Meet E.R.N.I.E.
For EY
Escape Room in the Sky
Ernst & Young (EY) is one of the world’s largest professional services networks and a member of the Big Four accounting firms, with headquarters in London and offices across the globe.
EY Canada challenged us to design a competitive, team-building escape room experience on the 31st floor of the EY Tower in downtown Toronto. The month-long activation would be experienced by staff from both Toronto and across North America.
This project posed a unique set of design and operational challenges. Constructing a compelling, immersive environment inside a modern office tower—dominated by glass and natural light—required creative solutions to establish the right mood and atmosphere. Additionally, we were responsible for recruiting and training a team to run the experience smoothly over the course of a month.
Note: the sound is a little hot on this video, turn down your volume.
Approach
We developed ERNIE—an interactive, obelisk-like A.I. designed to optimize company processes, aligning with EY’s real-world focus on efficiency and innovation. Staff were invited to participate in the final testing phase of ERNIE’s implementation.
Naturally, things didn’t go quite as planned. ERNIE quickly grew tired of being tested and began turning the tables on players. The experience blended live actors as game masters with behind-the-scenes technicians, immersive sound and lighting design, a custom-built VR challenge, and a commanding central prop: ERNIE herself — with mechanical components for the final puzzle.
This was one of our most complex and rewarding projects. There’s nothing quite like having an ever-present, snarky A.I. guiding, challenging, and occasionally mocking players depending on the context (this was just before the advent of ChatGPT, so it was still novel).
Results
Over 1,000 EY staff took on the challenge, competing for the best completion times and providing overwhelmingly positive feedback. Despite the logistical complexity of constructing a fully immersive, temporary escape room inside an office tower (at the top of it, no less), the project was delivered on time and on budget—an accomplishment as precise as EY might expect.
To this day we still can’t believe EY let us suggest they would let AI run amok in their beautiful office tower through a game inspired loosely by The Towering Inferno meets The Wizard of Oz.
Turns out accountants have a great sense of humour!