Web Video / Game Changer

The only game show where the game changes every show!

A Game Show on independent streaming service Dropout. Each episode, host Sam Reich has three comedians play a game, with the caveat that they (usually) don't know what they're about to play until they start playing. Hilarity Ensues.

Most episodes are unrelated to each other, making the show almost a game show anthology series. Certain concepts have proven successful enough to get "Game Samers", where the same players come back to the show to replay a game they've already played. Three concepts have been so successful that they got their own spinoff shows, Make Some Noise (under the same name), Never Have I Ever (as Dirty Laundry) and The Official Cast Recording (as Play it By Ear).

Games that have gotten at least one Game Samer

• Make Some Noise/Noise Boys: Three players make sounds according to Sam's prompts, which are usually something open-ended like "making small-talk with the dentist while he works on you".
• A Sponsored Episode: Players are given products and improvise an appealing pitch for them. Game Samed as Sell Outs in Season 3.
• Secret Samta: Players are asked to open presents that contain either a great prize, or a humiliating punishment, the goal is to lie well enough that the other players will steal a punishment or let a prize go.
• Do I Hear $1?: Players are asked how much they'd be willing to be paid to do something.
• Sam Says: Just a simple game of Simon Says, but with "Sam Says" as the key phrase.
• Like My Coffee: Players are given an unfinished pick-up line ("I like my lovers like I like my coffee...") and asked to finish it.
• Survivor: Eight players play a modified version of the hit reality TV show in the studio.

Game Changer includes examples of:

