Very few things in life are as dependable as the TV show Survivor. The CBS series has been on air since 2000, with 48 seasons completed, the 49th currently underway, and number 50 in production. The pioneering reality TV competition show has engaged an avid fan base for 25 years and counting, stranding groups of everyday Americans on remote islands who then systematically vote each other out of the game.
The carefully constructed world-building of Survivor is a massive part of its long-lasting success, sucking viewers into a fully realized visual universe that is consistent season to season. Survivor challenges compose a central aspect of this universe. In each episode, tribe members compete in various challenges for rewards and immunity, sometimes in groups and sometimes as individuals. A finely-tuned machine of BTS (behind the scenes) crew members is responsible for devising and creating these challenges, including Senior Game Designer Myles Nye.
Nye is an LA-based game and puzzle designer with a background in theater. He has been consulting on Survivor since its first-ever season, working with the show’s legendary Challenges Producer, John Kirhoffer. As someone who has recently been drawn into the highly immersive and deeply addictive world of Survivor, I reached out to Nye to learn more about what goes into designing the myriad challenges that have been featured over the years. His responses to my questions are below, edited lightly for clarity and length.
How did you first get involved with Survivor? How many seasons have you worked on the show, and in what capacity?
My first involvement in the show was as a fan: a massive one! I was living in LA and running scavenger hunts for a San Francisco-based technology company, traveling around a lot. Like a lot of people at the turn of the century, I started watching Survivor when it was the new hotness, and I never fell off!
One day in 2006 or so, I impulsively sent a cold-call email to John Kirhoffer, the show’s challenge impresario. John’s been on the show since day one, episode one, and there’s no one alive in reality TV who has done what he has done, overseeing every challenge in every episode. That’s a tentpole network show that’s been on for 25 years!
In addition to all the great things John has done that give the viewers a thrill each week, he also took a chance on me and gave me my first-ever job in television. He received my email, invited me to interview, realized that I was a huge Survivor nerd with experience in game design, and he added me to his rotating consultants to come in and help pitch ideas for challenges. I think everyone liked the ideas because he kept me coming back year after year, to the point where I became a mainstay of the room. I was one of the most senior consultants, supporting Kirhoffer and Survivor, starting with Survivor China (Season 15) through today!
Now, sharp-eyed viewers of the show will notice that, since the pandemic, seasons are shorter and place less emphasis on new and novel challenge types, drawing more heavily (and sometimes exclusively) on previous challenges. As a result, the previous annual consulting roundtable process is no longer the annual ritual as it once was. But I’m still involved in the show in the new era: I worked closely with host and show runner Jeff Probst on the Survivor 40 “Game Within the Game,” where I became the first person ever to receive the credit “Senior Game Designer” for a season of Survivor. I share occasional ideas for twists with Probst, and I still share ideas for puzzles with Kirhoffer. I’ve had several original designs appear on screen in the new era!
Image courtesy of Myles Nye
What’s the development process like for designing challenges for Survivor? What sort of considerations go into each, how long do they take, and how many people are involved from start to finish?
Making a reality show, especially one like Survivor, which is an institution, is like a business. I know my department: Challenge Consulting. My head honcho is Kirhoffer, and he works closely with the dream team on location (art department support, challenge rehearsal, and testing professionals) as well as the rest of the art department, camera, and safety—so many departments! I only work in pre-production, on-site in LA (or on Zoom as needed). What’s great about consulting is how little responsibility falls to me. I get to be the blue-sky guy, with my feet on the desk, saying, “You know what somebody oughta do…” When it comes to getting out in the dirt in Fiji and actually putting your back into it, Kirhoffer is the real hands-on wizard.
Any game we come up with is always in service of making the episode cohesive, dramatically. You don’t want to feel like the challenge is separate from the show, or that the episode is on pause while the challenge runs.
When Kirhoffer puts us together in the challenge room, it’s rather like any brainstorm you’ve been in: there’s a dry-erase board, no one knows where the hell the eraser went, and the only pen that works is orange. We bring in ideas based on kids’ toys or board games, foreign language game shows, or random clips from YouTube. A lot of goofing off happens. It’s a creative process! But ultimately, the goal is to get cards on the wall, a trope familiar to anyone who’s seen BTS content of making a TV show. Kirhoffer builds a board based on episode count and the number of tribal and individual challenges we need, for reward and immunity. When I work, it’s a few days a week for a few weeks, usually in January.
