space as well, alongside other new ‘Eatertainment’ concepts like the golf-themed Puttshack, Puttery, and Swingers, the darts-themed Flight Club, the shuffleboard-themed Electric Shuffle, the soccer-themed TOCA Social, and more all-in-one concepts like Punch Bowl Social. The pandemic has really underscored that people are hardwired to be social and need to go out and have fun with friends, family, and colleagues. Especially in a work-from-home environment when we are getting less social interaction during the day. The opportunity for us is enormous.
What’s your business model?
From the consumer’s standpoint, our core offering is a ticket to a 1-hour immersive social video game that you play with friends, family, or colleagues. We then offer food & beverages and the opportunity to play additional shorter format games in our 3-walled “Game Bays” at our facility. We offer event packages for corporate events and are also building STEM-themed after-school and summer camp programs.
From an investor and Landlord’s perspective, we build a location, which costs X dollars. Then in the subsequent years that location will make Y dollars in profit. The goal is for Y to end up bigger than X. If that’s the case, it justifies building more locations around the U.S. and the world. Our Brooklyn location is now in our 5th year of operations and doing extremely well, so we are confident in our model and looking forward to opening in Atlanta and DC later this year.
What are your post-COVID office plans?
We are being flexible and practical. In early 2022, we rented office space in the same building as our Brooklyn location of Beat The Bomb. Our HQ team, which consists of our Game Developers, Marketing Director, our President and our COO, and our Operations Manager all now work 3 days in that office, and the rest of the days remotely. That said, two of our employees are fully remote, while on the other hand our CTO (Chief Technology Officer) works 5 days a week in the office. We believe that this type of flexible and hybrid model is the future of work.
For that reason, reflecting the way work has changed, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we launched Beat The Bomb Virtual, a 45-minute hosted gaming experience where players get on Zoom and then log into the Beat The Bomb website from anywhere in the world. Once logged in, their computers are networked with each other, allowing them to play a growing library of virtual multiplayer video games. The games are specifically designed for remote team building. We’ve now had thousands of players and hundreds of corporate clients including Google, Microsoft, Meta, NYU, PwC, Citi, and even the U.N. We once had an Amazon executive log in from the backseat of a taxicab in Mumbai to play with colleagues while on a work trip abroad.
What was the funding process like?
We took our time and were very selective about which investors we were looking for, and it paid off. If I have a piece of advice, it’s that you want to partner with investors that you like and respect, whom you have come to trust, and who have independently developed an investment thesis about your market and are specifically looking for a business like yours. Ultimately, CVC2, the lead investor in our Series A in 2022 was also an investor in our Seed round in 2019. That gave us the opportunity to get to know each other over time, and we benefited a lot from their long-term perspective during the challenges of Covid-19. As we exited the worst of the pandemic, we were introduced to Otium Capital, the firm of French entrepreneur Pierre-Édouard Stérin. They loved the concept and had a strong thesis on location-based gaming, and brought an international perspective to our vision for the company. We were thrilled they wanted to become part of the Series A. Above all like all things Beat The Bomb, it is critical to use teamwork, and to not give up. Our President Jesse Bull in particular was incredible at keeping our outreach process going week-in week-out, without fail, until we succeeded.
