shows:industrial_zone [Zoniverse]

Industrial Zone

History

Industrial Zone is an adventure game show that brought the use of gunge back into fashion after a long dry spell. It was created as an idea for an escape room-style activity that brought back nostalgia for people who grew up with Saturday morning shows, but a friend of its creator convinced him to pitch it to the small television studio WKNX. Unexpectedly, they enthusiastically agreed to produce it, and made it into a far more elaborate spectacle and a much greater success than he had ever imagined. (The potential for showing attractive college furries in swimwear probably helped.)

After producing a couple of seasons, WKNX had to admit that the show had now outgrown the capabilities of their studio space, and passed the idea and the IZ-related staff on to Sci-Fi Nexus. This studio was known for high-budget drama shows set in the far future, and the third season of Industrial Zone was their first time producing unscripted television that involved the public. From its third season onwards the show was produced at Pine Hill Studios.

Format

A team of four players are guided along a route through the show's enormous themed set by Alex Redwolf, playing games and risking being covered in slime in various ways for points. Sixteen games are played in each show, with four in each of the four differently themed areas of the set. A team leader is selected at the start of each episode, and it's usually up to them to choose the order in which the areas are played and nominate someone to go into each game. Between areas, the players usually get the chance to clean up a little through some contrivance of the set, with a more thorough shower break at the halfway point.

In the first game of the fourth area (coincidentally the unlucky thirteenth game of each show), a surprise guest related to one of the contestants is involved, with the player getting the chance to get them extremely messy. Inspirations for these sections are solicited on the Industrial Zone application form by asking applicants "Who would you most like to gunge and why?", but some are complete surprises.

After the sixteen games, a final round is played in a large obstacle course where the team has to work together to obtain some ultimate objective, with the amount of time they have to do it dependent on how many points they amassed throughout the rest of the show. Winning this last game (and therefore the show) is a rare event, and Industrial Zone offers no cash reward or other significant prize - a deliberate decision to make sure that contestants are there for the fun of it.

In later episodes, an additional game is played while the main team is cleaning themselves up for the second half, with Alex setting an unrelated contestant a task where they attempt to avoid a large gunging.

Games

See the Industrial Zone games page for a complete list of games played on IZ.

First and second seasons

The early seasons of Industrial Zone were produced by WKNX starting in 2102. After an ambitious first season that caught a lot of attention, they poured a lot of effort and dedicated studio space into making the second one, with more elaborate games and larger gunge machines. At this stage the show was set in a large industrial complex of uncertain origin or purpose, consisting of a chemical plant, factory and security station (referred to as the military base in early episodes) as well as a space station in geosynchronous orbit above it. The storyline involved trying to wrestle control of the machinery back from the building's sadistic artificial intelligence Silicon by getting through the labyrinth unnoticed and turning him off.

In the early shows, fifty points were awarded per round, meaning the maximum possible score was 800. Some time during the second season, this was adjusted to sixty per round and a total maximum of 960, so that the score in each game could be split up sensibly no matter whether a game had four, five or six things to collect/hit/deactivate. The exchange rate of points to time in the final game was 30 seconds per 100 points obtained.

Third season

The move to SFN made Industrial Zone take a year off but let it move up to an even larger and more spectacular environment, reworking the storyline and setting almost entirely but finding ways to incorporate some of the classic games that had taken hold during the show's early phases. This version of the show was recorded and shown starting in 2105. It's set in an ocean exploration outpost owned by a corporation called IZEP, where some unknown environmental disaster had turned the ocean for miles around into neon-coloured gunge. The team are tasked with venturing into the abandoned complex with the aim of unlocking the lab at its centre and activating the prototype machine that was being worked on to purify gunge back into water.

This version retains the same number of games, but the areas of the complex are now named Storage Wing, Processing Wing, the Laboratory and the Undersea Level, with the game rooms shuffled around to match the new environments. The antagonist Silicon has been replaced with a different computer called ROB, who is less of an active villain and appears occasionally to act as a foil to Alex.

In season three the number of possible points per game was inflated to 100, with all scores from the last area the team visited counting double towards the total - therefore giving a maximum possible score of 2000. The team are given one second of time in the final game for every ten points they accumulate.

Saturday IZ

Because of the adventurous and puzzle-based nature of the show, as well as the vast quantities of gunge dispensed every week, Industrial Zone built up an unintended fan following of children despite some scenes in it not really being suitable for family viewing. To bridge the gap, Saturday IZ was set up - a series of short games played around the Industrial Zone set that were filmed for slotting in to the magazine show Sat-AM Live, with younger fans of the show writing in to ask to play a gunge challenge or to nominate their friends.

Influences

Industrial Zone takes a lot of influence from the sheer imagination of late 80s television, with shows like Fort Boyard, Knightmare, Legends of the Hidden Temple and so on. The most obvious comparison for the whole layout of the show is to The Crystal Maze, although that was a coincidence that happened while the show grew around the first game that Iron-K wrote. When a name was needed for the show, though, paying tribute to Crystal Maze seemed necessary!

Stories

Seven main Industrial Zone stories have been written - the first four about shows from its second season, the last three for its revamp. These are all the stories that feature IZ or take place in it.

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