Back in 2008 Microsoft announced a rather original and unusual idea, a service they were calling Xbox LIVE PrimeTime. PrimeTime was planned to present a new line of Xbox LIVE Arcade games based around real-world gameshows, that players could compete in online and earn real prizes through. It was a very exciting concept, but sadly it never really got off of the ground. The first and only title for the service was Microsoft’s 1 vs. 100, an adaptation of the Endemol-produced TV gameshow of the same name, released in late 2009. The game ran for just two “seasons” before being cancelled and was officially pronounced dead in mid-2010. The game was far from perfect, but like many unique games there were interesting things to be found in it, both where it succeeded and where it failed.

For those who didn’t play it, the basics of 1 vs. 100 were simple; players were given questions with three possible answers and had to answer correctly. The sooner they answered, the more points they’d get. Most players found themselves playing as part of “The Crowd”, but the central focus of the game was “The One”, a player who was attempting to correctly answer questions against a group of one hundred others known as “The Mob”. If one of The Mob answered wrongly, they’d be eliminated. If The One could answer all of their questions correctly, while eliminating The Mob, they would win. If The One answered a question incorrectly, The Mob would win.

Bridging the Gap

With 1 vs. 100, Microsoft managed to tap into the important idea that any trivia game can potentially bridge the gap between the “casual” and the “core”. The gameplay of most video games is centred around the mastery of skills and systems which are specific to video games. Activities like moving and firing in an FPS or deploying and controlling your units in an RTS are not something we learn about in the outside world and are able to bring into video games, they’re something that can only be learned by being involved in games in the first place, and thus create a significant barrier to entry for those who don’t play or have no desire to play games. The problems get even worse when the game you’re trying to create attempts to have those inexperienced with the medium compete with those who are experienced, while still maintaining a sense of fairness.

A trivia game like 1 vs. 100 can solve these problems through one simple solution; the central skill it requires players to utilise is not one that is learned solely from video games, it instead asks people to use knowledge of the outside world and directly apply it to the game. With a game like 1 vs. 100 you didn’t need to know basic combat strategies or have a feel for running and shooting your way around a map, you just needed to know some things about the world we live in and be able to press one of three buttons to answer a question. The appeal of the trivia game is also palpable and immediately identifiable to those inexperienced with games, and yet the format allows for both traditional and casual players to still be equally challenged by play. In this way trivia games have a perhaps undervalued ability to level the playing field between experienced gamers and newbies, and provide something that can be engaging, fair, and immediately understandable for both kinds of player.

Time Slots

While there have been plenty of gameshow-themed games before and since 1 vs. 100, the way in which they’re played has generally been indistinguishable from any other trivia game or mini-game collection. 1 vs. 100 made the effort to present an experience that was truer to an actual gameshow. Unfortunately, one of the more paradoxical things about the game was that a lot of its interesting and exciting aspects were also tied to its fundamental flaws, and were likely what lead to its eventual downfall.

For example, one of the most notable things about 1 vs. 100 was that just like a conventional television programme, if you wanted to play you had to tune in at the designated times to catch a game. As I recall, games were generally half an hour or an hour long and were usually scheduled for the evenings. If the games ran from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. and you weren’t there between those times then there was no 1 vs. 100 for you that day. This system seems reminiscent of a time that’s only relatively recently disappeared, where if you wanted to see a TV programme you had to be there for the moment, and if you weren’t you’d missed your chance. We are some of the last people who are going to remember a time like this.

This age of TV was exciting because it made the programmes feel like something special and it built a sense of anticipation. This experience is something that’s never really been part of the video game world due to their nature, and with the increasing abundance of huge online movie libraries and on-demand TV, exclusive windows in which entertainment can be consumed have rapidly disappeared. Overall, this is of course a very good thing, but I can’t help but feel we are losing something in the extinction of entertainment products as these special events. 1 vs. 100 managed to do something rather wonderful by embracing this idea of time slots, and bringing with them the excitement of the old-school TV programme.

