An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the name of Doc Preuss.

You and 10 other people are locked in a room. Words, numbers and pictures are scrawled on the walls, objects scattered. A disembodied voice announces there are 60 minutes remaining to escape. A frenzy sets in as people ransack the room, looking for clues leading to the key that will open the door that just locked behind you. Before you know it, the voice blares out: 10 minutes have passed ...

Part game, part theater, part team-building exercise, escape rooms are taking off around the world. And the growth has been explosive. The number of permanent rooms world-wide has gone from zero at the outset of 2010 to at least 2,800 today, according to MarketWatch calculations based on rooms registered to escape-room directories.

Nate Martin, co-founder and CEO of Puzzle Break, the first escape-room facility to open in the Pacific Northwest, invested $7,000 of his own money in 2013 to get the business off the ground. He recouped his initial investment within a month. Since then, the business has been profitable every month and, conservatively, is on track to gross over $600,000 in 2015. “Some months are record-breakingly fantastic,” he says. “Some are only very good.”

In Dallas, Andrew McJannett-Smith and his wife, Traci, run Escape Expert, which opened in February 2015. “We started with negative income to now bringing in $70,000 a month,” he says.

The concept was born in Japan, spread through Asia, then arrived in the U.S. in 2012. As of Friday, the site Escape Room Directory listed 367 rooms at 138 facilities in the U.S., with more registering on that site every week. Business appears to be booming: At popular locations, tickets sell out weeks in advance.

And it is now making its way into mainstream entertainment: The studios behind Tom Cruise’s coming “Mission: Impossible” film erected escape rooms at AMC Theaters AMC, -6.17% this month for fans to “become IMF agents.” Free tickets for those rooms sold out in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles in less than 24 hours. Later this month on July 25, the Science Channel is debuting an escape-room-themed game show called “Race to Escape.”

But many room owners and game enthusiasts are skeptical that the explosive growth can continue. And finding the key to success in this weird, new world may be the trickiest puzzle of all.

* * *

… 20 minutes have passed, and, at this point, you’re likely knee-deep in puzzles, exchanging adrenaline-fueled shrieks with your room compatriots ...

In most escape rooms, clues lead to a physical key. But the story of why you’re in the room — you’re trapped in a mysterious lab! You’re seeking lost treasure! You’re stuck in a New York City–sized apartment! — and the way in which action unfolds differs by room and location.

“People are looking for a new type of experience,” says Doc Preuss, a producer for Real Escape Games, which has rooms in San Francisco, New York and, soon, Los Angeles. It is run by SCRAP Entertainment Inc., which opened the first escape-game event in Japan in 2007. “It’s cerebral, [and] it’s exciting. The way we design [the games, there are these emotional highs. It’s like a roller coaster. It’s addicting.”

Most games cost $25 to $30 per person for a one-hour game, and typically allow 10 to 12 players at a time. For owners, the chief costs are payroll and rent, plus the one-time expense of building the room out. Some rooms comprise little more than a table with pens and paper. Others involve elaborate sets and technical wizardry. For instance, The Exit Game in Los Angeles has players navigating a laser room.

SCRAP is known for keeping costs low, eschewing traditional marketing costs in favor of organic growth and renting the smallest room possible to ensure tickets sell out. “They feel they have failed if they are not 100% booked out,” says Dan Egnor, an escape-game enthusiast and creator of the Escape Room Directory.

So far, the strategy appears to be paying off: SCRAP says revenues grew by 800% in its first year in the U.S. — a staggering figure even in light of today’s fast growth. The company has been profitable and seen revenue grow every year since then.

SCRAP now has more than 25 rooms across 12 cities in Japan and is opening its second San Francisco location with Escape From the Jail on Polk Street in August.

“They were the only game in town for years,” says Egnor. “Right now, a lot of local people equate the escape room with SCRAP.”

* * *

… 10 minutes remaining. You get the sense that you are on the verge of finishing the puzzle ...

Escape-room challenges may be as tricky for owners as for players. The business model presents a host of hurdles: Each room can only be played once, real estate can be pricey, and rooms get beat up as hundreds of players tear through them each week in search of clues.

“You’ve got dozens of people in there every day manipulating every single object in the room, under the pressure of a deadline,” says Puzzle Break’s Martin.

Players in the heat of the moment have tried to climb walls and rip apart furniture. At SCRAP’s Escape From the Time Travel Lab, an employee admitted he once saw a team attempt to wrap duct tape around his colleague in a failed attempt at finding the key.

“It’s difficult to design an experience that looks amazing and can withstand the crushing churn of folks everyday,” says Martin. “We’ve had to be creative with our material design.”

