Escape Lab | PBS live STEM escape game on Twitch

We partnered with WGBH to build something nobody had really done before: a live streamed escape experience that worked both in real life and online simultaneously.

Players on Twitch could solve puzzles alongside a live team in the physical room, all of it broadcast in real time. It was chaotic in the best way possible. Thousands of people tuned in to watch strangers work through a space-themed mystery together, and somehow it became this genuinely collaborative moment across the internet.

We learned that escape rooms aren’t just about the four walls. They’re about the people trying to get out of them, whether they’re in the same room or watching from their couch.

Behind the scenes

Behind the Puzzle: Trapology x WGBH Go to Space

Back in 2019, WGBH came to us with an idea: take an escape room, put it on Twitch, and let a live audience play mission control while four astronauts (played by the actual Skory family, of YouTube fame, 2.5 Million followers ) tried to get off a fictional space station before the clock ran out. No pressure.

Our team, Jason, Nicole, and Tina, designed the puzzles from scratch. Weeks of prototyping, testing, and rebuilding went into challenges that had to work twice: once as a physical puzzle in the room, and once as something an internet audience could follow, vote on, and occasionally sabotage in real time.

That second part is the tricky bit. A puzzle that’s fun to solve is one thing. A puzzle that’s fun to watch someone else solve, with thousands of strangers weighing in through chat, is a different design problem entirely. We built for both.

The result: Escape Lab, a real science-grounded escape room experiment that let a Twitch audience genuinely steer the outcome. Not a poll. Not a comment section. An actual hand on the story.

We’ve built a lot of rooms. This might be the only one that had its own live chat.

The stats

Live viewers: The finale drew more than 38,000 live viewers, growing from zero on day one, according to WGBH’s own Shorty Awards entry. Nieman Lab’s contemporaneous coverage put it at more than 30,000 unique viewers, so the low-to-high range is roughly 30K–38K. Current PBS
Minutes watched: 185,305 minutes watched during the finale alone. Current
Chat engagement: The channel gained more than 450 highly engaged followers, and during the finale, 400 unique chatters contributed 9,500 comments. Current
Community turnout: After the finale, WGBH kept the escape game open in-studio for a week and invited community members to try it themselves — 37 teams played, and only a few made it out. Current
Influencer reach: The cast included Twitch space streamers EJ_SA (55,746 followers) and DasValdez (61,232 followers), plus The Skorys, cross-platform influencers with 1.55 million YouTube subscribers. EJ_SA also raided the Escape Lab channel before the show started, sending hundreds of viewers over. Current Current
Lasting impact at WGBH: Since the pilot, WGBH implemented an automated Twitch streaming option for anyone at the station, built a Twitch starter kit, trained two teams to launch their own channels, and its in-house production team now offers Twitch livestreams as a standing service. Current
Physical build: The room itself was a 12′ x 30′ escape room set built in GBH’s Calderwood Studio, with three studio camera feeds, several security camera feeds from inside the room, and GoPros on each astronaut for a first-person viewer perspective. Nieman Lab Nieman Lab

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