By the pool, a slap fight breaks out. No longer content with trading insults, the two actors beat each other up with the intensity of a schoolyard brawl. The camera screen jumps and the producer rushes to snap the shot.
It’s 1999 and the contestants are working on the latest season of the hit reality show, smash house. The job involves casting the cast, capturing the plot, and most importantly satisfying an ever-changing audience to keep the show on the air. In the most traditional sense, fail and you’re canceled.
Until 2024, the role of “reality TV producer” was a largely unexplored video game hero. smash house ended this trend. Part satire, part love letter to the indomitable reality TV industry, Thirsty Man Shooter, due out later this year, is director Ni Ho’s way of exploring the genre in a fun and critical way.
smash house It’s not the only reality show making waves, either this week. content warningA cooperative horror game about shooting your friends and trying to go viral attracted more than 200,000 simultaneous players after launching on April Fools’ Day.
“When people talk about reality TV — and I would say especially men, the way men talk about reality TV — there’s not a wholehearted endorsement of it,” he said. They watch it with their girlfriends, or call it a guilty pleasure: ironic viewing. “I think for a lot of people that’s generally true [media-considered] “Women’s interests.” Even though people look at this stuff very critically, it’s not taken seriously. “
Reality TV has the potential to be fertile ground for game developers. As it stands, it’s a one-way medium: producers make; The audience watches. But these audiences also interact with it—a lot. On X, on message boards, in group chats. Pet theories abound about the behind-the-scenes drama.If the title is like smash house Players can be placed in control rooms where they can attract players eager to engage in new ways.even like content warningNot based on a reality show per se, but still capturing the desire to capture reality and go viral, it’s already proven there’s a hunger for this kind of gameplay.
He initially co-conceived the smash house as a terrace house– Inspired Games – an ode to the 2015 Netflix show that offers a gentler, lower-stakes version real world– style drama. There were no fights, secret gossip, or things becoming national scandals; they just encountered the daily friction that comes with living with strangers.The first prototype is smash house Similar Tones: Let people live together in a house and explore how to get along. “But we found it boring,” he said.
content warning spoofs its themes in a similar way, adopting the feel of ghost hunter shows and influencer videos. The goal is to get famous on “SpookTube” – the better shots you capture, the more money you make if you survive. Players enter a world full of monsters with a flashlight and camera to get what they need.