You might be surprised how little playtesting goes into the popular Dropout game show
Game Changer has become a popular online TV show, probably because it’s fun to watch such masterfully controlled chaos. The series, which just aired its seventh season finale exclusively on Dropout, is all about forcing comedians to play different, often bizarre games, without any of the contestants being told in advance what the game is, how it works, or how you even win.
For example, in a recent episode, three comedians were placed in velcro body suits and then forced to spin a wheel covered in modifiers and rules that they had to apply to their bodies each time they spun the wheel. Stuff like “Always be smiling” or “Be rude.” As the rules piled up, the contestants began to turn on each other, and eventually it all resulted in the game’s host becoming a contestant. It’s weird, hilarious, and unlike anything else on TV. I wanted to learn more about how it all works, so I sat down with Dropout CEO and Game Changer host Sam Reich to talk about how he and his crew design multiple unique, funny, and strange games for their comedians to play each season, and all the work involved. I was shocked to learn that for most of Game Changer’s run, they’ve avoided playtesting and just hoped things would work out on the day.
“Yeah, people, I think, would be scandalized to know that [season seven is the first time] we did any game testing,” said Sam Reich during our Zoom interview. He laughed about it and explained that there were some exceptions, like an escape room episode in 2023, but for the most part, they historically haven’t done much playtesting at all, at least before the most recent season.
So if the show has mostly avoided playtesting, I asked Reich how they knew a game or an episode idea was ready for production, and once again I was surprised by how wild Game Changer’s production is. Reich told me, “I think there’s probably a few different answers to that question. One is we don’t. And we do it anyway.” We both laughed at the response.Â
“The second is that, particularly in earlier seasons of Game Changer, a lot of our games were loosely inspired by games that already exist, whether they’re improv games or other games. There’s a lot of ‘this-meets-that’ going on. And in that sense, we kind of know something like Like My Coffee is going to work, because it’s based on a popular improv game that we’re just doing our spin on.”
“The reason why game testing becomes more relevant now as the seasons climb up is because, by virtue of the show going on and by virtue of us backing ourselves into a corner where originality is more and more hard to come by, we can’t afford to be derivative anymore. Like we have to be more inventive,” explained Reich.Â
Another common problem that Reich and his team of talented writers and creators run into when coming up with ideas for new Game Changer episodes is making sure an idea is funny for more than a minute and has places to go throughout a full episode. A common pitch involves having the host and others speak in a foreign or gibberish language the comedians have to figure out. But while that sounds funny, Reich says it really has nowhere to go. The same is true of episode pitches built around lots of tiny games that aren’t connected thematically, including a pitch for a Conclave-like episode to replace Sam Reich with someone else.
[The Conclave idea] becomes a kind of ‘who can be the best game show host?’ competition,” explained Reich. “But, the games don’t relate to each other enough…there’s no sort of journey of competence or discovery there. This gets into game design wonkiness. I’m really big on game design and it’s rare these daysâ€|that I’ll get excited about a game that feels like it’s just a series of mini games.”
Reich’s thinking on this has come a long way since he started Game Changer back in 2019. As he told me when I asked if he realized he was going to have to become a full-time game designer to create a show like Game Changer:
“I loved games, but I wouldn’t say that I loved games, like, more than the average person. I wasn’t a big board gamer,” said Reich. “I’d probably done three escape rooms in my life. And thank God, because I think if I had been—if I had started Game Changer as the game designer I am today, I would have had far less room to grow into the show. Like in a way, I think my competence as a game designer has sort of grown as the show has grown and the budget has grown. So if you start Game Changer from the beginning, you can kind of watch my journey as a game designer, which I think is fun.”Â
Reich admitted to me that before starting Game Changer, he didn’t really know what the term “Balanced” meant in game design terms. Now, he consults often with table top, video game, and escape room designers as well as comedians to create the odd beast that is Game Changer. And while a lot of game design goes into the show, especially in its more recent seasons, it’s still a comedy series and the audience comes first, over rules, balance, or anything else.
“Ultimately, I will break any rule in service of the audience or in service of entertainment,” said Reich. “It’s like, even if this isn’t a very well-balanced game, or even if it is a little clunky or whatever it is, we’ll plow forward with it if we think it’s going to be very entertaining. We’ve totally taken out clunky moments [in post-production].”
And that clunky, sometimes messy, often chaotic nature of Game Changer is, according to Sam, one of the reasons it has connected with such a large audience. “I would almost equate it to, like, Saturday Night Live in a way where it’s like, the fact that it’s live will always make it feel a little dangerous,” said Reich. “And that’s part of the fun.”
“There is sort of an excitement to every episode of Game Changer, which is like the excitement of: Is this even going to work? And I think that some games sort of require that more than others,” said Reich. “Look, at the end of the day, we’re making a show and production schedules are what they are. And Game Changer always feels like a trust fall by the time we’re on the shoot day. [During the episode] Beat The Buzzer, I swear to you, five of those buzzers weren’t working in dress rehearsal. We’re hanging on for dear life to this show,” explained Reich with a chuckle and a big smile.Â
He did admit that he expects future episodes and seasons will feature a lot more playtesting as ideas get bigger and games get more complicated. But he also explained that he wants Game Changer to avoid the “sterile” and sometimes boring feel of popular big-budget game shows that have been on the air for decades, adding: Â “In a way our show feels sort of like, um, it’s always falling apart a little bit. Just a little bit, which is a part of the fun, you know?” So don’t worry that future seasons of the hit series will playtest the life out of everything and make sure the game is perfectly balanced. There will still be plenty of chaos in the future.
Game Changer’s season seven finale is now live on Dropout. You can watch all the past episodes of the show exclusively on Dropout.