• Affectionate Parody:
  • "Survivor" and its "Battle Royale" sequel series are direct parodies of Survivor.
  • "The Bachelor" parodies the reality show of the same name.
  • "Second Place"'s minigames are all parodies of existing game shows: "The Price is Not Quite", "Family Two'd", and "Deux or No Deux".
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: Since host Sam Reich is also the CEO of Dropout, the cast's frequent berating of him ends up as this.
  • One of the letters in "Don't Cry" ends with Mike Trapp lamenting that his chance to give that speech was on a streaming service behind a paywall.
• Butt-Monkey: Grant O'Brien. "Race to the Bottom" ends with him getting slapped by every cast and crew member who wanted to and "Like My Coffee..." features Grant's favorite porn star as a special guest for a minigame. "Like My Coffee 2" takes it even further by bringing in Grant's mom. To his credit, he does occasionally seem kind of into it, frequently choosing to make things weirder for everyone else than it is for him.
  • Brennan Lee Mulligan, to a lesser extent. At least two episodes have been explicitly rigged against him (although he was an emergency standby for one of them after Grant tested positive for Covid upon arriving to set).
  • Raphael Chestang, primarily in "Secret Samta 3". He is forced to change into a Sia costume (namely the leotard from the Chandelier music video), gets splashed with color, and is forced to post a sonogram on his social media.
  Raphael: [after finally winning a prize, wearing a Sia wig, a leotard, and covered in colored powder] This is what winning looks like.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: One challenge in "Second Place" asked the players to Venmo money to Katie Marovitch.
  • "Deja Vu" has a challenge that explicitly asks the players to bribe Sam with cash in their podiums. Siobhan takes it a step further by using the cash in her podium to bribe the people running other challenges.
• Call-Back: When Sam introduces the players on stage he often references previous work they have done on CollegeHumor/Dropout, such as Brennan as the DM of Dimension 20, or Ally and Grant being the contestants on Total Forgiveness.
• Character Filibuster: Brennan Lee Mulligan does this on almost every episode he's featured in. "Second Place" sees him go off on no less than four separate tangential rants.
• Chekhov's Gun: In the "Whodunnit" episode, a real knife was swapped out for the retractible prop knife, turning a fake murder into a real murder. Grant and Rekha find the prop knife in the Returns bin and screw around with it a little bit before mostly forgetting about it as they continue to investigate. Then Grant is unmasked as the murderer and grabs the knife to underline a dramatic Motive Rant. Everyone acts like it's an actual knife, until Grant stabs himself and remembers it's a retractible plastic blade.
• Corpsing: One episode, "Whodunnit", has a literal example: Josh is playing a murder victim, and Rehka and Grant are discussing who could have done it. At one point, Rehka insults him, and it cuts to a shot of Josh chuckling on the floor. He never breaks "character" otherwise.
• Deliberate VHS Quality: After multiple rounds in "Deja Vu", the video and audio quality starts noticeably degrading like a VHS tape would, with tracking lines and static cuts throughout, as part of the whole show breaking down with each cycle.
• Developer's Foresight: In "Do I Hear $1?", the players eventually Take a Third Option and refuse to continue playing on Sam's terms, banding together to deadlock the bidding. Sam has a slide prepared for this congratulating them for unionizing.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Izzy Roland appeared in "Lie Detector" as one of the "scientists" running the machine almost 3 years before she'd participate as a contestant in "Sam Says".
  • Before they both participated in Season 3, Christine Medrano and Alfred Aquino II played roles as suspects in "Whodunnit" as the production designer and the PA respectively.
• Friendly Scheming: "Don't Cry" turns out to be a method of picking up cast member Jess Ross after a hard year in which she had major surgery which left her temporarily bedridden and was forced to postpone her wedding due to Covid. The other two players were in on the trick, and multiple assorted Dropout cast members and friends come out to present heartfelt letters of appreciation to Jess. The episode ends with her and her partner Kait being practice-married by their favorite drag queen. Jess technically loses because she broke down in happy tears and therefore lost all her points, but Rehka gives her the prize for the episode: a honeymoon trip for Jess and her fianceé.
• Game Show Winnings Cap: "Do I Hear $1?" is eventually revealed to have a total maximum prize pool of $10,000 in the safe. It's implied that the original end state was the safe running out of money, and that would later end up being the end state for the Game Samer "Race to the Bottom", but since the players broke the game before they got there, we'll never know.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: "Deja Vu". The first 5 minutes or so are slightly chaotic, but otherwise as normal as Game Changer ever gets. Then Sam kicks a camera by accident, the show holds for a couple minutes, and the episode restarts. The episode starts to break down over time as the damage to the camera builds up.
• Loophole Abuse: Fairly common and somewhat encouraged. If a player finds a way around a specific game rule, whether or not they'll get the point depends on how funny it is.
  • The original "Make Some Noise" episode has Brennan get a prompt for "a North Dakotan," which Sam obviously intends for him to do a stereotypical accent. He just neutrally describes moving to North Dakota for his wife's job, then calls Sam out for being reductive.
  • "Sam Says" saw all three contestants work out a way around the prompt to "say something we'll have to bleep". Brennan starts singing a copyrighted song, Izzy literally says "something we'll have to bleep", and Lou declares that the official stated position of Dropout as a company is that OJ didn't do it. The former and latter do end up having to be censored, and all three get a point for creativity.