Martin’s business has thrived in Seattle, where it was the first game on the scene, but he shut down a room in San Francisco after finding it difficult to gain a foothold.

“In Seattle, we are understood to be far and away the best escape room. People know us. In San Francisco, they didn’t.”

Today the escape-room landscape is mostly dominated by smaller businesses, each operating one or a handful of rooms in a single city or region, many of them run by enthusiasts who saw the trend taking off and decided to strike out on their own, just as Martin did.

Businesses borrow ideas from each other liberally as U.S. intellectual-property laws do not cover game design. According to Scott Nicholson, a professor in game design at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, who surveyed the operators of 175 escape-room facilities, this is actually spurring a rapid evolution in the industry, as room designers iterate on each other’s ideas in a quest to one-up each other.

Until now, increasing competition has been good for everyone: for businesses, which benefit as people discover one escape room and then embark on a search of more, and for the players, who are being offered more selection and better game design. But this is shifting quickly.

“There is this tipping point that we’re arriving at right now, where competition is no longer 100% a good thing,” says Martin. As unique as the escape-room category is today, he says, it won’t be immune to “Disneyfication,” in which a few major players emerge with high production values but an inclination toward “safe design decisions.”

“You’re going to start to see smaller operators go out of business and the larger side making more revenue,” Martin says. He also expects to see larger operations eating up smaller ones through acquisitions. Some are moving into the franchise model, notably Real Escape Adventures of Trapped in a Room with a Zombie fame.

But this isn’t all bad for the industry, he says. Smaller operations will be pushed harder than ever to produce cutting-edge experiences for superfans. “You never like to see people struggle in their business,” says Martin. “But as a player of these things, as an ‘enjoyer’ of experiences, bigger, badder, better is always a good thing.”

* * *

… 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… time’s up! Once out of the room, your game master analyzes how you performed: One team member’s crucial actions saved you 10 minutes, but a lapse in communication left a key clue unsolved. It occurs to you that this is the most fun you’ve ever had in a performance review.

According to Nicholson’s survey, the average success rate for escape rooms is 41%, though rooms vary widely in difficulty. His research also shows 90% of facilities recognize the importance of debriefing after the game, for players to get a sense of how they performed in relation to other groups, and to generate what’s known as “froth” — shared discussion of the activity after it is over.

Signs outside Escape from the Time Travel Lab in San Francisco explain rules — no Internet, no climbing on furniture — as well as the success rate. So far, 70 of 1,485 teams have successfully escaped. Jess Marmor Shaw, MarketWatch

The debriefing is also critical to transforming escape games from a fun Saturday-evening activity with friends into a team-building exercise that can be sold to corporate clients, a crucial revenue stream. For many escape rooms, corporate clients make up 50% of all business.

Corporate teams can fill escape rooms on weekdays, when rooms might otherwise sit empty. Larger corporations can become repeat clients, bringing new departments every week. And they can be sold elaborate packages and extras, with snacks for employees and meeting space provided adjacent to the escape room.

Companies can’t seem to get enough of the escape room as a team-building exercise. Egnor says it is easy to see the appeal: “A lot of classic off-sites are very tame and not challenging, like cheese tasting. The more challenging ones often had a physical component. … This is a very inclusive off-site. It’s not paintball.”

At Escape Expert in Dallas, the corporate package includes video footage of employees playing the game for “review at a later stage.”

McJannett-Smith says that Dallas–Fort Worth airport brought in a group of employees, and that he was told someone at the airport was looking to study the CCTV footage for help with a vice president position that was up for grabs.

McJanett-Smith says he was told they wanted “to find out which ones were the natural leaders, which ones thought out of the box, which ones were the peacocks and pretended to be the ones who did stuff.”

An airport spokesperson says that the Escape Expert experience was used as a team-building exercise, but nothing more than that.

Beyond team building, game owners are finding other unique venues and forms to expand into. Puzzle Break opened a room on a cruise ship. SCRAP has put on massive games in huge venues like San Francisco’s AT&T Park, where they had 6,000 players, each paying $33 to $38, come through in a day.

SCRAP is also aiming to expand more into licensed games to, for instance, create an escape room based on a popular film in partnership with a movie studio, much like AMC’s “Mission: Impossible” promotion.

Puzzle Break’s Martin was a videogame product manager before forging into the escape-room business. He traded virtual for real life, and he mostly feels it was a trade up.

“The part I like the most about Puzzle Break as opposed to videogames is that at any point I can pop into a room game and watch people having an amazing time doing something I’ve created. You can’t do that with a videogame.”

It is an enormously satisfying thing, to see people enjoying your work live, he says. That is, “until we have to replace the 17 door-knob handles.”