By Lou Kesten

The Associated Press

Everyone who loves to watch game shows thinks the same thing: “I could do better than that.” But few of us get the chance, because there’s too much competition for too few spots on TV.

“We can bridge that gap,” says Manuel Bronstein, director of Xbox Live Primetime. “We want to give a lot of people the ability to be on a game show.”

The name of the game is “1 vs. 100,” based on the short-lived TV series. It’s a trivia contest that pits a single player (The One) against 100 others (The Mob). Everyone who tunes into the program on Xbox Live has a chance to be one of those 101 players.

Bronstein and his colleagues on Microsoft’s incubation team were trying to find ways to “bring the large Xbox Live audience together for mass events,” he says. “We met with a lot of the big players in game shows, but when we saw ’1 vs. 100,’ that mechanic was perfect.”

I’ve been checking out the Canadian beta test of the game, and it’s a lot of fun. Even if you aren’t chosen to be The One or part of The Mob, you can still play along and try to beat the scores of other audience members. And Bronstein says audience members who answer a lot of questions correctly will have a better chance of being named The One.

The questions lean toward the easy side, although I stumbled across a few stumpers that were pitched at the Canadian audience. (No, I don’t know what shape a Nunavut license plate is in.) But “1 vs. 100” will offer something you can’t get from other electronic trivia games: fresh questions every episode. And there will be prizes, too, like Microsoft points and free Xbox Live Arcade downloads.

Microsoft hasn’t set a date for the official launch of “1 vs. 100.”