This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.
To this day, the Achievements on my Xbox gamercard that I’m most proud of are the 12 out of 12 I got in 1 vs. 100. They are, of course, impossible to attain now, and so I will always cherish them. But 1 vs. 100 was more than a licensed video game adaptation of a popular game show. For Xbox, it was an incredibly gutsy creative risk that actually worked, and I’d love to see the company get back to that kind of boldness again.
If you’re not familiar with the video game version of 1 vs. 100, it was an Xbox 360 game played live with actual Xbox players at certain times of the week when the show would be “on the air.” It was, quite literally, appointment gaming. The majority of players were in The Crowd, aka the audience. You’d get to play along trying to answer the quick-response trivia questions. Meanwhile, 100 randomly selected players would get to be in The Mob, who would compete for actual prizes — free Xbox Live Arcade games and/or Microsoft Points (for those too young to remember, these were virtual currency used to buy games on the Xbox Live Marketplace or on Xbox Live Arcade). Finally, there was The One, another randomly selected player who, if they could beat The Mob in the trivia challenge, could win even bigger amounts of cash (again, in the form of Microsoft Points).
I so vividly remember making the time to log on and play in the evenings the game was available, and trying to answer those trivia questions as quickly as possible. You could get on Party Chat with your friends and root for each other to make it into The Mob — or even The One. I never got to be The One, but I did make it into The Mob once. I fared well enough that I did win an honest-to-goodness prize: 80 Microsoft Points, which was the equivalent of $1. That’s a dollar more than any other game I’d ever played had given me!
Sadly, 1 vs. 100 didn’t last. It had a real-life host, a crew of game and infrastructure engineers that made the live events work, server costs on Xbox Live, and goodness knows what else. I understand why Microsoft killed it, but still don’t like it. 1 vs. 100 represented the kind of creative risk-taking that Xbox just doesn’t do anymore. I get the franchise-first focus the new regime is taking now — and I won’t lie, it’ll be nice to have Fallout games more than once every 15 years, as one example — but it sure would be cool to see Asha Sharma and Matt Booty take the creative swings that made Xbox beloved and successful in the Xbox 360 era in the first place.
The concept of a live interactive video game show had so much promise and potential. As 1 vs. 100 reigned for a brief time, I remember how we would openly daydreamed together in the Official Xbox Magazine office about what other game shows could be brought to life this way: The Price is Right, Press Your Luck, or even Jeopardy and/or Wheel of Fortune. None of it ever came to pass, of course, and none of it probably ever will. But 1 vs. 100 was real, it worked, it was glorious, and I miss it.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