  • One of the puzzles in "Escape the Greenroom" involves driving a remote-controlled toy car around the parking lot with a controller bolted to the wall away from the only windows that can see the parking lot. Siobhan and Lou try to play the game for real for a moment, then give up and FaceTime each other so Siobhan can drive more accurately. Sam's impressed by their ingenuity.
  • The final prompt of "Second Place" is "Who will forfeit the most points?" Brennan attempts to forfeit "negative infinity" points and is disqualified for it. This results in Ally and Oscar being tied with more points than him, putting him in second place and winning the episode even though the loophole didn't go anywhere.
  • One challenge in "Deja Vu" is to give Sam a duck from a shelf at the top of the set. Trapp immediately runs off set to grab a ladder from the production team. Sam shuts the idea down before it can go anywhere, although he clarifies that it's mostly for safety reasons.
• Mad Scientist: Sam Reich's great-grandfather Samuel Dalton in "Escape the Greenroom", who combined his magic knowledge with electromagnetism and time-traveled to the future to kidnap and replace Sam Reich and try to blow up the Game Changer studio.
• Monster Clown: Roscoe in Deja Vu, played by Josh Ruben.
• Never Trust a Trailer: Parodied and Invoked. The season 6 trailer has a shot of Jacob Wysocki snapping and yelling at Sam, shouting that Sam has crossed a line and hit a nerve, before calmly declaring he's going home and walking off-set, complete with dramatic music. ...The camera then pans to show that the screen next to Sam shows the prompt "Do something great for the trailer", and Jacob calmly walks back on set saying it should cut good as everyone cracks up.
• Running Gag: In the sales-pitch episode "A Sponsored Episode", in which Trapp, Grant, and Rekha must give their best sales pitches for strange objects to host Sam Reich, nearly every pitch ends up beginning "Now, Sam, where are you from?" Trapp and Grant eventually abandon the gag, but Rekha never does.
• Sadistic Game Show: Sam Reich will stop at almost nothing to torment his players. Episodes have included making players bid against each other for Sam's money, having players control their heart rates while being exposed to stressful stimuli, rigging the game against a specific player for Sam's amusement, and surprising players with an escape room.^note On a production level, safety measures are in place before filming even begins. According to comments in behind the scenes shorts and on his Twitter, starting with (at least) season 6 Sam provided all contestants with a scale of what intensity level they're comfortable with from 1 to 5 before episodes were cast, and players were cast for episodes based on their comfort levels.
  • The trailers for seasons 5 and 6 play this angle up, starting with audio clips of various players complaining about how torturous the game is.
• Second Place Is for Losers: Inverted in "Second Place", where the goal is to come second in a group of three. Brennan plays it straight by insisting on trying his best to come first in every task. This approach ends up winning him the episode, to his frustration.
• Serial Escalation: The "Make Some Noise" episodes go from prompts like "cat" and "cow" in season 1 to prompts like "the Tooth Fairy fucks up the whole routine" and "an auctioneer's existential crisis" in season 4. Presumably part of why the concept got its own spinoff was because they were running out of places to go with the original players.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The camera that Sam kept accidentally breaking in "Deja Vu", causing the loop to reset? It never had any film in it to begin with.
• Sitcom Archnemesis: No matter how competitive the players get with each other there is always one constant, its everyone against Sam.
• Special Guest:
  • "Yes or No?" has a video prompt from Jewel.
  • Zac Oyama was unavailable for "The Substitute", the third of the "Make Some Noise" game samers, so he was replaced by Michael Winslow, to the horror of Josh and Brennan.
  • "Ham it Up" has Grant O'Brien, Christine Medrano and Lou Wilson test their acting chops against Giancarlo Esposito.
  • "Like My Coffee..." has an appearance from "Grant O'Brien's favorite porn star" Ty Mitchell, to Grant's absolute horror. "Like My Coffee 2" ups the ante by bringing in Debbie O'Brien, Grant's mother.
  • "Survivor: Battle Royale" has a variety of guest judges, such as former Survivor contestant Rick Devens, MasterChef winner Claudia Sandoval, America's Got Talent judge Howie Mandel, and Rupauls Drag Race alum Laganja Estranja.
  • "Second Place" has a minigame parodying Deal or No Deal, so Sam brings in former Deal suitcase girl and friend of the show Hayley Marie Norman.
• Studio Audience: "Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience", naturally. The players have to use the audience's reactions to figure out what they're actually supposed to be doing to earn points, since they laugh and cheer when the players get closer to what they're supposed to be doing and boo when they get further away.
• The Swear Jar: "Sam Says 3" has one that deducts points from players whenever they curse. None of them can avoid losing points to it.
• "Truman Show" Plot: Referenced in "The Surprise Murder Mystery Game Show" episode, right after The Reveal that Grant is part of the mystery and Rekha is the only actual contestant.
• Unexpectedly Obscure Answer: Invoked in "As a Cucumber". The bird quiz section has simple answers like "chicken" for Katie and Carolyn, and extremely obscure answers like "roseate spoonbill" for Brennan. The point, of course, isn't actually who gets the answers right, it's to annoy Brennan.
  • "Deja Vu" opens with a battery of these, including asking for a specific HTML color code. Since the episode contains a "Groundhog Day" Loop, the players eventually figure them all out.
• Unwitting Pawn: Katie, Brennan, and Raph in "Bingo", who don't know that they're being watched from the green room by another trio of players with their own bingo boards specifically for the original three's behaviors. The second trio is also being watched by a third trio in a different green room with a third set of bingo boards for their behaviors.
• Zonk: "Secret Samta" has these for about half of its "prizes", with options like "factory reset your phone". One episode ends with Raph dressed in a Sia costume and covered in color run dust.