How Electric Gamebox turns your body into the joystick

Not long ago, a woman came up to Will Dean in King’s Road, Chelsea, and said: “Are you that famous entrepreneur?” Dean, known as the founder of Tough Mudder, replied that he was. She looked at him askance: “You don’t sound like the guy who makes the space rockets!”

Dean cheerfully admits – despite a passing resemblance – to not being Elon Musk. On the other hand, you are less likely to find yourself in a SpaceX than in an Electric Gamebox, which he does make.

Tough Mudder, which – for anyone who hasn’t tried it – is like a park run, except longer, tougher and a lot lot muddier. I’m not surprised to learn that he was brought up near Sherwood Forest. “My parents wouldn’t let me play Nintendo,” he says. “We were always out riding bikes and climbing trees.”

Following this rugged upbringing, post 9/11 found him at the Foreign Office, working on counter-terrorism. “It was entrepreneurial in a way,” says Dean. “There were new problems needing new solutions.” But after five years of pitting his wits against bad guys around the world, he came to the conclusion that he, “was not well suited to being a Whitehall bureaucrat”.

In 2009, he took an MBA at Harvard Business School. At the same time he had taken an interest in health and fitness and triathlons but the iron man routine seemed too easy to him. He wanted to make it harder. So he asked himself, “Could we do a military-style obstacle course for civilians?” His answer was Tough Mudder, which made its initial splash in 2010.

I’m not saying you have to be a masochist to do it but it probably helps – or at least you have to be as willing as a hippo to wallow in mud while also running over 10 miles and clambering over or under or through assorted obstacles and taking the occasional ice bath. “It’s all about the teamwork and camaraderie,” says Dean. “When you’ve completed it you can say you’ve done it with your friends. It’s team versus environment.”

Now some 20,000 people have the Tough Mudder logo tattooed on their bodies. It started in the US but Dean brought it over. He reckons his inspiration was, oddly enough, the internet. “Back when I was an undergraduate, the utopia of the internet was bringing everyone together.” Now, he reflects, we’re more connected than ever but also strangely disconnected. “Doing it in a group is better.”

The big difference that strikes me about Electric Gamebox is that there is absolutely no mud involved and kids can have a go too (Tough Mudder is adults only – and 50/50 men and women). Electric Gamebox takes a video game and makes it real. It’s like you’re inside a Gameboy. Three years ago Dean and his co-founder David Spindler built a prototype in a warehouse in Wood Green, north London, an interactive “escape room” in which the two of them could play Pong – one of the earliest computer games – on the walls.

They devised a few more games and opened in London before Christmas 2019 to tremendous acclaim. Then – when the pandemic kicked in – everything came to a grinding stop. Dean is philosophical about that prolonged caesura. “It gave us time to raise some more money, do more R & D and create more games.”

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Recruiting two likely young lads (my sons), I put the Electric Gamebox to the test at its site under the railways arches in Southwark, central London. When the voiceover mentioned a 1984 alien invasion I thought I was going to be playing Space Invaders but in fact we ended up playing dodgeball, shuffling cards, getting pursued by ghosts and scooting around a maze. Your body is, in effect, the joystick or mouse. You wear a very light headset, nothing like the bulky VR helmet, more like a croupier’s eyeshade.

Whole families can play together (including children on the autistic spectrum and/or with educational needs). It’s popular with stag and hen nights. There’s a dedicated corporate section with a transparent wall for spectators, in which workplace colleagues have the opportunity to do a bit of team bonding after the pandemic. Dean was particularly chuffed that the staff of the London HQ of Zoom had booked. One nice thing is that on weekday mornings they have schoolchildren playing active games to do with history, geography and mathematics, so there is an educational component, too. “We’re not curing cancer,” says Dean, “but we are making a difference in the world.” The key for him is bringing people together, with or without mud.

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There are Electric Gameboxes popping up in a former Debenhams in Wandsworth and they’re at Lakeside shopping centre, Essex. In the US it has already opened in Chicago, San Antonio, Washington DC, Salt Lake City, LA, Denver and Houston. They recently struck a deal with Brookfield which owns most of America’s malls. Their brief is to “fill the mall”. Electric Gamebox is to be found in Australia and Germany, too.

Spindler, who is also in charge of finance, says that they have plans in place to open about 100 sites here and in the US within a couple of years and in five years, 1,000. “This is the high street of the future,” he says. “So many industries are going through a transition. You’ve got gaming companies that are trying to become media companies and you’ve got Disneyland, which is experiential. We’re sitting in the middle.”

I wander over to the R&D offices down the street to inspect the work in progress. I am sworn to secrecy but the gist of current developments is that they are taking existing games or films – going into partnership with various companies – and adapting them, sometimes involving angry animals or sheepish ones. Dean came up with the first games, “but now we have much better people doing it”.

There are a few rules for developers. No zombies. No one gets their head chopped off. No gratuitous death or violence (even if you can get chomped by a Pac-Man-type character). And talking of feelgood, I reckon it can’t be too bad working at Electric Gamebox. It is one of those rare companies that offers unlimited holidays. There is no catch. “We don’t want to police you,” says Dean. “The responsibility is yours. We think it’s a bad idea if you never come in. I’m not bashing Zoom but it’s a substitute for the real thing.”

@andymartinink