Escape Game Soundtracks: The Coded Music of Tool, Radiohead, and Messiaen

Although musicians are better associated with black leather and bad life choices than with math and cryptography, there’s a long history of musical types playing with coded messages.

Really, it shouldn’t be surprising: What is a musical score but mathematics and symbology?

Below we list three famous instances that show musicians are just as into cryptography as we are here at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game.

1. The song “Lateralus” by the band Tool

Although those of us who just jam along to the beat may not realize it, musically impressive metal songs are impressive precisely because they use complicated time signatures, which is basically complicated math. The more intricate the time signature, the more talented the musician.

It’s no surprise then that the highly capable musicians of Tool upped the game by composing the song “Lateralus” using the Fibonacci sequence. Like the Fibonacci sequence, “Lateralus” lyrics “spiral out,” and the song uses the time signatures 9/8, 9/8, and 7/8 to refer to 987, the sixteenth integer of the sequence.

2. Radiohead’s coded messages

The albums and songs of Radiohead—often called a “cerebral” band—are more than what they seem. The band leaves “Easter eggs” in all of their albums, but perhaps most interesting of all is In Rainbows from 2007. It includes multiple references to the numbers 01 and 10, which you may recognize as the digits that make up binary sequencing.

There’s plenty of theories that spin out from these 01/10 references, but perhaps most significant is that In Rainbows came out exactly 10 years after OK Computer. Believe or not, the tracks of In Rainbows and OK Computer combine together create an entirely new mega-album. You can find out more about the mega-tracklist on Diffuser <link: http://diffuser.fm/radiohead-01-and-10/>

3. Olivier Messiaen’s musical cipher

Decades before Tool and Radiohead were building codes into their rock albums, the 20th-century French composer Olivier Messiaen was putting cryptography to classical music in a very real way. Messiaen’s Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité, a 1969 composition for organ, is actual a musical cipher, with its pitches and note lengths making up the code.


Jump into the codes and ciphers on offer at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game by booking a round in any of our four themed escape rooms: http://bookeo.com/krakit

5 Cryptography-centric TV Shows to Bend Your Escape-Game-Loving Mind

The four codebreakers of The Bletchley Circle

If there’s one thing all escape game fans can agree on, it’s their love of ciphers, codes, and the amazing feeling that comes with cracking one. A few television producers out there share that feeling, too.

While only one of these shows is still on the air, luckily we live in the age of streaming! And, who knows, if we all put in the effort and get the numbers just right, they might just bring them back for encore seasons. We have the power, cryptography-loving escape room fans!

1. The Bletchley Circle (2012–14)

Yep, that Bletchley, the same one where Alan Turing and his team cracked the “unbreakable” Enigma Code in WWII. This series is set after the end of the war in the early ’50s, centering on a group of women—former Bletchley codebreakers, of course—who take the solving of complex crimes into their own hands after the police fail to get the job done.

2. Numbers (2005–10)

FBI Special Agent Don Eppes skips the wiretapping and intimidation and goes straight for the numbers to solve a variety of crimes. His secret weapon? His super math genius brother, Charles, who uses equations (yes, equations!) to help find and apprehend the criminals. Yay, math!

3. Gravity Falls (2012–16)

In this animated series, Mabel Pines (Kristin Schaal) and her brother Dipper (Jason Ritter) spend their summer at their uncle’s house running “The Mystery Shack.” (The town of Gravity Falls happens to be full of paranormal creatures, so it’s sort of necessary.) At the end of every episode, there’s a different cipher to crack, introducing kids—and kids at heart!—to the Caesar, Atbash, and Vigenère ciphers, among others.

4. Touch (2012–13)

Former reporter Martin Bohm (played by Kiefer Sutherland) realizes his young son, Jake, who has been diagnosed as autistic, is an ace when it comes to numbers and patterns. So good, in fact, that he can predict the future based on what he sees within them. Jake uses his skills to decipher a number of codes that lead to the pair saving the day, naturally.

5. The Numbers Game (2013–)

Unlike the other shows in this list, The Numbers Game isn’t a drama or cartoon, but shows how numbers work in our everyday lives. Host Jake Porway (who looks like he could be Bill Nye’s long lost son, incidentally) delves into the history of codes and other brain-melting puzzles. Get ready for some codebreaking and silly skits to keep you entertained along the way.