We took our time and were very selective about which investors we were looking for, and it paid off. If I have a piece of advice, it’s that you want to partner with investors that you like and respect, whom you have come to trust, and who have independently developed an investment thesis about your market and are specifically looking for a business like yours. Ultimately, CVC2, the lead investor in our Series A in 2022 was also an investor in our Seed round in 2019. That gave us the opportunity to get to know each other over time, and we benefited a lot from their long-term perspective during the challenges of Covid-19. As we exited the worst of the pandemic, we were introduced to Otium Capital, the firm of French entrepreneur Pierre-Édouard Stérin. They loved the concept and had a strong thesis on location-based gaming, and brought an international perspective to our vision for the company. We were thrilled they wanted to become part of the Series A. Above all like all things Beat The Bomb, it is critical to use teamwork, and to not give up. Our President Jesse Bull in particular was incredible at keeping our outreach process going week-in week-out, without fail, until we succeeded.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
While the core of our company is our highly scalable software system, custom hardware stack, and proprietary game titles, fundamentally Beat The Bomb is a location-based entertainment company. The future anticipated capital requirements of scaling that type of business made it harder to attract traditional venture capital. However, with only 1 location, even for as strongly as we were performing, most private equity firms felt it was too early to make an investment. But with enough diligence and teamwork, we kept disciplined and trusted in the process and made it happen. In our case, our lead investor CVC2 came via an introduction from a venture debt firm that itself was not the right fit for us at the moment. Try to think of the process more as making connections, versus just pitching.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
First, we had multiple years of proving solid unit economics on our first unit in Brooklyn. Second, we had incredible customer reviews demonstrating in their own words how differentiated Beat The Bomb is from any other product. Third, and most importantly, we had built an incredible core team of brilliant employees that were standing ready to scale the concept. That includes our President Jesse Bull, our COO Tiffer Valente, our CTO Chuck Fletcher, our Lead Developer Jesse Johnson, and our Senior Developer Zach Chang, plus many more.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We will open 2 new locations in the next 6 months. The first will be in West Midtown, Atlanta in a property owned by Jamestown LP, and the second in the Hecht Warehouse/Ivy City in Washington, D.C. in a property owned by Douglas Development. The locations will each have a full bar and a light food offering, plus six Beat The Bomb ‘Game Bays’ which are 3-walled game zones with a drink rail at the back, perfect for a more casual style of immersive group gaming while enjoying food & drinks from our Bomb Bar.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Focus on what you can do with the limited resources that you have – which constraints may just force you to innovate and create something new and extraordinary. When Beat The Bomb started out, we had no money for expensive scenic and set designs like conventional escape rooms. So we worked with video game developers in grad school to come up with a unique experience using projection-mapped walls and RFID readers, technologies that we could afford to deploy. As a result, we invented location-based immersive video gaming. Not to stretch the analogy too thin, but the Google founders didn’t have the funds to copy AOL.com or Yahoo.com. So they built something better.
Focus on what you can do with the limited resources that you have – which constraints may just force you to innovate and create something new and extraordinary. When Beat The Bomb started out, we had no money for expensive scenic and set designs like conventional escape rooms. So we worked with video game developers in grad school to come up with a unique experience using projection-mapped walls and RFID readers, technologies that we could afford to deploy. As a result, we invented location-based immersive video gaming. Not to stretch the analogy too thin, but the Google founders didn’t have the funds to copy AOL.com or Yahoo.com. So they built something better.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Beat The Bomb Atlanta will open in the early Fall at 1483 Chattahoochee Avenue NW, in the up-and-coming Upper Westside of Atlanta. Jamestown our Landlord, is known for its dynamic mixed-use properties, including nearby Westside Provisions District and Ponce City Market. Beat The Bomb D.C. will then open in late November / early December in Washington D.C., at Hecht Warehouse/Ivy City in partnership with Douglas Development Corp., which has track record of reactivating landmark real estate in our nation’s Capitol region.
Working with renowned design-build firm ARCO/Murray, Beat The Bomb’s Atlanta and D.C. locations will feature glass-walled Bomb Rooms, a beer garden, and The Bomb Bar, a full-service bar with signature cocktails and slushies, paired with a light food offering. The locations will also each have multiple Game Bays, which are 150-square-foot, 3-walled game areas with dedicated seating allowing players to choose from 20 hyper-social 2-5 minute games developed by Beat The Bomb’s in-house gaming studio.
What is your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC?
I love the rooftop patio at the Time Out New York Market in DUMBO. It’s about a 10-minute walk from Beat The Bomb’s Brooklyn location. The views of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline are incredible, and they have a great bar and food offerings that include pizza from Fornino and burgers from Pat LaFrieda. Whenever I have guests in town it’s where I take them!
