The origin of quests in Ukraine goes back to the year 2003 when the first project appeared - AutoQuest. It was widely popular among IT specialists (but not only for them) as a way to distract from the office or other daily routine, to get some new and exciting experience, to release tension, to challenge their brains and physical abilities, etc. At those times the teams received all the tasks (missions) at once, at the beginning of the game - on the paper sheets in envelopes. The passcodes had to be sent to the organizers as SMS. Hardcore times :)

Later, in 2007, the group of enthusiasts created another project - Quest.UA. First there were envelopes with the missions as well, later the project built their game engine and website. The games were held in many cities & towns of Ukraine. They were games for local players, or regional games, or even games for the teams from the whole Ukraine - the annual tournaments (Leagues) including a few games in some big cities + the largest 2-days game in Crimea (a peninsula in Ukraine currently occupied by russia).

There have been also other projects, like in Luhansk for a few years there was MachineQuest (later renamed to MQuest), with basically local teams participating but sometimes also with guest teams from the other regions. This one first used ICQ to give the missions to players and receive the passcodes from them, later they had a game system as well.

The project you're in now is QEng. (By the way, Quest.UA is now using this game engine as well).

The first game using this game engine was held in 2009 in Luhansk.

Since then, there have been more than three thousand games held in different cities & towns.

You can see a bit of statistics here.