Get your hands on all the ciphers and codes Krakit has to offer by booking a game in one of our four themed escape rooms, steps away from Lougheed SkyTrain in Burnaby. Book here.

Escape Game History: The Uncrackable Code of the Phaistos Disc

Both sides of the Phaistos Disc

The current obsession with codes and puzzles that every escape game fan enjoys has a very long history. Pretty much as long as humans have been able to communicate through language, we’ve had the burning desire to encrypt that communication. What can we say, we’re a complicated species.

One ancient example of our fondness for code-making—one that still has cryptologists scratching their heads—is the Phaistos Disc.

Found on the Mediterranean island of Crete in 1908, the Phaistos Disc is a 15 cm disc of fired clay with a spiral of symbols adorning each side. The 241 symbols are made up of only 45 signs, which can only mean one thing—the images aren’t just decoration, they’re trying to tell us something.

The archaeologist who found the disc, Luigi Pernier, continued excavations at the Phaistos palace site for years afterward, but no other example of the symbols was ever found. This makes not only the message the Phaistos Disc contains a mystery, but also its very origins—no one knows where in the world it came from (literally).

Since the Phaistos Disc was found in Crete, and is from very very long ago—the second millennium BC, to be exact—some people have gone so far as to connect the mysterious artifact to the legendary Maze of Daedelus—otherwise known as the home of the Minotaur.

While this seems highly unlikely, it’s as good a guess as any, as many archaeologists and crytography experts think there’s little chance of the message of the Phaistos Disc ever being solved, without any other examples of this symbol set to help decipher it. Some of the symbols resemble those from another writing system from the same geographical area, called Linear A. However, Linear A also hasn’t been solved, so no luck there.

It seems that the Phaistos Disc is a mystery we’re just going to have to learn to live with.

At Krakit Vancouver Escape Game, you have a much better chance of solving our codes. You can try out your hand at cryptography by booking a go in one of our four themed escape rooms.

Escape Game Forefathers: 4 Not-Famous but Very Famous Codebreakers and Codemakers

Lewis Carroll's Alphabet Cipher

In the long history of codebreaking, there are few highly famous codebreakers. Probably has something to do with the secrecy that surrounds cryptography … but we try not to focus on that here at Krakit Escape Game!

One of the best-known codebreakers of all time is definitely Alan Turing, who led the team at Bletchley Park (which was home to several other famous codebreakers) to break the Enigma Cipher. And though he may be fictional, Sherlock Holmes is another person that comes to mind when thinking of secret codes.

But along with these few famous cipher sleuths, there a whole host of non-famous cryptographers, who are, paradoxically, also quite famous.

1. Johnny Cash

That’s right—the Johnny Cash was no stranger to codes and ciphers. During his time in the United States Air Force, the future music icon was a Morse Code Intercept Operator for the Soviet Army. Basically, Johnny Cash eavesdropped on Russian spies. Now we know one of the reasons he was such a badass. We're also pretty sure he would've been a major horror escape game fan.

2. Lewis Carroll

The man who wrote Alice in Wonderland was a fan of riddles and tricks of logic, and he also developed his own cipher. The code he made was called the Alphabet Cipher, a simple polyalphabetic substitution that is nevertheless quite clever.

3. Charles Babbage

You may not be very familiar with his name, but you’re certainly very familiar with his work. Charles Babbage built the first successful automatic calculator and made scientific contributions that led directly to the computer. He also was a highly successful codebreaker—although this wasn’t known until a century after his death, due to the military keeping it hush-hush. Now Babbage is fully recognized for solving the Vigenère Cipher during the Crimean War.

4. Galileo Galilei

The man who confirmed that the earth went around the sun was also rather fond of making his own codes. Perhaps not surprising from a scientific mind such as his. He was also onto the fact that other people were aware of his brilliant brain—and probably wanted to steal his ideas. So, he simply coded his correspondence with other science geniuses, including Johannes Kepler. Problem solved.

Try your own hand at solving codes and other riddles at one of our four Vancouver escape games. Book here: http://bookeo.com/krakit.

