Last week, we brought you a review of The Bunker Experience, and told you how much we all enjoyed it. Today, we are chatting with Bea Egeto, creator and partner of The Bunker Experience, to learn a little more about how it was created, and what is coming next for them.

HorrorBuzz.com: For those who haven’t been yet, tell us what The Bunker Experience is all about. What’s the story of it?

Bea Egeto: The story takes place in 2078, global warming has taken its toll on Earth and most of civilization has been wiped out. The remaining 10% of the population is forced to live in underground compounds to protect themselves from the elements. These self-sufficient compounds communicate with each other through a Mainframe. The largest and most secure compound is the UHC (United Human Compound). This is the only compound with a military presence. It is the most sophisticated and well equipped place to find protection against the elements and Vandals attack.

The Vandals are a group of savages – led by Lightcrawler – who roam the world “Topside”, seizing every opportunity to loot anything, kill, and eat anyone that they come across. Lighcrawler’s mission is to locate the UHC and orchestrate a massacre.

For security reasons, no one knows exactly where the UHC is located except for a handful of compound leaders. These leaders have vowed to keep this a secret and hide any information that could lead the Vandals to the UHC. One of the compounds with this information is The Bunker, which recently suffered a massive attack. Any living survivors are unknown.

Chapter 1 starts off with our audience entering The Bunker, seeking refuge since their compound was attacked by the Vandals recently.  As they are about to get a walkthrough of where they will be staying, something happens and they are given a mission to complete in order to survive.

HorrorBuzz.com:  Tell us about where the idea of The Bunker Experience came from?

Bea Egeto: The Bunker Experience is based on a choose-your-own-adventure webseries I created, which won a Webby Award in 2015.  I’m an avid player of escape the room video games, so when I visited a local escape room, I immediately thought this would be a perfect way to tell my interactive story.  What’s great about the internet is that it breaks the barrier between of traditional story telling (such as tv or film) and it allows the audience to interact with the story/characters.  When you take that idea and redevelop it to an actual physical experience such as an escape room it elevates the interactivity even more.  Which is why I LOVED this opportunity to tell the story in such a way.

HorrorBuzz.com: Have you had experience in creating escape rooms or experiences like this before?

Bea Egeto: I personally have not created an escape room before.  My background is in digital entertainment, I worked as a producer for a digital production company where I was head of the production department.  During this time, I’ve had the opportunity to produce a number of scripted content which inspired me to create/write digital content of my own.  Since then, I’ve written/directed/produced short form content as well as a few theater plays, but nothing like an escape room experience.

My partner Charlotte Bjornbak, however, has had experience creating Halloween Haunts, so her background came in handy when we had to design and build out our experience.  She also comes from entertainment, as an actress and as a beloved member of local theaters, she had plenty of theatrical plays and halloween haunts under her belt.  With her experience and my vision, we built this new type of an experience together.

HorrorBuzz.com:  To me, the title is dead on…it’s not just an escape, it’s an entire experience from the second you walk in until the moment it’s over. What was the thought process behind making it a fully immersive game?

Bea Egeto: I wanted to tell a story in the most interactive way possible.  My original idea was to create this story as a choose-your-own-adventure series, so the audience has the power on how they want to story to go.  Once this physical experience came to my mind it was a true “AHA” moment.  I wanted our audience to be submerged into the story right away, everything is story related and everyone is a character in this story, even our audience.  As you said, this is not really just an escape room or just a Halloween Haunt, it’s an adventure game an interactive experience combining the two events.  In a way I think it’s a cousin of an ARG.

HorrorBuzz.com:  You make great use of live actors throughout the game. Was that something you were big on doing right out of the gate?

Bea Egeto: I did want to use live actors so the story can be told properly and with some added excitement, it would’ve been hard to tell the story otherwise.  I also wanted the audience to get to know the characters in the story right away, eventually as we expand our experience to Chapter 2, 3, 4 etc. we will develop these characters even more.  So if you’ve done Chapter 1 and continue our experience you will get to know them more and more and be vested in the story even deeper.

HorrorBuzz.com: The location itself lends heavily into the entire ordeal. How easy (or hard) was it to convert the space into what you guys needed it to be?

Bea Egeto: The basement was a perfect fit design and location wise.  It used to be the “Old Town Haunt” a few years ago, which is when I first got introduced to this place.  When we were looking for the location I remembered this basement and thought I’d give it a try to see if we can make it work.  We had a very long process with the city to get us open, but ultimately we worked everything out.  As far as design and the build-out is concerned, we had to basically set dress the space since it was already a gem to begin with and it organically fit our story.

It is a historical building, and it served as the old Union Bank over 100 years ago, our basement was their vault.  So there’s a lot of history here.  Our location was also important, since we wanted it to be central and have easy access to our venue for people to come and visit, plus Old Town Pasadena offers a ton of shopping, restaurants and bars are walking distance away in every direction.  We lucked out.

HorrorBuzz.com:  I know some people saw you guys when you first opened in October, and then you had to close for a bit. Can you talk about some of the things you did or revamped during that time, to perhaps convince some folks to try it out again?

Bea Egeto: We reworked 70% of our original experience.  Of course the story is still the same, however, everything got a nice improvement since we had the time to redesign, and redevelop the experience.  We also added and reworked most of the puzzles in our escape room.  Overall I would say it’s night and day and we have raised the bar since last year.

HorrorBuzz.com: What is next on deck? You mentioned a second room, and a Halloween experience the other day. Can you expand on that some more?

Bea Egeto: We are amping up our scare zone for Halloween to give people an added adrenalin rush for the season.  We are in the plans of continuing our story and launching our 2nd experience called Chapter 2, hopefully it’ll be ready later this year.

Thanks so much to Bea for taking the time to chat with us. We highly recommend you check out The Bunker Experience for yourself. You can visit them online at www.thebunkerexperience.com