A Rare In-Depth Crystal Maze Interview With Ed Tudor-Pole

Second maze master Ed Tudor-Pole is usually reluctant to talk about his time on the show, preferring to talk about his music rather than his film and TV career. A few interviews I've read and listened to over the years have all featured mentions of The Crystal Maze being moved on from very quickly. One that particularly sticks out in my memory is the one from Demon FM from 2009 which features Ed's responses to a series of Crystal Maze questions being "You've got to bear in mind I did it for 5 weeks about 12 years ago and I've only seen one and a half episodes so I'm not an expert on it" and also "Frankly I wasn't sent to this world to present gameshows". 

Interview With Games Designer David J. Bodycombe

In another entry in our series of interviews, Phil Newton-England talked to a fellow designer of games for the original series in David J Bodycombe

Firstly, tell us a bit about yourself.

I grew up in the North-East of England. I lived in Darlington and studied maths at Durham University. At the end of the academic year, it was normal for there to be quite a lot of dead time waiting for exam results to come out, in addition to the usual summer holiday lull. So, there was often lots of time to do something creative. I wrote a few puzzle books which were published by a company called Robinson Publishing (now 'Constable Robinson') who were able to use my Crystal Maze credits as part of the blurb. After university, I lived a double life for a while. By day, I was a management consultant. By night, I was still writing puzzles for various books and magazines. After three years, I was earning enough to work in games and puzzles full-time, and have been working as a freelance TV producer, games consultant and question writer/editor ever since. 

 When did you first become interested in designing games/puzzles? 

An Interview with Executive Producer of The Crystal Maze, Neale Simpson!

Earlier this year, myself & team superfans were once again invited to take part in helping The Crystal Maze as Games Testers.

This time round, we had a more intense experience as Camera Blocking was taking place, so this meant all the cameras were cranking & rolling, and we were doing all the new entry methods into the maze for Aztec, Industrial & Future.

We also got to hang out briefly in the new zone, Eastern, and bumped into James Dillon who designed this wonderful masterpiece of a zone. Whilst we did not get to play any of the games in Eastern, we had a full day (9 Hours!) inside the wonderful world of the Crystal Maze.

Following our 9 hour marathon of gaming the maze, we went home almost euphoric and feeling like we left a dream state. We had a lot of questions, and Executive Producer Neale Simpson was kind enough to go through the interrogation we lined up for him.

Neale, firstly please let me re-iterate the thanks from all of us on Team Superfans and The Crystal Maze Fansite Blog for allowing us to enter the Maze again this year, and for your time in answering our questions about the 3^rd season of filming!

An absolute pleasure on all fronts!

Interview with the games designer of the new West End Live Experience Maze - Charlie Wheeler

Designing games for the Crystal Maze must be a very rewarding process, and while Anna Kidd designs fantastic games for the new TV Series, today we interview Charlie Wheeler, who is only 22 years old and was not even born when the Crystal Maze originally aired. Yet the Maze still captivated him enough to design all 32 games in the brand new West End London Live Experience maze.

When did you start coming up with ideas for the West End Maze games? Did you design games for the previous experiences? How many have you devised?

I guess "to devise" is not really a singular task as so many elements make a Crystal Maze game a reality. The whole design and development process is quite huge and involves loads of people! The rough process of getting a game from start to finish began with the Crystal Maze directors, we would talk (about a year ago now) about ideas, often having an old favourite from the TV show or maybe someone might have seen something out and about and thought ‘that would make a cracking game!’, and from this the directors’ treatments would be created. Each treatment would be totally different: some just a sting of an idea or a sketch or for others much more of a solid vision for a game. This is where I joined the ‘production line’ as it were, attaching this idea to reality (and the space it would soon inhabit) and turning an idea or a brief into a full size digital 3D representation of how the game and room would turn out like, fully dressed and decorated and lit as it would turn out in the end. This - I guess fairly unique - prototyping method really helped everyone get a feel for just how immersive each idea could become. From me the designs were passed onto the production team or the games manufacturers to make the physical products. In terms of numbers, there were 32 games used but almost double that number designed.