Escape Game History: The Art and Science of Cryptography

When you play escape rooms, there’s a good chance you’ll encounter a cryptography-based puzzle. Cryptography is the art of writing and solving codes—so you can see why it’s a favourite tool for the creators of escape games.

Although people have been writing codes to protect their secrets for literally thousands of years, cryptography as a science has only been around for about a century. That’s because it really took off during the World Wars. With a vast network of telephones and telegraphs and even carrier pigeons encircling the world, code writing suddenly took on global proportions during the Wars.

But we’re jumping ahead.

The first known use of a code goes way back, right to the ancient Egyptians and the tomb of the nobleman Khnumhotep II. Written around 1900 BCE in hieroglyphs (which proved to be their own code for Egyptologists to crack!), this burial script features symbols that don’t appear anywhere else in the language—intentionally obscuring the message.

The first use of encryption to deliver messages, however, is attributed to a man famous for many things: Caesar. The army general used a simple substitution cipher to send encrypted messages to his top men at the front. Known as the Casear cipher, this code shifts the letters of the alphabet over three, so “A” is written as “D” and “B” as “E” and so on.

It’s not the toughest code to crack, is it? That’s why, when electricity started making automated codes easier, there arose intensely complicated ciphers, such as the famous Enigma code of WWII. Any cipher becomes a race between the codemaker and the codebreaker, and in the case of war, crypotography plays a life and death role.

Information sent through wires continues to be encrypted (including the messages you send from your computer), making cryptography a daily part of our modern lives—and not just when we’re playing an escape room.

However, remember that escape games don’t take a degree in cryptography to crack. Any single puzzle definitely isn’t meant to take up all of your time, so if it’s starting to do that, you’re probably overthinking it. More than likely, the puzzle is of the Caesar variety rather than the Enigma.

Try your hand at the codebreaking at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game by booking a spot here: http://bookeo.com/krakit.

Ingenuity, Charm, and Mystery: The Greatest Codes in History

The history of codebreaking isn’t just filled with mathematics and ciphers. And neither is it populated only by spies in trenchcoats and trilby hats. It also involves a whole lot of ingenuity, charm, and surprise—and even a whole bunch of regular, non-spy folks, who just happen to have a thing for brainy puzzles (much like us here at Krakit Vancouver Escape Game!).

Below we look at some of the most fascinating codes in human history, whether they have been long solved or are still keeping us guessing.

Edward Elgar's Dorabella Cipher

The Enigma

The reason that the Enigma code from World War II—recently recounted in the movie The Imitation Game (2014)—is such a famous cipher is not because it is unbroken, but because it has been solved. And by no easy means. The amount of ingenuity required by Alan Turing and his Bletchley Park team to crack the code was astounding, with the very real goal of saving human lives and ending the war.

The Dorabella Cipher

The stakes of cracking the Dorabella Cipher are nowhere near as high as they were for the Enigma team. In fact, by comparison, the story of the Dorabella Cipher is positively charming.

English composer and code-enthusiastic Edward Elgar is the cryptographer behind this 87-character message, written for his friend Dora Penny (who he called Dorabella). Penny claimed never to have been able to solve the message, and its contents remain a mystery to this day. However, some codebreakers say the reason for this is because it’s not a message at all, but a coded composition. (Makes sense!)

Cicada 3301

Not strictly a code, the mystery of Cicada 3301 instead involves a set of puzzles that have been unleashed upon the public once per year since 2012 (or, almost once per year: there was no puzzle in 2015). According to Cicada 3301, the reason for the puzzles—which heavily feature cryptography and computer programming—is to recruit codebreakers from the general public. Recruit them for what, exactly, is not clear.

For more codebreaking hijinks, check out our posts on the Kryptos Sculpture at the CIA, the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, and the ciphers of the Zodiac Killer.

Or, even better, get your very own brain in code-cracking mode at one of our four escape rooms by booking here: http://bookeo.com/krakit

Oak Island: A Good Old Canadian Treasure Hunt

Richard McCully, McCully Nova Scotia Archives, 2012-010/004

Sure, Canada may be known internationally as sort of a boring place—some people think not a lot goes on here beyond snowstorms and the occasional bear in a swimming pool. But did you know there’s a centuries-old Canadian mystery involving buried treasure, which is still yet to be solved?

