From Immersive Entertainment to Creative Curation — The Professional Perspective of Dmytro Tkachenko

“A successful space is not one that has a modern renovation, designer furniture, or well-planned lighting. Of course, those things matter too, but they are secondary. More often, a person remembers something else: exactly how they felt in that space, where their eyes went first, what surprised them, and at what moment they wanted to stay longer or come back again.”

This is not just a quote. It is an important observation that marks the beginning of Dmytro Tkachenko’s professional approach.

How It All Began

Dmytro Tkachenko is an entrepreneur and creative producer working at the intersection of entertainment, design, restaurant business, and event decor. He is the owner of one of the largest and most technologically advanced escape room locations in the United States, launched under the 60out brand, as well as MOOD Restaurant and the floral studio FLORAL N5.

Dmytro was born in Dnipro and moved to the United States in 2014. One could say that his path in American business began with ready-made infrastructure or a large team, but that would not be true. In reality, it started back in Ukraine — with the entrepreneurial experience Dmytro had been building since his teenage years.

From the age of 16, Dmytro Tkachenko was involved in the retail food trade, and a little later, in the automobile business. An attentive reader may note that these fields are far removed from immersive entertainment or restaurant concepts — and they would be right. But it was there that the basic skills without which creative industries cannot function were formed: understanding the customer, managing processes, taking responsibility for the result, and quickly assessing what truly influences a person’s choice and what merely serves as background.

“A Dream Gives You Nothing If You Do Not Turn It Into Life”

After moving to Los Angeles, Dmytro found himself in an environment where entertainment had already ceased to be merely a way to have a good time, but had not yet fully acquired its modern form. The Ukrainian entrepreneur chose the most difficult path.

“I wanted to move away from the idea of an escape room as just a set of puzzles in a room. For me, it was important to elevate the product to the level of a complete experience — with dramaturgy, atmosphere, technological solutions, and the feeling that a person is not simply playing, but living through a story,” explains Dmytro Tkachenko.

In 2015, under the 60out brand, he launched one of the largest and most technologically advanced escape room locations in the United States — in the very heart of Los Angeles.

Today, the flagship location includes six themed spaces, among them one of the first VR rooms in the United States and the official Sony Pictures room “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” which deserves a separate story.

In 2018, Sony Pictures Entertainment approached 60out with a proposal to create a licensed product. For the brand, it was the first project of such scale, and Dmytro Tkachenko’s involvement proved decisive. He developed the concept and organized the production, skillfully combining commercial objectives, the requirements of a major studio, and the expectations of an audience that came not simply to “look at Jumanji” — they had already seen it — but to live their own adventure inside a familiar universe.

In 2017, Forbes included 60out in its ranking “Best Escape Rooms in Los Angeles by Category.” For the industry, this was confirmation that an escape room could be more than a niche form of entertainment; it could become a full-fledged format of immersive experience. For Tkachenko, it was proof that a strong concept works when technology, dramaturgy, design, and the business model operate in connection with one another instead of existing separately.

A Professional Laboratory

“My experience with escape rooms became a professional laboratory for me,” says Dmytro, recalling that period. “In this format, space cannot be passive. Every detail in it must work: an object should suggest, sound should guide attention, light should set the pace, and the sequence of actions should shape the participant’s emotional route. In a conventional interior, a person may remain an observer, but in an immersive game, they become part of the environment. For a creative producer, this means one thing: space must be designed not as a picture, but as a scenario.”

This idea became the foundation of Dmytro Tkachenko’s original methodology, “Quest in Balance: The Psychology of Game and Space.”

Tkachenko analyzes play as a psychological tool capable of activating attention, relieving tension, and encouraging cooperation. At the same time, his approach is not purely theoretical and is by no means limited to immersive entertainment.

Dmytro’s methodology combines scientific reflection with practical recommendations for everyone who creates interactive formats — designers, psychologists, educators, event organizers, and spatial curators.

An Interdisciplinary Approach

A little later, Dmytro transferred this approach into the restaurant sphere. Today, he owns and manages MOOD Restaurant — a modern breakfast and brunch venue at 8201 W 3rd Street, near Beverly Hills and The Grove. MOOD became a popular daytime restaurant by combining a stylish interior, signature coffee, and Californian-European cuisine.

But what matters is that, in Dmytro’s view, a restaurant is not only about the menu. It is a sequence of impressions: how a guest enters, where their gaze pauses, how the surrounding space sounds at that moment, how comfortable it is to sit, whether they want to photograph a detail, and whether a sense of appropriateness of the moment emerges.

Today, MOOD is developing an evening format focused on wine, craft cocktails, and contemporary cuisine — essentially creating a new scenario for the same location.

A similar logic can be seen in FLORAL N5, the family business Dmytro is developing together with his wife. This premium floral design and event decor studio promotes floristry not merely as decoration, but as a tool for creating atmosphere.

“Flowers, compositions, color, scale, and placement work as elements of the event’s visual dramaturgy,” the owner explains. Although, in this case, little explanation is needed: everything is felt from the first minutes of interacting with the space.

Dmytro Tkachenko’s professional perspective is interesting precisely because he does not divide immersive entertainment, restaurants, and decor into separate worlds. For him, they are different forms of the same task: to create an environment in which a person does not merely exist, but lives through a pleasant experience.

In this sense, his path from technological escape rooms to restaurant and exhibition projects looks not like a radical change of field, but like a consistent expansion of method.

“Space should speak to a person,” Dmytro Tkachenko believes. “But that conversation should not be loud. It should be precise and appropriate.”