Anna Kidd has left hundreds of game show contestants with the bitter taste of defeat in their mouths. As a task producer for The Crystal Maze, it’s her job to conjure up games that walk the thin line between infuriating and impossible. And for the latest season of the show, which airs tonight at 9pm on Channel 4, she redesigned almost every one from the ground up.
After considering reprising some of the games from the first season, the show's producers opted for a total refresh for season two, Kidd says. Only one, which features the comedian Adam Buxton as a disembodied head in a jar, peppering contestants with riddles, has been carried over from the last season. “Part of what makes a good game is when it plays out in different ways – when somebody smashes it but somebody else falls arse over tit,” she says. “Once it's played out in a number of ways, I wonder what else you can get from it.” Last season – the first of the rebooted Crystal Maze – attracted criticism for repeating games too often; this season, a game will appear on average just four times across the entire run, compared to six appearances per game last season.
Often, a game starts out as only the kernel of an idea, Kidd says. Someone might want to build a game that involves a fiery skull, for example, or that changes course halfway through. The task is to turn those embryonic ideas into full games. “We’ll sit there and talk for hours about the minutiae of how each game would work,” she says.
For season two, the initial longlist ran to some 150 games. Kidd then presented these to a team of producers who narrowed them down to 70 contenders. At that stage, the design team gets involved in thinking about how the games will work on film. “Sometimes that will end up nixing a game – if the design team says that it’s possible to make it work but not in the way that we hoped,” says Kidd.
One of the games originally slated for season one fell at exactly this hurdle. The idea was to have a gutter that ran around all four walls of the game area, with gaps in it. Contestants would have to slot replacement parts into the gaps in order to guide a crystal along the length of the gutter without it falling to the ground. This, it turned out, was nearly impossible to represent on camera. “Filming that is just really hard – we couldn't find a way to make it feel big enough and work,” says Kidd.
But now the game is back in a new guise. Called One Shot, the gutter is arranged on one wall in front of the contestant. They must hit buttons on a console to fill in gaps in the gutter in the correct order. The buttons, however, don’t clearly match up with each of the sections, and contestants only get one try at the task (although they can practice as many times as they like).
Although all but one of the games have changed, the core Crystal Maze formula stays the same for season two, says Kidd, who has also designed games for Big Brother, The Cube and The Generation Game. The show is split into four zones: Aztec, Medieval, Future and Industrial, and there are also four game types: skill, physical, mental and mystery. For season two, 70 games were eventually whittled down to a final 32 – two of each game type for each zone.
For the majority of games, it’s clear which zone they’ll end up in, Kidd says, but a few can be easily shuffled between them. One game in the Medieval zone this season tasks contestants with setting up a series of mirrors to bounce a chink of light onto a target. If you swapped the light with a laser beam, it’d be easy enough to place this game in the Future zone, Kidd says, but that’s unusual. Most games are destined for a particular zone right from their inception.
Although the core formula is the same, season two will ramp up the theatricality and physicality, says Neale Simpson, the show’s executive producer – expect fire, sparks and a touch more slapstick.
Once each game has been designed in a computer simulation and then re-created in the 30,000 square foot studio in Bristol, it’s time to bring in the mega-fans. “We get a load of people who have never seen the game before to test it,” says Kidd. She uses this testing session to set the time limit for each game, timing each tester to pick a limit that is challenging but not quite impossible.
Watching people try the games can also lead to further tweaks. Producers might notice more than one person struggling with the same phrase in a word game, and decide to swap it out for something different, says Simpson. Each game is tested by 10-12 outsiders with no knowledge of the game, as well as members of the production staff who will be more familiar with its mechanics.
Even when it comes to the same game, people’s performance can vary widely. In one game, contestants sit on a rope swing suspended from the ceiling and have to push a number of buttons placed on the walls within ten seconds. Many contestants spend the three minutes allotted for the task hopelessly bouncing off the walls. But one completed it after just a couple of goes, with more than four seconds to spare.
For Kidd, this unpredictability is what makes The Crystal Maze such compulsive viewing. What appears to be a simple task can easily quickly go awry – just like she planned. “We've discovered that as soon as you put cameras and lights, and Richard Ayoade into the mix, then with the pressures of live television you end up with people finding things quite hard.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
