Chris Pitt – Puzzle Inventor (April 2023)
Designing the Revomaze ® Blue (1) back in 2008, I had no idea the puzzle would make people feel so good about themselves. A recent study (2) shows, puzzles can relax and reward the player, and our puzzle did that in a big way.
The feeling of progress, coupled with multiple “Aha!” moments, builds to a dramatic climax by opening and finally revealing the maze that has been successfully navigated. The reason for our success is not seeing the solution, but instead forcing you to feel your way around a maze on a cylinder, along with the inclusion of traps that reset the puzzle (a unique feature only on our puzzles).
It is a great feeling to solve one of the best puzzles in the world, so why change it?
Firstly, we wanted to include a larger audience of mechanical, jigsaw, and logic puzzlers. Second, with a premium product like the Revomaze ®, a natural decline happens when the wow factor is reduced as more and more solves the puzzle.
A new approach to give them vision will provide a different challenge but seeing the whole maze would remove the thrill of solving blind. We wanted to find a way to keep this feature and found one by slicing up the maze into rings that needed to be combined to recreate the correct maze.
By not seeing the maze, we discovered just how much of a challenge this would be. But to have the same wow factor, we needed many different mazes and a theme to join them together. VAULTMAZE™ was the result, and due to only having one machine combined with the exceptional precision engineering required, we must place a limit of 200 players at this time, as we have to set a realistic target for ourselves. However, this doesn't mean VAULTMAZE is limited at all, and we would love to expand this number later.
Finding all the mazes gives the same feeling of progress and then having a unique logical way to use this to solve the VAULT CODE to open the vault. This will reveal a special reward that takes the user back to the original solution.
The result allows you to solve all the mazes twice, once using sight and the second using the same blind formula on which we have built our success over the years, by putting the maze back into a Revomaze ® sleeve.
Our long-term goal is to create an original Revomaze ® everyone can enjoy solving, but we also wanted to evolve the product to a new market to find what people like best.
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5zQPPCszqE (please note, the video contains a spoiler of Blue maze)
Revomaze ® and the R ® logo are Registered Trademarks of Ashton Pitt Ltd © 2008-2023. All rights reserved.
VAULTMAZE™ is a Trademark of Ashton Pitt Ltd © 2008-2023. All rights reserved.
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