As far as what considerations go in, so much! We are thinking about what is fair, what is fun, what makes good TV, what has come-from-behind potential, what will be “the great equalizer.” Ultimately, any game we come up with is always in service of making the episode cohesive and dramatic. You don’t want to feel like the challenge is separate from the show, or that the episode is on pause while the challenge runs; we’re not making drum solos or car chase scenes. The drama must come first, which means if something dynamic happens between the characters that sparks some interpersonal tension, that will be in the forefront, regardless of what the challenge may be that provides the background stimulus. I’ve seen challenges that lose entire acts in the edit: the players may have used a big ladder prop to get between two platforms high off the ground, but we only see them when they use it at the end to get down from the second one. This may be for the good of the episode overall.
My favorite thing about Survivor challenges has always been the ways in which unlikely competitors—the mailman, the librarian, the person from your neighborhood—can triumph against overwhelming odds.
My favorite thing about Survivor challenges has always been the ways in which unlikely competitors—the mailman, the librarian, the person from your neighborhood—can triumph against overwhelming odds. Longtime fans will know what I mean when I talk about Kass winning Vertigo in Cagayan (Season 28); the last one to leave her perch and start the puzzle, almost too scared to jump off, and coming from behind to beat three fellows she was behind— it still hits! And it takes careful design of each component to create the circumstances where such a thing is utterly possible and still delightfully unexpected if it comes about.
One of my favorite challenges I ever helped design was “Game of Throw-Ins,” which involved a basketball hoop in the middle of a maze (from Survivor San Juan Del Sur, Season 29). A memorable fight broke out during that challenge, and the design work I was so proud of did what it was supposed to do. That challenge, which I was sure was going to become an all-timer, is not the part anyone remembers; they remember what the competition brought out in the players (Natalie and John Rocker— real ones know).
One of the many things people love about Survivor is the world-building of the show, brought to life in large part by the design. How does that overarching Survivor universe factor into your design process for challenges?
It’s really fun getting to join an existing program with a well-defined schema because you then have constraints within which to be creative. I’ve written and designed for other game shows and reality shows, but other than Survivor, the only one I really brag about is Only Connect, a highly esoteric quiz show on the BBC.
Survivor is great because of its existing semiotics; think skulls, coconuts, rattan wood. Challenges never have external forces, such as motors turning wheels. I was inspired by a great video game called “Johann Sebastian Joust” (itself inspired by folk games played with wooden turtles placed on the back of the hand) and pitched a challenge called “Idol Hands” that was as simple as balancing a small idol on a platform and making sure you knocked over your opponent’s idol before your own toppled. So simple, like a game kids would play in the sand— and likely have! The simplicity at the core of the idea is a big part of what Kirhoffer steers us toward as the king in the room; that’s a value he instills in the show, and I think the result is a lot of integrity. Plus, the idol hands challenge did become a mainstay and has been on the show several times. One day, I walked into a Costco, and there was a wall of TVs showing highlights just from this challenge: that was pretty cool. (I still didn’t buy a TV, though.)
Kirhoffer is also very adamant about having on-point, punny names for the challenges we create. The best idea can die on the vine if the room can’t come up with a dad-style groaner to identify it, as you will see from the rest of my responses!
Image courtesy of Myles Nye
What’s your favorite aspect of creating these challenges?
I love having the opportunity to view the world through the lens of “What would this be if it were a Survivor challenge?” and then having the very great fortune of being able to enlist a team of highly skilled professionals to effectuate my weird idea. A hobby of mine outside of game design is practicing Iyengar yoga, and once, while we were doing something really tough with abdominal work, I thought, I can use this. It was the germ of an idea that led to “The Game is Afoot,” where players must untie a bundle of blocks and stack them up in a tower, using only their feet! Tough core work, and a challenge that’s appeared in several seasons.
Do you have a favorite challenge you helped bring to life for the show?
Building on the previous answer, one time in the teens, I was watching a documentary about speed Rubik’s Cube solvers, and I thought, I wonder what the Survivor version of a Rubik’s Cube would be? The result was “A Crate Idea,” a challenge that first appeared on Survivor Tocantins (Season 18). Players have to manipulate and stack crates with designs painted on all six faces, but there’s only one way to put them together in a tower that spells out the tribe name on the side of it. Ideally, they build the tower and then realize one of the cubes on the bottom is wrong, so they have to strip the whole thing down and build it again. This happened to the Heroes tribe in Season 20. This challenge has been used on the show more than any other I contributed to, and has appeared on just about every international season of Survivor. Because no matter what size budget your international production company is working with, just about everyone can build a crate out of wood. That’s what makes it such A Crate Idea!
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