Starting this Friday, May 8th, Canadians will be among the first to test out a new hybrid experience, one that combines the NBC television game show “1 vs. 100” with elements of an online video game. A new season of two-hour episodes will air each Friday and Saturday night at 10 pm EST, but not through traditional broadcast networks. Instead Microsoft will use their internet-based Xbox Live network, the one they use for connecting game experiences, to send the show to televisions in living rooms across Canada. Performer Chris Cashman will be replacing Bob Saget as host of the series, not in a broadcast studio before a live audience, but in a virtual one where players sitting at home take on the role of contestants and studio audience. As before there are commercials and prizes, the difference is that the audience at home can pick up their video game controllers and join in.

 

Here’s how it works. Xbox 360 owners with a Gold Xbox Live membership can “tune in” this Friday at 10 pm EST to the “1 vs. 100” experience for free. They’ll need to connect in advance to first download and install the game’s software, from there the menu screen will display a countdown timer to warn you when you are about to go live. At 10 pm EST the game will start and select one player to take on the role of the main contestant, the “1”, and one hundred other players to take on the role of the show’s mob, the “100”. Remaining players can stay connected to watch the show take place as part of the virtual studio audience. Everyone is represented in the game by their own Avatar, a customizable character that players can create in their Xbox 360 dashboard and that appear in the virtual studio, cheering and dancing throughout the show,

Connected with a headset, host Chris Cashman sits in a recording booth in Redmond, Washington, talking and bantering with the players live. He will call on players by their Gamertags and even exchange voice mails and instant messages with them, sharing the details he learns with the rest of the players. As contestants succeed in the game, they will have the chance to win Microsoft Points to purchase online games, movie rentals, etc. or “credits” that will be used towards winning a large cash prize through a sweepstakes held later.

The game show itself plays out the same as before. The main contestant has to take on a mob of one hundred additional contestants in order to earn prizes. Each round a trivia question is asked and all 101 players must key in an answer. All contestants who give a wrong answer must leave. If the main contestant loses, the game is over and the prizes are split amongst the remaining members of the mob.

If the contestant manages to survive long enough to dwindle the mob down in size, he/she will be given the choice to play on or “cash-out” with their existing earnings. A contestant that can manage to out-survive all one hundred members of the mob will win the grand prize. In the TV show that’s one million dollars, here in the video game it’s 10,000 MS points.

Conversely, if you’re one of the mob and you manage to survive after forty of the 100 contestants are eliminated, you’ll win a free Xbox Live arcade game (worth 400 MS points).

Each episode lasts for two hours, enough time to play five or six games, after which players will have to wait until the next broadcast of the show to try again. Microsoft plans to run the interactive game show in seasons of thirteen weeks and in three main markets – Canada/US, Ireland/UK, and France/Germany with each market getting its own live host, local advertising, and prizes. Should the “1 vs. 100” experience prove to be a hit, Microsoft will adapt other successful television game shows to their interactive model.

Officially the show is set to launch “this spring”, but Microsoft has chosen Canada as a test market and so this Friday’s episode will be the first is a series of beta or “test pilot” episodes that will run each weekend until May 24th. As with other betas in the world of consumer electronics, the feedback from this test experience will go towards identifying issues and problems to fix.

Yesterday I took part in a preview episode that was held for the press where we each singed in with an avatar designed to look like ourselves. As multiple choice trivia questions appeared on the screen, we used the colour-coded buttons on our controllers to answer them, and then, in between rounds used those same controls to make our characters cheer, fist pump, or point enthusiastically in joy or back-slap, punch, or perform a thumbs-down in displeasure. Canadian questions were mixed in with the general knowledge trivia to challenge our knowledge of curling, Parliament, and hockey.

Reacting to the results, host Chris Cashman would chime in with zingers about our inability to answer Canadian questions and make cracks about players “chillaxing in a snuggie” at home. At regular intervals the show paused for a commercial break where we were treated to video ads for the Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch and Windows Vista. The ads played in a small window in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, leaving enough room for players to access game menus to check their stats and scores.

Host Chris Cashman hosts the experience remotely from Redmond, Washington. 

With all the music and presentation cues of the original series, the game successfully emulates the tension and excitement of a television game show. Players who are selected to be “1” are really placed on a stage for all to see, a very different feeling that being just one person of many running around on a battlefield. Questions slip by so fast that it’s easy to accidentally get one wrong and you’ll hate yourself for being eliminated while others go on to collect prizes. The feeling that there are stakes at risk is very palpable.

What is missing is the pace from the television series, the ability for host Bob Saget to take control of the flow of the game, to slow it down or even pause it at dramatic moments, just as most game shows do today, to really sweat the main contestant and drive up the tension of each decision. In the game version, host Chris Cashman has no control, in one case the game cut him off completely during one of his presentations, forcing him to move on. Players can also create their own “Party” sessions, connecting their headsets together to allow them to chat and banter amongst themselves during the game which should only make it even harder for the host to command attention and maintain the reins.

The difference the Xbox 360 offers is a sense of reputation. Every player in the game has a profile, a gamerscore, and even a career score that accumulates from game to game. Unlike in television, you can come back to play again and again, and in the Xbox Live network your performance is on record for others to see. In between broadcasts, Microsoft will be hosting a smaller version of the game called “1 vs. 100 Extended” that will take place on Tuesday nights. These quick trivia nights will serve as practice rounds for players to work on their trivia skills before the big night and will give Microsoft the chance to use themed questions such as “Battle of the Sexes”, “Player Written Questions” and “Super Hard” trivia.

The preview episode I played was fun and enough to show that Microsoft can combine some of the best elements of both worlds, television game shows and online trivia games, but not enough to create something that is wholly new to regular audiences of either. In the end it feels exactly like a game show and so should have the same appeal to the same audiences, for the same reasons.