Every year the giants that are Red Bull create hundreds of fantastic competitive events. These span a plethora of activities, such as surfing, skating, the Flugtag and, a personal favourite, the Soap Box Race, to name a few. There are thousands of competitive events around the world, but Red Bull manage to bring something extra to theirs and create an infectious atmosphere that audiences are drawn into even if they're watching on a screen thousands of miles away.

This year Red Bull created the M1NDG4M3RS event 'Mission Enoch', which involved releasing some brain games / mental strategy puzzles online and ranking people as they played them. These were logic based visual puzzles that were very hands on and involved you creating trails from one point to another or moving obstacles to clear them. While gamers enjoyed taking on the challenges posed by these games, results from them were used to create a leaderboard and the top twenty players from each country were invited to their nearest LIVE qualifying event.

We were really intrigued about the whole premise of this event, but were even more excited when we were chosen to host both the UK qualifiers at our Breakout Manchester High Street centre on December 5th and Breakout Cardiff on December 7th. Red Bull fridges arrived on each of our premises (even Breakout Liverpool got to join the fun) in order to promote the event and each centre found different puzzles our customers had to solve to access a free drink before their games.

The night before our qualifiers, Red Bull arrived equipment in tow and spent the evening setting up the interactive 'cube' that would be the basis of the live event. After a few hours of watching mystery screens and wires disappearing from our reception into Reclassified in Manchester and Classified in Cardiff, the set up was done and we all got to go home and await the following day for the public to arrive. In the morning yet more pieces of equipment arrived; desks, laptops, fridges (FILLED with Red Bull for the gamers) and a huge team from the Red Bull Events division. We were ready to go.

Throughout the day gamers would arrive and try their hand at the qualifier. Some of these were Wild Card teams, simply turning up to have a go and, of course, the leaderboard gamers themselves. One by one, teams of four disappeared into our newly kitted out rooms and spent twenty minutes trying to take the puzzles down through its various stages. This conception was designed using logic, creativity, visual thinking and strategy, similar to the processed BReakout base our game play on when we're in design. @RedBullMindGame and@RedBullUK tweeted about the event as the day progressed and teams could also tweet in their various results and lay the gauntlet down without knowing how they themselves had yet ranked. The competition was fierce, the stakes were high, but the ultimte result was just fun, fun and fun.
At the end of the day the team to have succeeded in the quickest time were deemed the winners of that qualifier and got to progress to the next round.

The final stage of these qualifiers is in March next year and is a unique escape game tournament being held in BUDAPEST! The idea of a trip to Budapest is already amazing, but what got us giddy is how fitting it is as Hungary is where the concept of live escape games had its inception. This industry view Budapest as the spiritual home of what we do, so it feels so right tht this is where this event would end. There is a reason Red Bull are at the forefront of what they do.