A slap fight breaks out at the pool. Two cast members, no longer content to trade insults, swing at each other with the passion of a schoolyard fight. The camera screen bounces and the producer sprints over to capture footage.
It’s 1999 and players are producing the final season of the hit reality show, The Crusher House. That job includes choosing the cast, capturing the drama and, most importantly, satisfying the ever-changing audience to keep the show on the air. If you fail, you are canceled, in the most traditional sense of the word.
Until 2024, the role of “reality TV producer” was a largely undiscovered video game hero. The Crusher House puts an end to that trend. Part satire, part love letter to the indomitable industry of reality TV, the “thorst person shooter,” expected to be released later this year, is director Nicole He’s way of exploring the genre in a fun, yet critical way.
Crush house is also not the only reality TV-themed title that is making waves this week. content warninga co-op horror game where you film your friends to try to go viral, shut down 200,000 concurrent players after an April 1 launch.
“When people talk about reality TV – I say mostly men, the way men talk about reality TV – there’s not a whole-hearted endorsement of it,” he says. They watch it with their friends, or call it a ‘guilty pleasure’: something to look at ironically. “I think this is generally true of many (media-perceived) ‘women’s interests.’ It is not taken seriously, even though people are very critical of it.”
Reality TV has the potential to be a very fertile ground for game developers. As it stands, it’s a one-way medium: producers make it; audience is watching. But that audience also has a lot to do with it. On X, on message boards, in group chats. There are many theories about behind-the-scenes drama. Like titles Crush house can put players in the control room, they can tap into a group of gamers who want to work in a new way. Even something like content warningwhich isn’t necessarily based on reality TV, but still scratches the itch to capture reality to go viral, has proven that there is an appetite for this type of gameplay.
He was originally co-created Crush house like a Terraced house-inspired game: an ode to the 2015 Netflix show that a softer, low stakes version of Real world-style drama. No one got into fist fights, or had secret gossip stories, or affairs that became national scandals; they simply encountered the daily friction that comes from living with strangers. The first prototype for Crush house was tonally similar, laid-back people living in a house together and navigating how to interact with each other. “But we discovered that was boring,” he says.
content warning spoofs the subject in a similar way, taking on the feel of ghost hunter shows and influencer videos. The goal is to become famous on “SpookTube”: the better the images you create, the more money you make if you can survive. Players are armed with flashlights and a camera as they enter a world full of monsters to get what they need.