Pixels and Puzzles: The Inside Scoop on building and running Retro Oasis Escape Rooms and Arcade.

The Beginning...

Let's give you a little background to start off with. We are Steve and Gina, the owners and operators of Retro Oasis. We are proud Gen Xers and come from a time before cell phones and streaming videos...back when you had to get up off the couch to change the channel on the TV to one of 3 local stations. Arcades were where you would go to hang out with your friends and play games and we didn't go home until we had to.

Steve's always been into gaming—old school style. He loves Atari, Sega, and NES, and he's got a soft spot for vintage arcade games. For the past decade (or more), he's been all about finding, fixing, and bringing these vintage machines back to life. They shouldn't just sit around collecting dust in a basement; they deserve to be shared with everyone, whether you're feeling nostalgic or trying them out for the first time! Now with 30+ working arcade machines and another dozen still needing repair, his collection is better and more diverse than ever before!

When it comes to escape rooms, our family gave our first one a shot at Confined Escape Rooms in Calgary, Alberta, Beta testing their Alice in Wonderland room. We were hooked right away! Our two boys loved the puzzles and challenges just as much as we did. At the time, we never thought that we would end up creating our own.

In the meantime, we spent every September and October creating walk-through haunted houses and yard haunts, adding some extra Halloween fun for the community. Our crowds grew year to year and our haunted house ended up being a destination for families to go to on Halloween night. As our crowds increased, so did our skills. We picked up some cool building and design tricks from other haunters and Gina really honed her techniques when it came to prop making.

And then in 2019, pre-Covid when the world was still "normal", we took our first family road trip to Victoria, BC and on our LAST DAY we discovered Quazar's arcade across from Bastian Square Market - that was the moment that Steve thought that maybe owning an arcade could actually work. After running some numbers, we were not convinced that an arcade alone could make enough money, and that was when we decided to bring in escape rooms and birthday parties.

Now we had the idea and the skills, next was finding a location.

Signing off...

Thanks for checking out our blog and please stay tuned for our continuing story. Comment below if our story is anything like yours!

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