There’s currently an orgy of archivery going on on Youtube and Buzzerblog’s Christian Carrion has been uploading lots of interesting things (I can’t keep up) – it’s their 24 Hour Gameshow Marathon for Child’s Play this weekend from 5pm UK Saturday incidentally – including this, the pilot for a US show called Make Your Move. It’s both pretty interesting, as in it’s another example of an unusual concept you probably wouldn’t expect from a 1960s US gameshow but still wrapped in all the traditional pageantry, but it’s also a very dull watch and the idea that you’d watch such a thing for 30 minutes a day seems absolutely crazy.
In it, four contestants attempt to move across a grid sight unseen, collect money and escape the other corner, but there are barriers in the way and they have to figure it all out in their heads. There’s a comedy element in the “we know things they don’t” mould, but really it’s an extremely dry game.
Edit: Oh it looks like the channel has been taken down, which is annoying. I’ll try and describe it for you: four people on swivel chairs labelled A-D at front of set, behind them a 7×7 grid, each player’s lettered counter starting in each corner. also light barriers form a sort of maze, with symmetry. In the middle a circle counter representing the cash. In turn, with their backs to the grid at all times, players call out a direction, if they can move in that direction they do, if not the host says you can’t move and the next person plays. If they get to the money in the middle, their counter starts flashing and the corner they need to escape from lights up. If you end a move next to an opposing counter you get another go, and if you move on to that player’s space they get eliminated, if you eliminate the person with money you inherit the money. It’s basically ten minutes of being being confused as to where they are, not understanding they can’t move because a barrier is in the way, then repeated twice with different starting players and barrier configs. Winning a game earns $200, although being first to the money wins $50.
You might be thinking “there could be quite a good Genius Game death match in this” – well you’re right! And there was, in the original at least, a game called Memory Maze – two contestants had to cross a 7×7 grid moving up to three squares at a time, but if they crossed one of the “invisible walls” an alarm would go off and they’d have to start again. Fair to suggest it was a much more successful version of the idea.
Edit: it’s from the mid-60s apparently, not 50s as I originally thought.
Amusingly enough, I just saw a life scale Memory Maze in the finals of Elite League 2, a Korean reality game show where contestants from top academic institutions are pitted against each other in team matches and individual eliminations. This being EL2, you weren’t straightforwardly given the maze of course.
Their idea of a fun game is to be given a corpus of sentences in Korean and a Rwandan dialect, but not a correspondence. Then a little while later, you have to select a person from a Guess Who panel based on Rwandan clues. The most amusing thing however is the audience on the Internet, nakedly thirsting over the person who can best solve sudoku blindfolded.