BBC Mastermind Quiz Brief

The Mastermind brand, created in 1972, attracts a dedicated weekly audience and has evolved into sport, junior, celebrity and Australian editions yet Mastermind, the king of quizzes had never had an online game presence.

Challenged to build the quiz engine CTI faithfully replicated the traditional features of the famous flagship quiz show while integrating social media engagement tools to maximise sharing.

The game was played more than 1.5m times in the first three months. The on-budget, on-time delivery of the site proved to be so successful that CTI is now on the preferred developers list for the BBC and is working on further projects with the corporation.

BBC Mastermind Quiz Technology

After winning the pitch, CTI forged a working task team to quickly get to grips with the parameters created by the front-end design and to understand the core principles of BBC Forge- the official BBC platform. CTI delivered a quiz engine that incorporated the front-end designs created by the BBC User Experience (UX) team, worked within Forge - and was fully integrated with the BBC Games API.

CTI also strategically advised on including the following features:

• Twitter and Facebook share function for scores to attract a wider audience.
• Integration of BBC unique I.D. codes for people without social media profiles.
• A BBC leaderboard, stimulating competition within the quiz community.
• Further reading to provide context, information and a stimulus to learn more.

The nature of the quiz community means that extensive fresh content would keep people returning to the game time and again, CTI recommended creating an engine that was simple to update.

BBC Mastermind Quiz Benefits and Results

• 1.5m plays and 1m unique visitors within the first 3 months.
• The quiz is a clear favourite amongst quiz fans; reflected in the repeat plays. Over 90% of users have played the quiz more than once, which exemplifies the strong appeal of the user experience
• Repeat plays is also strong evidence of the benefits of providing an editable database, which provides an inexhaustible amount of questions.
• Before the go-live date for the Mastermind quiz the project had to undergo rigorous testing by the BBC Opps team. Any significant problems with the technological integration with BBC systems would have caused delays and additional costs. The Mastermind quiz suffered no such problems.
• The BBC is so impressed with the engine that they are looking to reuse it for further projects.
• A further indication that the client is impressed with the project is that CTI were promoted to the ‘Preferred Suppliers’ list at the corporation.

BBC Mastermind Quiz Solutions

The online quiz was created using two service layers; a Java RESTful service layer and PHP service, with a PAL/Zend application on top. This architecture was chosen to allow the application to scale under the high volume of anticipated traffic.

Building the engine in a demanding Forge environment is testament to the breadth of experience across the CTI team. The build was completed by a team of three developers who were able to draw on the expertise of further CTI team members to deal with the diverse technologies on the Forge platform. In all CTI worked with PHP, Zend, HTML, Java, MySQL, Linux and Apache. The corporation’s games API, needed to be incorporated into the quiz engine in order to allow full integration with the BBC site.

To meet the client’s criteria, a results processor was built to compile and calculate the users’ scores from the quiz. A database was created to host over 4,000 questions, answers and question metadata and an admin control panel was implemented in order to provide the client with the ability to manage the questions and answers used in the quiz. A Java service was used to extract a set of questions from the database dependent on a variety of criteria; age and chosen category, as supplied by the website visitors.