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.