If you grew up in the US in the ’90s, chances are good that you dreamed of competing on Nickelodeon’s Legends of the Hidden Temple or Double Dare; immersive, challenge-filled competitions that tested your mental and physical skills and promised to give you eternal bragging rights or a face full of slime.
But if you grew up in the UK, there was one game show that captured the public’s imagination throughout the decade – The Crystal Maze, an immersive, interactive labyrinth filled with physical and mental challenges, spread across four distinct, themed “zones,” including one that recreated an Aztec jungle, and another that imagined a pristine, space-based future. Teams of six adults would compete to complete games and earn “time crystals” – each crystal giving them five seconds towards the time they’d spend in the final challenge, an elaborate “Crystal Dome,” where they’d have a chance to try and collect 100 gold tokens to win the cash prize, all while the tokens were blown chaotically around them by giant wind machines. Evoking the tension of an escape room, if contestants failed their puzzles or didn’t complete them within the allotted time limit, they could risk being locked in the room, reducing the team’s size and leaving that player unable to compete in the Crystal Dome.
Check out one of the new show’s most stressful challenges, “The Shrinking Room,” in the video below:
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The History of The Crystal Maze
The original UK show ran from 1990-1995 before being revived in 2016 (it continues to air across the pond), but surprisingly for such a high-concept game show, the format never made it Stateside, until now. Rob Bagshaw, Nickelodeon’s Executive Vice President of Unscripted Content, grew up in the UK with the Crystal Maze, and explained that the series felt ripe for a US adaptation after the network realized that their audience demographic seemed to be gravitating towards unscripted network TV shows with family appeal, like American Ninja Warrior, The Voice, America’s Got Talent, The Masked Singer, Dancing with the Stars, and Ellen’s Game of Games.
“[We] really felt that we should be doing our own version of shows that the kids love to watch, but with a Nickelodeon lens,” Bagshaw explained. “When I’m looking for a new big physical game show, we knew that we wanted to have families play this new show, whatever it might be. We were pitched a lot of shows that were pitting parents versus kids or family versus family. And it just didn’t feel quite right in the current climate. Family TV really is like feel-good television. So I thought, ‘What’s good family programming that is still right for Nickelodeon’s kids but everybody can watch? Whether it’s student television, whether it’s adults who don’t have kids that just love a good game…'”
Having watched the Crystal Maze as a teenager, it seemed like a “no-brainer” to Bagshaw, despite the fact that families traditionally haven’t played the game together. “I think with the Crystal Maze, one of the biggest feelings that you have as a viewer is, ‘I want to play that game. It looks like so much fun.’ And we want to give our kids the opportunity to actually interact and get involved,” he said.
“So to do that with a family of five as opposed to five contestants, and in the knowledge that had never been pitched in the U.S. before because it was seen as being a little bit too junior or a bit too family… now that’s exactly what we’re looking for,” Bagshaw pointed out. “Plus escape rooms are such a phenomena over the last few years. We know that the Crystal Maze has been around for a long time in the UK way before escape rooms were popular. But when you add the fun of a family getting to do this together with an existing format that we know works, and some really clever little games that build up to a much bigger game, then you put that into the States where escape rooms are cool now and a lot of kids love the escape room experience. It all adds up to being something that we wanted to own.”
The Crystal Maze is Escape Room Meets D&D
One of the thrills of the series is the immersive quality of the gameplay; the interactive, elaborate environments (Aztec Zone, Futuristic Zone, Eastern Zone, and Industrial Zone) evoke live-action roleplaying elements, the critical thinking of Dungeons and Dragons, and the ticking clock of an Escape Room. The US version is filmed on the show’s existing Bristol-based set in the UK as a way to utilize the meticulously crafted zones and puzzles.
“These zones are huge. Of course it’s a TV show so that there’s cameras – so there is a kind of a fourth wall that’s a camera. But I think when you’re a young kid and you’re put into that environment, you suspend your disbelief a little bit because it’s so beautifully made,” Bagshaw said. “It’s one of the reasons that we came to the UK to do it on the original set. Not least because it’s so expensive to build this and it’s here – but these guys really know what they’re doing. And over the last few years they’ve improved on the production values of the show every season.”
The team is guided through the maze by a “Maze Master” who explains the challenges – acting as an in-world guide who is tied to the story of the maze. Rocky Horror Picture Show creator Richard O’Brien served as the original UK host, followed by Ed Tudor-Pole (the latest UK iteration is hosted by Richard Ayoade), while the US version has enlisted comedian Adam Conover to lead these brave souls through the challenges that await them.
“I really am leaning into the fictional world of it. That’s the part that really gets me going. I love that this is not a traditional game show host, but that there’s a degree to which he fits this archetype of the trickster spirit. Is he a vampire? Who is he? Why is he here? Just the fact that he’s called the Maze Master,” Conover told IGN on set. “That’s why I play it as a very heightened theatrical way … At one point in one of the episodes I tell the kids, ‘I’m a thousand years old.’ That’s my approach, is to really lean into the idea that I’m not Adam Conover, the game show host; I’m Adam Conover, the Maze Master. I live in the maze. I designed all the games, the place is full of traps. I’ve brought you here to challenge you, et cetera… [he’s] 100% the dungeon master.”
Bringing Gaming to Life
Conover admitted that he’s always been a “huge game player,” from Dungeons and Dragons to Fire Emblem and Sekiro, “so I knew I really wanted to lean into that element of [the show]. I’ve really been a game-focused person my whole life and I’m very interested in game design. In the fictional world of the show, I designed all the games, which I didn’t in real life. But that’s what I say, ‘games of my own invention.’ That’s very much how I’m interfacing with them as, ‘what is it like to play this game?’ I’ll chat with the games crew between episodes going like, ‘I think what happened with this one was it wasn’t quite clear, they didn’t get it right away,’ just talking about how the players are taking in the game information.”
To Bagshaw’s point, Conover said the show tries to maintain the immersiveness of the world for the players – the kid contestants’ ages’ range from 9-18, while the parents in the team also seem to find themselves fully embracing the world of the show.
“There’s a much more fantastical element in it compared to most game shows. It feels a cohesive world. One of the things I like about it is that the Crystal Maze feels a real place,” he said. “It’s a TV set so we yell cut and you have to go around backstage and see it, but I think the kids really do get immersed in it because there’s no studio audience or anything. We’re in the room, in the Aztec Zone it’s around us, all four walls. There are camera men who are making sure they don’t shoot each other. But apart from that, we are there and we run up to the door with them and they do get a safety briefing, you don’t see that on camera, before we put them in the room. But when we say, ‘okay, you may now enter the game’ and they enter the room, that’s the first time they’re in the room. So they really are there and they really do take it seriously. Everybody really wants to win the games.”
Bagshaw revealed that designing and building the challenges takes about three months, “just from an idea to having it realized … So the original designer, the creator of the show who designed the sets is still with the show. And a lot of the producers and games designers have been with the show for many years. So they really know what works and they get excited every time. And even this experience doing it with kids, the game designers, the producers have all got more excited for their next season of the UK version … They’re still coming up with new ideas.”
Be honest, you kind of want to play, right?
The Crystal Maze premieres Friday, Jan. 24 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on Nickelodeon.
Source: IGN.com Nickelodeon's New Game Show is Escape Room Meets Dungeons and Dragons