It’s Breakout Day for the call centre staff of Zonix Inc, an evening devoted to training and team building. But there’s an efficiency expert on site, and rumours of layoffs are rife. Secrets abound, mysteries flourish, and is it that the night teams are full of vampires? And what on earth is the product you sell when you make these calls? Breakout Day is horror-comedy set in the corporate world with a twist, where getting fired may be the least of your worries!

ZONIX INC is a multinational company based in Wellington, but a fairly small one. 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. 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. Zonix’s HQ is run by Lenora Bracklee, who seems a perfectly typical member of senior management. It was Bracklee who announced this paid, compulsory “breakout day”, probably to counter plummeting morale.

Originally written for and run at KapCon X, January 2001, by Morgan Davie, Bryan “Baz” Clark, Luke Walker, Jonathan Todd and Nate Cull. Additional material by Anna Klein, Rowena Knill and Blair Purkiss for Battlecry 2010. It has been further revamped and rewritten by Anna Klein to suit 2019 themes and play styles.

This game has now been cast.