The virtual reality games were designed by Bethea and Miteff for Bethea/Miteff Productions and programmed by Curt Toumainian for Saddleback/Live Studios and Dean Friedman (for InVideo Systems).

The latter involved one player of the team playing one of five video games in an attempt to beat a certain score or accomplish a certain objective within 30 seconds.

These areas included: There were eight different types of spaces Mikey could land on: The team with the most points at the end of two rounds won the game.

Using a video monitor to see themselves, the contestants would be backstage, climbing ladders, throwing "snowballs", and using a boat in front of a bluescreen attempting to achieve previously explained goals (which was always to obtain three objects) for each level of the game.

If they lost all of their power (five units, as shown by an on-screen gauge), the screen would fade to grey, and they would have to start the stage over and repeat its objectives until successful (in season 1, six episodes had a message that read "Try again.

Successfully beating the Game Wizard in the final level won the grand prize, which was usually a vacation.

Both players, sharing one energy gauge, teamed up for the last level, which was a face-off against one of three villains, the evil wizard Merlock who conjured lightning bolts, a fireball-throwing sorceress named Scorchia, and the armor-clad monster Mongo who tossed balls of energy.

If either player touched a spinning hourglass that randomly appeared, all enemies and hazards would be immobilized and rendered harmless for five seconds.

Upon the Wizard's defeat, depending on who the players faced, Merlock would disintegrate into a pile of dust, Scorchia's body would burn to ashes and blow away, and Mongo would vanish in a flash of light, leaving only his armor behind.

In Season 2, the mechanics were the same as before, but each Wizard was given a more customized room: The show taped four pilots, with a videotape of one of the episodes available.

The Time Bomb challenge was considered a Video Puzzle and instead of spelling words, required teams to come up with multiple answers to a specific question.

In 2015, James Bethea and Karim Miteff proposed a spiritual successor to Nick Arcade on Kickstarter, called Enthlevel.

The proposed show would again be hosted by Phil Moore, and update the chroma key technology of the original to incorporate modern advancements in motion capture and virtual reality.