The Running Man Busan experience center was a good 25 minutes cab ride away from Songdo Bay Station, but the cab we hailed was driven by what seemed to be a part-time F1 driver: he drove at high speed, weaved in an out of lanes, and applied sudden braking a few times. All of us were a little fearful of our chances of getting to our location in one piece!
Still, the taxi driver reached our destination in Seomyeon at 10:15AM: plenty early before the Samjung Tower that the Running Man Busan center is situated in was open at 11AM for business. So, we ducked into a fast food joint – hilariously named No Brand Burger – across the road for a quick lunch. The burgers were surprisingly pretty good and affordable with burger lunch sets averaging 5,000 to 6,000 KRW. Fries were of the MOS Burger type: thick. The wife also remarked at how fresh the shrimps tasted in the burger patties.
We’ve not watched the ‘Running Man’ TV show before, but the center is essentially an indoor theme park that comprises 25 mini-game stations. Some of the games are likely familiar from other experiences you might have already had before: e.g. memory games where you are shown 10 pairs of pictures for a short period and you have to correctly pair them up again, basketball, and also shooting mini-games. Others were physically demanding, including a pull-up station which requires players to hang for 20 seconds. I could have easily done that… 30 years ago!
The game process is pretty simple: upon registration, you’re each given a electronic silicon bracelet that tracks your game completion status, and the target is to get up to 100 points in 1 hour. There are three difficulty levels, with signage explaining that the ‘hard’ difficulty level is suitable for adults, and ‘medium’ for older kids. Er, that difficulty assignment is quite a bit too optimistic! We found ‘Easy’ a challenge already, and I honestly doubt that some of the mini-games can be realistically even completed by individuals on the hardest difficulty level.
Pro-Tip: firstly, unless you’re at a pretty good fitness level, and you’re also OK working up a sweat, just go for for the ‘Easy’ difficulty level. Secondly, some of the games honestly seemed impossible to complete by individual players: so we all ganged up as a family to complete them. E.g. there is a mini-game where you need to scream as loud as you can into a microphone, but none of us were individually racking up enough decibels to complete the challenge. So, we all squeezed into the shouting booth and screamed our lungs out LOL. Thanks to the daughter’s ability to shriek at terrifying volume, we completed that mini-game! Perhaps the real intent is that the mini-games are really for families to complete as a group activity. Lastly, the center is located on the 10th floor: we had to get Google to translate the floor signage to determine how far up we had to go in the mall to get to the center.
We had a lot of fun over the one hour we had to get as many points as possible. No surprises too: because the daughter got the highest number of points among the four of us – 86 – and I got the lowest at 14, because I decided quickly that I wasn’t going to try very hard to complete the mini-games.
Continued in the next post!