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December 17, 2025
The Moment That Defined Sherlocked: When a Talk Show Introduced Escape Rooms to the Netherlands
Before we dive into this little chapter of Sherlocked history, here’s a quick snapshot of what you’re about to read:
Quick Summary
- Sherlocked’s defining moment came when De Wereld Draait Door introduced escape rooms to over 1.2 million viewers, effectively launching the concept in the Netherlands.
- Before this moment, escape rooms were rising globally but were still largely unknown in the Netherlands.
- Sherlocked’s first room, The Architect, was crafted under the Beurs van Berlage, inspired by H.P. Berlage’s philosophy, symbols, and architectural secrets.
- In its first week of opening, Sherlocked was invited onto the talk show, where they demonstrated a miniature escape room live on air.
- Table guest Evi Hanssen played through the puzzle cabinet in five tense, funny minutes, giving the nation its first emotional experience of an escape room.
- The broadcast sparked immediate interest: bookings surged, other creators emerged, and the Dutch escape room industry began to flourish.
- Victor reflects that this moment helped give the Netherlands its global reputation for world-class escape rooms.
- Sherlocked grew from The Architect into The Vault, The Alchemist, City Games, and Home Mysteries, all tracing their lineage back to that pivotal TV appearance.
- The blog concludes that the talk-show moment ignited both Sherlocked’s rise and a nationwide movement, and invites readers to book one of their experiences today.
Before escape rooms became a staple in Amsterdam, before the queues, the hype, the delighted “you have to try this”, the very idea was still finding its way across the world. In the early history of escape rooms, the concept drifted from Japan to Hungary to the U.S., a playful secret whispered from city to city: a room you enter voluntarily… simply to feel more alive.
By the early 2010s, this strange new form of storytelling was blooming internationally, but in the Netherlands it remained beautifully unknown. And then, in a single, unforgettable moment, a million people watched the penny drop.
This is the story of how one TV appearance didn’t just introduce Sherlocked to the country, but it helped ignite an entire Dutch industry.
Table of Contents
How It All Began: A Room Under the Beurs van Berlage
Long before the talk show lights, Sherlocked’s first creation was being shaped under the warm brick arches of the Beurs van Berlage. The Architect, our ode to the mind and mystery of H.P. Berlage, was born out of a question we couldn’t shake:
- What if you could step into the secret world of a real architect?
- What if the building itself held puzzles in its bones?
We dove into the archives, studied Berlage’s handwriting, symbols, patterns, even the way he hid meaning inside ornamentation. His philosophy, from truth in materials to harmony in structure, became the backbone of our puzzle design. The room was not a collection of riddles but a living narrative. Every drawer, every shadow, every piece of crafted wood was part of the story.
When Victor looks back, that period was full of the quiet magic that always accompanies a project before the world knows its name. A handful of makers in a basement, sketching, crafting, rewriting, fueled by the conviction that this was something new, something that needed to exist.
And then, in the very first week of opening, the unexpected happened.
“We Introduced It to the Country.” - The Night Everything Changed
Victor recalls it instantly when asked about the moment that defined Sherlocked:
“One that comes up first is the first week that we were open, we also appeared on a talk show called The World Keeps Turning… I think it was like 1.2 million people watched it.”
The show, De Wereld Draait Door, was at its peak. A cultural powerhouse. If you were on it, the whole country knew.
Suddenly there we were, sitting at the table next to Alexander Klöpping, sharing a concept that barely existed in Dutch vocabulary: escape room.
The host introduced it with wonder:
“San Francisco, Hong Kong, London, Cape Town, New York, Budapest, Berlin… Just a few cities that have already been captivated by the mystery of escape rooms. They also suddenly appeared in the Netherlands this summer.”
To make the idea tangible, we built a miniature escape room inside a cabinet for table lady Evi Hanssen. She slipped inside with a nervous laugh:
“I’m Belgian, you know. I’m not very smart, you know… I seem smart because of my accent, but that’s just a façade.”
The door closed. The clock started ticking.
Five minutes to solve a mystery on live television.
The audience watched her trace cities on a postcard map: “London, Amsterdam, Paris”, discover hidden numbers, unlock boxes, melt ice to retrieve a key (“I’ll throw that, I think, in the hot water, okay?”), and finally wrestle a long test-tube with a magnet.
The tension built beautifully. She was sweating, swearing, laughing, pleading for extra time:
“Please buy an extra minute! Give me bonus time.”
And in those five minutes, something remarkable happened.
People understood escape rooms. Not theoretically, but emotionally.
They felt the wonder of the reveal, the rush of the unlock, the shared cheering around the table. They saw adults play with total sincerity, total immersion. And the country fell in love.
As Victor described:
“We demonstrated the principle of escape rooms… we introduced it to the country of the Netherlands. Because of the massive reach of that program… it made a massive difference in how embraced the format is here.”
That night lit a spark. Within days, bookings soared, other creators showed up, and a movement quietly began.
And that is why, when we look at the global landscape today, with the Netherlands often praised for its astonishing density of world-class escape rooms, we still feel some tenderness for that first cabinet-sized puzzle on national TV.
As Victor put it:
“I think it plays a part… of why the Netherlands has its pole position in the industry worldwide.”
From One Room to a World of Mystery
The Architect was our beginning: quiet, historical, conspiratorial.
But soon we felt the itch to build something bolder, faster, louder. Something that pulsed.
So we created The Vault: a cinematic heist set in a real 1950s bank vault. Players step into the shoes of master thieves and race against security systems, alarms, and time itself. Where The Architect whispers in riddles;, The Vault answers with alarms and adrenaline.
And after that came our most ambitious creation yet: The Alchemist, our love letter to magic, science, and the strange beauty of collaboration. A technological and artistic feat years in the making, woven together by dozens of makers, dramaturgs, and designers. A world where rooms shift, potions glow, and players find themselves at the crossroads of physics and myth.
As our worlds expanded, so did our reach.
We stepped outside our rooms and into the heart of the city with our City Games, transforming Amsterdam’s architecture and history into clues.
When the world went quiet, we carried our puzzles to where people were with our Home Mysteries: The Vandermist Trilogy, hands-on detective adventures to gather around, and Ada’s Study, a phone-sized escape game that lets players slip into a miniature world of mystery anytime, anywhere.
And every one of these worlds, big or small, loud or intimate, can trace its family tree back to that one moment on national television, when a simple wooden cabinet and a brave volunteer revealed to 1.2 million people that wonder could be built… and entered.
A Moment, a Movement, and What Comes Next
Looking back, it still feels a little surreal. One talk-show segment. One brave volunteer. Five minutes of joyful chaos. And suddenly, escape rooms weren’t just a curiosity, they were a cultural force.
For us, that moment didn’t define Sherlocked alone. It helped define an entire industry in the Netherlands.
And we’re still building, still experimenting, still chasing that delicious feeling when a group opens a door and gasps, “Wait… that was real?”
If you’d like to step into the mystery yourself, whether the quiet brilliance of The Architect, the high-adrenaline cinematic thrill of The Vault, or the magical science of The Alchemist, we’ll be here, crafting worlds beneath the surface of Amsterdam.
Book now and let’s make some magic. ✨