We’re sure most people, like us here at Krakit Vancouver Escape Room, would agree that a mysterious treasure hunt is pretty exciting.

Back in the day, a small island just off the coast of Nova Scotia—Oak Island, to be exact—was a favourite stopover for pirates, including the famous Captain Kidd. On this island is something known as the “Money Pit,” first discovered by 18-year-old Daniel McGinnis in 1795. After gathering some friends to help him, McGinnis began to dig down into the strange-looking pit, discovering layers of flagstones and log platforms every 10 feet.

They also found a stone inscribed in a secret code. The most commonly held solution of this code reads: “Forty feet below two million pounds are buried.”

An island, pirates, a money pit, and a code telling of buried treasure? Yes, please.

Unsurprisingly, this discovery caught the attention of more than just McGinnis and his friends. Since their eighteenth-century excavation—during which they did not find the two million pounds—several attempts have been made to dig down deep enough to find the treasure.

However, as several unlucky treasure seekers have found out, the Money Pit is booby trapped, with channels of water directed into the pit, which flood the dig in order to keep out raiders. At least six people have been killed during attempts to excavate the Money Pit.

Today, Oak Island is privately owned, but thanks to the Oak Island Treasure Act of 2011 (yes, that’s a real legal act), treasure hunters are still allowed to access the island in pursuit of solving the mystery. If you want to give it a go, you’ll just need to apply for a treasure hunting licence from the Minister of Natural Resources.

But, beware, for many have failed before you.

If you’re the type who looks for much safer—but equally mysterious—excitement, book a round in one of Krakit’s Vancouver escape rooms here: http://bookeo.com/krakit.

Best Escape Room–Themed Game Shows on Television

It’s far from a secret that escape rooms are getting more and more popular and landing on more and more people’s lists of things to try. So it’s not really all that surprising that television networks are getting in on the escape room action. 

At last count, there are three currently airing TV shows that not just feature escape rooms—like Big Bang Theory, Conan, and Two Broke Girls have done—but completely focus on them. Like escape games themselves, this sort of puzzle-rific television has deeper roots.

To help escape game fans catch up on this essential TV viewing, we’ve rounded up the best escape room–themed TV out there.

1. The Crystal Maze (1990–95)

One cannot talk of today’s puzzle- and escape-themed TV shows without first mentioning The Crystal Maze. Hosted by Richard O’Brien (aka Riff Raff from Rocky Horror Picture Show), The Crystal Maze was one of the biggest and most beloved UK game shows ever to air.

Many Canadians may have missed out on the craze, so luckily there’s quite a few episodes on YouTube to catch you up. And, if you’re heading to London any time soon, it’s even coming back as a “live and immersive interactive experience” (aka, a sort of escape game).

2. Takeshi’s Castle (2002–04)

From the other side of the world—Japan—comes Takeshi’s Castle. The premise is that contestants are trying to make it through a trap-filled castle in order to reach the count, aka actor Takeshi Kitano. More physical than puzzley, Takeshi’s Castle is nevertheless a forebear to today’s escape room–themed television shows. Plus, it’s by far the zaniest—what else would we expect from Japanese TV?

3. Race to Escape (2015–)

Race to Escape is the brainchild of the folks at the Science Channel. Their inspiration comes directly from real-world escape games, with contestants trying to solve clues and bust out of the various themed rooms. Though perhaps not as exciting as actually playing a game yourself, it’s definitely some useful viewing for anyone preparing to take on the Asylum room at our Vancouver escape game—the hardest room we have.

4. Hellevator (2015–)

Another new addition to the genre is Game Show Network’s Hellevator—but this one comes with a twist. Like our own Krakit team, the people behind Hellevator know a good scare when they see one—or make one, rather. This is unsurprising, as the show’s hosts are Vancouver’s own Soska sisters, the directors behind American Mary.

Contestants of Hellevator are challenged to escape an abandoned warehouse, which just happens to have a haunted elevator. Unsurprisingly, screams abound.

5. Code (2016–)

This show has literally just hit the airwaves, broadcast by Korean network JTBC beginning this month. To spice up the format, Code has celebrities as contestants (it was only a matter of time!). The group starts eight floors underground, with the winners advancing one floor per week by solving puzzles and unlocking doors.

Try out the real thing at our Coquitlam escape room by booking here.