Breakout Day

Breakout Day

Genre

Modern horror-comedy

Duration

3 hours

Number of participants

43

Credits

Morgan Davie, Zak Clark, Luke Walker, Jonathan Todd and Nate Cull

Breakout Day is a flagship theatre-style larp run in New Zealand. It was first run at KapCon X in 2001 and has been run repeatedly around New Zealand since then.

The game is a horror-comedy set in a corporate call-centre where no-one is what they seem.

Summary

It’s Breakout Day for the call centre staff of Zonix Inc, an evening devoted to training and teambuilding. But there's an efficiency expert on site, and rumours of layoffs are pending. Secrets abound, mysteries flourish, and it might be true that the night teams are full of vampires. And what on earth is the product you sell when you make these calls?

ZONIX INC is a multinational company, but a fairly small one. The company sells products to customers by means of cold calls from a call centre. In the call centre, employees use computers to manage their calls. They cannot make personal calls, and the computer places each call. As soon as a call is answered the computer provides a simple script, standard sales stuff but with a numerical code instead of a product name. All the customers on the database know who Zonix is and what the numbers refer to, because many of them agree to make a purchase. Few of them ask questions. No-one who works in the call centre knows what the products actually are. The call centre has a high employee turnover and is not a very happy place to work.

Employees are divided up into small teams named after cities in the USA. The teams work closely together and everyone in a team is familiar with their teammates. Zonix’s local branch is run by Leonard Bracklee, who seems a perfectly typical member of senior management. It was Bracklee who announced this paid, compulsory “breakout day”, probably to counter drooping morale.

Runs

• 20 January 2001, at KapCon X (Wellington, NZ)
• 20 February 2010, at Battlecry (Auckland, NZ) (with additional material by Anna Klein, Rowena Knill and Blair Purkiss)
• 29 November 2014, at Medusa (Hamilton, NZ)
• 19 November 2016, at Chimera (Auckland, NZ)