Candy Crush addicts get new outlet as video game comes to TV
Candy Crush addicts, and you know who you are, put down your mobile device immediately. Then you can watch “Candy Crush,” the TV game show.
Expect breezy, energetic fun from the CBS series airing at 9 p.m. Sundays with host Mario Lopez, said executive producer Matt Kunitz, whose credits include “Wipeout.”
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 20-by-25 feet, require contestants to physically scramble as they compete for the weekly $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, natch, swiping squares a la the mobile game.
The stunt team that handled Lady Gaga’s rig during her airborne entrance to the Super Bowl show did the same for “Candy Crush,” with the same injury-free success, Kunitz and CBS said. Taping is completed.
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 the Australia’s Queensland University of Technology.
That was the world’s biggest, Kunitz said, until “Candy Crush” came along — and he points to a Guinness World Records citation attesting to that. Each monitor has 32 cameras to record the flurry of hand swipes.
Many video games have been translated to the movie screen, from “Super Mario Brothers” to “Tomb Raider,” but it’s rare for a game to come to TV, said Sebastian Knutsson, a King executive who helped develop Candy Crush.
The game’s simplicity “actually translates very well,” he said, and the audience’s perspective allows them to see opportunities more readily than the contestants who are close to the oversized boards.
How protective did he feel of his baby’s TV adaptation?
“It’s been very important to us that this stay true to the core of how you play the game, and that it wouldn’t break what we think of as the core rules of Candy Crush,” he said.