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Over by the pool, a slap fight breaks out. Two cast members, no longer content to trade insults, are flailing at each other with the fervor of a schoolyard fight. Camera screen bouncing, the producer sprints over to get footage.
It’s 1999, and players are producing the latest season of the hot reality show, The Crush House. That job includes picking the cast, capturing the drama, and above all satisfying the ever-changing audience to keep the show on the air. Fail, and you’re canceled, in the most traditional sense of the word.
Until 2024, the role of “reality TV producer” was a largely unexplored video game hero. The Crush House ends that trend. Part satire, part love letter to the indomitable industry of reality TV, the “thirst person shooter,” which is expected to launch 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-tinged title to make waves this week. Content Warning, a co-op horror game about filming your friends to try and go viral, pulled in more than 200,000 concurrent players after an April Fools’ Day launch.
“When people talk about reality TV—I will say men in particular, the way men talk about reality TV—there isn't this full-hearted endorsement of it,” He says. They watch it with their girlfriends, or call it a guilty pleasure: something to watch ironically. “I think this is true in general for a lot of [media-considered] ‘women’s interests.’ It’s not taken seriously, even though people engage with this stuff very critically.”
Reality TV has the potential to be very fertile ground for game developers. As it stands, it's a one-way medium: Producers make it; audiences watch. But those audiences also interact with it—a lot. On X, on message boards, in group chats. Pet theories about behind-the-scenes drama abound. If titles like Crush House can put players in the control room, they could tap into a vein of gamers eager to engage in a new way. Even something like Content Warning, which isn't based on reality TV per se, but still scratches the itch of capturing reality to go viral, has proven there's a hunger for this kind of gameplay.
He originally co-conceived of Crush House as a Terrace House–inspired game—an ode to the 2015 Netflix show that offered a softer, low-stakes version of Real World–style drama. Nobody got into fist fights, or had secret gossip accounts, or affairs that became nationwide scandals; they just ran into the everyday friction that comes from living with strangers. The first prototype for Crush House was tonally similar: chill people living in a house together and navigating how to get along. “But we discovered that was boring,” He says.
Content Warning spoofs its subject matter in a similar way, adopting the feel of ghost hunter shows and influencer videos. The goal is to get famous on “SpookTube”—the better the footage you capture, the more money you make, if you can survive. Players are armed with flashlights and a camera as they enter a monster-filled world to get what they need.
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At the onset, players of Crush House are presented with 12 cast members they can choose from to fill a four-person house any way they see fit. “When you think of a reality TV video game, I think the instinct is to go for a dating sim, play a contestant,” He says. Platforms like Netflix have capitalized on the success of their reality shows like Too Hot to Handle by making mobile games with this premise. But He was more interested in the production side, something that would stoke the mystery of what’s really going on behind the show’s scenes.
“As a fan of reality TV, when you’re watching this stuff, what’s really interesting is the meta conversation and analysis about what’s real and what’s fake,” He says. Sometimes cast members on TV feel like they’re just trying to launch influencer careers, or they accuse producers of giving them a “villain edit” on the show, she says. “The producers must have done something here, but you never really know what actually happened,” He adds.
Players embody this every time they choose what to shoot, and what to ignore. It’s a ratings game, one where it’s also important to select the right commercials to run with the show, which in turn helps players buy more props. During the demo He showed me, the ad that played over and over was a close-up of one big, quaking ass—and a familiar one at that. He says that the team asked other game devs, including Baby Steps creator Ape Out, to make fake ads referencing their games that they could put into Crush House.
“It's not like making video games is done in a vacuum,” He says. “We make them in a community, and it's fun to have something that feels perfect in our game.”
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The chaos that ensues is procedurally generated, meaning even if a player keeps putting the same lineup in the house, different problems may emerge. As players decide who to cast, each character’s personality flaws are the highlight—“because that’s critical for reality TV,” He says. They date, befriend one another, and, of course, fight. Cast members also have their own agendas and may approach the player/producer with special requests. (Strictly against the rules to engage with the talent, the game reminds you.)
In one instance during the demo, cast member Charlie—a girl-next-door type who is more chaste than a few of the others—specifically requests that the player cut down on any shots of the cast’s ass. “This is actually an incredibly difficult task to achieve because there’s always butts all the time,” He says. So much so that players can specifically cater to an audience known as the “butt guys,” who hope for everyone to be cheeked up as much as possible. “The audiences are, frankly, unhinged,” she says, referencing the viewers programmed into Crush House.
These audiences include a wide variety of people that players need to figure out: traditional Crush House fans, landscape lovers, voyeurs who will fawn over a toilet, film students who want to see a good shot. (“‘Butt guys’ is just funny to me,” He says.) To be successful in growing their audience, players have to figure out how to combo—capture footage that can please a bunch of fans at once.
Whatever the subject, and however it’s shot, there’s one reality TV rule to remember: Get it on camera.
