Some old school Bother’s Bar style content tonight as the alternative is watching Handcuffed With Jonathan Ross and I can’t be bothered.
I’ve been ill the last few days and this popped up in my Youtube feed and I thought it was quite fun even if the fact nobody had ever really bought it up before probably tells its own story (a cursory search suggests 1989-1990 and that’s it). Everyone knows Blokken, the Flemish quiz based on Tetris that’s been running since 1994 and is still going, but what about a Dutch quiz based on Pac Man?
Labyrinth sees two couples gobble dots and race to get to the centre of a maze. The maze is split into various hallways linked by white doors. On their go a team moves their character any number of spaces in a direction (they can’t go back on themselves on the same go) earning 10 Guilders for each dot they eat. However if they want to go through a door they have to answer a question or do a challenge – these seem to have a lot of variety and are rather jolly, some quick general knowledge, some involving guests, film clips, some involving picture puzzles and at one point a don’t touch the wire game. Succeed, and they can continue. Get it wrong and control passes to their opponents. However, it also looks like some of these doors are locked/fake, and if you try and go through one your turn ends immediately. There seems to be some business if the two characters meet each other although I hadn’t grasped what. Presumably you win if you get to the middle, as both teams were trying to do that, but if time runs out than the team with the most money is the winner.
And they get to play an end game that might be familiar to fans of The Crystal Maze – a virtual labyrinth is imprinted on the floor that one half of the couple can see but the person walking the labyrinth cannot. They have to be carefully guided to the middle to meet the host within 2:30 for a prize, but any time the contestant touches one of the virtual walls they’re immediately assessed a time penalty.
The technology makes for a slightly strange bedfellow with the otherwise fairly jolly daytime quiz set-up, perhaps the Netherlands wasn’t ready for it at the time. All we’re saying as it was a John De Mol production, perhaps there’d be something in a reboot.
Based on dodgy auto-subtitles that are then dodgily auto-translated into English, I think meeting your opponent’s character functions like a door; it seemed the host said something like, “To pass you have to answer this question,” and gave them a trivia question which they got wrong.