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The Crystal Maze
1990 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 6 seasons
Created by Jacques Antoine
The Crystal Maze was a British game show, produced by Chatsworth Television and shown on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom between 15 February 1990 and 10 August 1995. The series is set in "The Crystal Maze", which features four different "zones" set in various periods of time and space. A team of six contestants take part in a series of challenges in order to win "time crystals". Each crystal gives the team five seconds of time inside "The Crystal Dome", the centrepiece of the maze where the contestants take part in their final challenge.
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4 comments on Hacker News
What a reference. Incidentally, I started watching The Crystal Maze for the first time a few months ago after finding episodes of it on Archive.org. It's like watching adults running through Legends of The Hidden Temple, but with more urgency and charm. It's such a fun show
I’d watch Richard Ayoade in just about anything. Travel Man was absolutely brilliant. I keep trying to find a way to watch his Crystal Maze episodes — what little I’ve seen of them has been hilarious.
I've always thought the best way to explain this was by analogy with the '90s TV show "The Crystal Maze" [0].
Contestents are put in a dome filled with gold and silver tickets being blown around by fans. For every gold ticket they collect, they get a point. For every silver ticket, they lose a point. If they collect enough points, they win a prize.
Sorting through the team's collection of tickets and throwing away a silver ticket (minus a -1) is just as good as adding another gold ticket (+1).
Not sure the kids these days are down with the crystal maze though. More loss to them - Richard O'Brien was a national treasure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Maze
I never watched the TV show, but I played a Cyberdrome Crystal Maze as a child. This was an attraction that competed with bowling and laser tag that let you play a simplified version of the real Crystal Maze. It retrospect it wasn't very good, because too many of the games were just simple video games played with a trackball, but there were some with interesting physical interfaces, and I enjoyed it at the time.
More detailed description: https://web.archive.org/web/20050305152830/http://alumni.ox.compsoc.net/~dickson/GS/TCM/TCCM.html
I remember being impressed by "Sensor Cell". And some games had one player operating some interface while only the rest of the team could see what was going on, so they had to shout instructions (like the TV show "Knightmare"). I think that's good design.
I'd like to see something like this again, but I don't think it would be commercially viable without a popular license. Bowling and laser tag are both cheaper to build and have more replay value.