The owners of Escape from Reality, an escape room and gaming store in South Porcupine, are thinking outside the box and expanding their business in new ways.
About six years ago, Marcus Niebler and Julie Evans were operating an escape room business in Stratford and were looking to expand to a new locale when they found their current location on Golden Avenue. They found that the building was much larger than expected and, being gamers themselves, decided to add a game store to fill out the space.
Escape from Reality currently has five escape rooms. They also sell board games, tabletop games, and occasionally host tournaments and events, including an upcoming tournament in August for Legions: Realms at War, an up-and-coming Canadian trading card game that Escape from Reality has been supporting. In December of last year they opened Craft Magic just down the street, an arts and crafts store where Evans offers workshops in knitting, crochet, macrame, and more recently, painting.
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The next few months will see big changes coming for both stores, after Niebler and Evans spent a recent vacation thinking about the future of their businesses.
“We got back from holidays and were like, we should really combine the stores into one big retail space and turn this into just escape rooms,” Niebler says.
They are renovating the basement of Craft Magic, which will become a space for tabletop gaming and crafting workshops. The upstairs area will still house the craft store, but will also have a section dedicated to gaming merchandise. Despite the shift in product, Craft Magic’s name will remain the same.
“Local people will figure it out, and anyone who’s not local will find the craft store and be like ‘Oh, there’s a game store too!’” Niebler says.
As for Escape from Reality, the plan is to expand to seven escape rooms from the current five, while the ground floor will become a film studio.
“I’m going through my mid-life crisis and I’ve always wanted to do TV, so I’m just going to start filming,” Niebler says.
Niebler is interested in dabbling in all sorts of content, including gaming — think something like Critical Role — as well as music videos, but he's perhaps most excited about creating good, educational kids' programming.
“I have a background in child development, so I want to do kids TV shows because the stuff on the internet now is awful. I grew up in a world with Mr. Rogers, Mr. Dressup, and that quality doesn’t really exist anymore. There’s not a lot of good content being created,” Niebler says.
“I think the internet has been good and bad in so many ways. Music went through this whole video phase and you don’t see those anymore. There was a whole genre of really good productions, and now it’s just a band playing,” he says.
“It’s a big change, but I’ve gotten to the point where a midlife crisis was due to happen. What else am I gonna do with this space? I don’t want an eighth escape room, I don’t want to put up walls — I think just having green screens and fun props in a room is way cooler. My goal is to increase the capacity for art on this side of the city.”
Niebler and Evans are busy with other ventures as well — they’ve created a game that they're hoping to get developed, and they've started a garden in the yard space behind Craft Magic that Niebler hopes will eventually become a community garden. The pair also owns another property just around the corner from both businesses where they plan to build a greenhouse and seasonal store to sell the “weird, exotic plants” that you can't find anywhere else in town.
“We’re busy people. We’re busy, creative people,” Niebler says.
Niebler’s primary goal is to grow the South Porcupine, which he believes has a ton of potential to become a vibrant business and arts hub. It just needs the room and the resources to grow.
“We’re always in a state of change. It’s move, adapt, or die. We’re always adapting to the community, and there are so many things not happening in the community that need to happen,” he says.
Escape rooms are currently by appointment, or visitors can take a chance by walking in during the store's business hours. To keep up with Escape from Reality, visit their website or Facebook page.
