Incredible work from FOTB Daniel Hurst (@danielmarkhurst), a complete collection of stats for the original run of The Cube, in time for the new series next week.
Points of note:
- Barrier is obviously the most used game, being played a whopping 21 times. It felt like a *lot* more.
- Meanwhile there are *forty* games that have only been played once, and a further 22 that have only been played twice. What a waste of effort!
- The Bell Curve of Boring. It’s something that affects most if not all money ladder shows and has done even since Millionaire, and the force is strong in this one – over two thirds of the outcomes are on the middle three rungs. As the results get more predictable, it becomes far less entertaining to watch – everyone stops in the same place. TV needs to get a lot smarter going forward to combat this.
Great work Daniel. The Million Pound Cube starts next Saturday at 9pm.
And that means I’m *likely* to move Bother’s Bar Game Night from 9pm to 10pm to avoid clashing such a momentous event. More details in a few days.
Meanwhile, I’m going to run another community game of Among Us tomorrow (Sunday) from 9pm – just turn up in the Discord voice chat and play. It won’t be recorded.
Finally, I’m opening up the Stool Pigeon on Monday for your Autumn/Winter industry goss. Exciting!
Maybe what they need to do is combine the money ladder format with the Pointless-style rolling jackpot. Like to use the original Cube ladder as an example, the values up to £20k would stay the same, then the £50k would start at that value and go up by £250 every player until someone wins it, the £100k would start at that and go up by £500 per player until it’s won, and the £250k would go up by £1k per player. You’d still have the money ladder, but the longer you go without a big winner the more tempting it becomes to play Just One More Game, and the big wins would be even more of an event. For example, Mo Farah was the 81st contestant, but it had been three contestants since someone took £50k and seventeen since someone took £100k. Under this system, his money ladder would’ve been 1k/2k/10k/20k/50750/108500/331k. (For contrast, the first celebrity on the list, Kelly Holmes at #29, would have had a tree of 1k/2k/10k/20k/51500/105k/279k.) Obviously the balance there might still need tweaking and it’d be a pain to change the Cube graphics/narration every episode but it’s a way to make the final rounds more tempting than they would otherwise be, without blowing up the prize to insane proportions like it’s a US network show run by executives who aren’t confident the format will work. Plus if you get a bunch of people taking the £50k, that’ll stay pretty close to its original value while the two higher values continue to rise.
This would be very difficult to do because they can cut the episodes from all the runs filmed. I’m also not sure the money will go up fast enough to change the decision all that much – if I wasn’t going to risk it for 50k, I’m probably not going to risk it for 51500 either – without it becoming wasted budget.
Agreed.
For me the 25k-100k jump in this revival is great – if there’s going to be a difficulty curve where the average game involves running out of lives on game 5 then having a huge uplift at that exact point creates a huge decision. I’d be very surprised if we even see the first £250k civilian game played even now it’s game 6, but the game 5 decision is going to produce some very good TV IMO.
What if they could ‘buy’ a safety net, either for a life or (later in the game) a reduction in the top prize
There was actually a “Bank” option in the pilot. They also had to play a game to earn their lives.
Must admit, really rather baffled by the 40 games that were only played once. Wonder why?
Maybe they took too long to set up and put away, but many of the games don’t even need any props so I have no idea.
I guess some were for later rounds so had less opportunity to be played.
Probably a lot of later-rounds games and a lot of games that debuted late in a series and evolved into new games the following series.
Stephen Lovelock tweets:
“There were actually a lot more games in existance that had Body VTs shot and ready to go. A lot of the time we would get them built and tested and then when they were put in they just didn’t feel right. A lot were games that felt quite random and not in the show’s spirit.”