This month’s Cubed! feature continues with the Noxsquad Gameshow, which is returning to this year’s convention! I spoke to Dwittyy, a game designer for RASA Studios (described on their website as “resident puzzle man and qualified deep thinker”) about what the gameshow is, how it came to be, and what you can look forward to at this year’s Cubed!
2024 will be the Noxsquad Gameshow’s fifth year at Cubed!, and from the looks and sounds of it is shaping up to be yet another brilliant show. Even readers who have never watched the gameshow before may spot something familiar in its title – because yes, “Nox” is short for Noxcrew. So how did the Noxsquad Gameshow come about in the first place?
“That is a very long story that started around 10 years ago, when the Noxcrew were releasing Season 1 of their gameshow,” Dwittyy tells me. “When that was in its peak, there was a community forming around it. We had a community server that the Noxcrew set up for us, where originally we just started making a Mario Party map with our own mini minigames in it, and that inevitably became making our own bigger minigames, and then became making recreations of the Noxcrew Gameshow games because we wanted to play them. So we made things like Bathtime, Dodgebolt, Factory – which are Noxcrew Gameshow classics. At some point we had enough for a full dome of eight games, some of which being recreations, some of which being our own games. We said to the Noxcrew, ‘hey do you want to come on and play and we’ll do a live show using our version’ and they said yeah, so we did our own show.”
Whilst the Noxsquad Gameshow originated as a fan-made version of the Noxcrew Gameshow, it’s evolved a lot since then. “The Noxcrew is amazing, that’s a given, but at the time we were a lot closer to them because we’d hang out in their socials, in their community rooms,” Dwittyy says. “We became the Noxsquad as fans of the Noxcrew, and then a few years later we changed our name to become RASA Studios to become a bit more independent. Of course, we’re still inspired by the Noxcrew – very much so.”
The Noxsquad Gameshow remains a RASA staple, but nowadays RASA also make maps for the Minecraft Marketplace – their latest being Heist-Meisters, a procedurally generated heist map in which players must infiltrate the Claremont National Museum to steal an artefact. They’ve also done various skits, videos, and charity streams, both in Minecraft and real life. “Every year we have a big summer meetup, and on one of those we hosted our own version of Taskmaster,” Dwittyy says, “and five of us including myself were made fools of by attempting to do the simplest of tasks.”
So what’s in store for this year’s show at Cubed? “The games are much more arcade-y, we’ve gone for a very arcade roster,” Dwittyy tells me. “We’ve kept some good games from last year, there’s some ones that haven’t been seen yet, and we’ve brought back a couple of classics.”
For regular Minecraft event watchers and players, these may not be the kinds of games you’d expect. “We’ve been doing the gameshow for so many years now, before the event space really kicked off. In the last year or two, the space has really evolved, but our games have stayed roughly the same in terms of their style. There’s not your standard race game, your standard building game, your standard PvP game. They’re gameshow games, is the best way to explain them.”
Running a full live gameshow similar to those you’d see on TV is no small feat – and requires a whole team of production managers, replay and graphics operators, sound designers, hosts, cast and crew to pull off. “I’m a small cog in the machine,” Dwittyy says. “There’s so many people who work to make the show run so smoothly – that’s not something we had 5 years ago. Our first shows were just a few cameras, but now there’s graphics, cuts to rule videos and music, and we have live interactions with the chat.”
“We’ve got someone who works in theatre as one of our lead producers. We’ve got someone who works in esports streaming and graphics and runnings of actual shows working the production side. We have someone who commentates on other esports games for a living, commentating this show. We really have an amazing bunch of people, and the best thing is that we’re all friends. We were all doing this before we went down our careers.”
The gameshow itself isn’t the only thing RASA’s bringing to the Cubed! table this year. “We’ve created a game live in the convention, so one of the gameshow games is going to be there in the convention hall with the other games that people can hop in and play,” Dwittyy tells me. “It’s Flick Flack. We describe gameshow games as silly and wacky and there is no sillier or wackier game than Flick Flack. You jump in and press buttons and dodge things and don’t fall in the water, and that’s it. It’s really simple and a lot of fun.”
You can play Flick Flack from Friday 4th to Sunday 6th October at Cubed! – or watch the Noxsquad Gameshow live on the Sunday at 6pm BST / 1pm EDT.
About The Author