This wasn’t without a price though. With the current expectation that we can easily load up our entertainment whenever we want, especially when it comes to video games, access to 1 vs. 100 stood out as restrictive and inconvenient. It was pretty ballsy to tell even people more dedicated to games that they could only play within the scheduled time periods, but the fact they told the casual crowd (who need by far the most coercing to play something new) that for the large majority of the day their game would be entirely unusable, seems downright crazy in retrospect.

The Scale

While the times at which the game could be played were limited, the scale it was played on certainly wasn’t. Even forgetting The Crowd for a minute, The One facing The Mob was a great concept within itself. In other games one player facing one hundred others may have been given a separate gameplay task or a much easier version of the same task. 1 vs. 100 implemented a few Who Wants to Be a Millionaire-style lifelines for The One, but beyond that it really was a case of a single person having to beat one hundred other players at the same game. It was a daunting task for them to be set in the first place and only made it more impressive when they won.

Beyond those one hundred and one players, Crowds were composed of hundreds or even thousands of others who had a chance of making it into The Mob if they could answer enough questions correctly. In any other competitive multiplayer game there are only so many players in a match and so many people you can attack at once. When you do attack enemies, the conflicts usually consist of a series of smaller actions like repositioning, moving, firing, etc. In 1 vs. 100 there was a charming simplicity to the competition, because all players did in any round was make one button press, but that button press was in direct conflict with hundreds or thousands of others.

If we’re to be honest about it though, while this looks great when analysed from an external perspective, giving a true sense of its scale to players was not something 1 vs. 100 was that good at. Players were never given a lot of information on how close they were to entering The Mob or how well they were doing compared to the rest of The Crowd. That in itself felt like a huge waste of potential, and left the game without the strong sense of purpose it might have otherwise had. What may have been even more detrimental is that with such a small number of positions available in The Mob, most players didn’t ever get to be part of those one hundred and one contestants, let alone get to be The One. For those who did, it was most likely a fleeting moment. You’ve got a bit of a problem when the very focal point of your game is something your players are never going to experience.

Payouts and Hosts

If you could make it to become The One or part of The Mob, there was the chance to win actual prizes. If you triumphed as The One you’d earn a large haul of Microsoft Points, or if you won as part of The Mob, you’d collect a share of that prize and an Xbox LIVE Arcade game. Due to the aforementioned reasons, this was something rather unlikely to happen to any one player, but it’s not often you see a video game where winning could actually earn you substantial, tangible rewards outside of the game itself. The game would have better matched the pitch laid out for PrimeTime to begin with if the average player had a reasonable chance to walk away with some sort of prize, but then Microsoft never were too generous when it came to their Xbox 360 products.

Some of the games in 1 vs. 100 were also commentated over by a live host. There was only so much a host could really say about any one match, but it was cool to see it implemented none the less, and does make you think about how such a thing could be employed in other multiplayer-focused games today. The game even included live interviews with various personalities from the world of video games. While a trivia video game wasn’t the best platform for these interviews, and it probably should have been questioned whether it was wise to conduct interviews only relevant to those pretty heavily into video games in a game meant for a broader audience, it was refreshing to see something that ambitious. Unfortunately, for the UK and Ireland at least there was no live host during the second season, leading to a series of surreal sequences where the game would cut away to a CGI avatar silently mouthing words.

In the end it’s not hard to see how 1 vs. 100 may have run itself into the ground; the windows in which you could play it were limited, it was riddled with adverts, there wasn’t enough feedback on certain gameplay aspects, and players rarely ever experienced the true focus of the game, but it was still something special and it’s a game I really miss. It was an attempt at delivering a proper gameshow experience, made all the more delightful by framing its games as special events, and it did a number of clever and unique things which set it apart from just about every other game out there. On top of this, as a simple trivia game it was just plain fun; I can only hope that one day we’ll see something like 1 vs. 100 make a return. Thanks for reading.