Candy Crush addicts, put down your mobile device immediately. Then you can watch Candy Crush, the TV game show.
Expect breezy, energetic fun from the CBS series debuting on Sunday with host Mario Lopez, said executive producer Matt Kunitz, whose credits include Wipeout and Fear Factor.
Nearly 200 billion game rounds were played in the Candy Crush Saga last year, according to its maker, King.
To entice people to watch it on TV, Candy Crush supersizes the visuals and the action. Two specially designed video walls, each made up of 55 monitors and measuring more than 6m by 7.5m require contestants to physically scramble as they compete for the weekly US$100,000 prize.
One wall is placed horizontally on the stage floor, the other is perpendicular to it and players in safety harnesses scoot across and up and down the screens. They make candy matches by swiping squares in the same way as the mobile game.
When the show was pitched to the network, Kunitz said they asked CBS executives to imagine “if you were playing on your phone and got sucked through and were in a Candy Crush arena.”
The video walls were key, he said.
Their surfaces needed to withstand running, jumping and sliding and respond only to the swipe of contestants’ hands.
Producers ended up going with a company, MultiTaction, that had created a 44-monitor wall for Australia’s Queensland University of Technology.
That was the world’s biggest, Kunitz said, until Candy Crush came along, adding that a Guinness World Records citation attests to that.
Each monitor has 32 cameras to record the flurry of hand swipes.
The game’s simplicity “actually translates very well” to TV, he said.
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