An online game to help Channel 4 cast contestants for its newest game show, The Bank Job, has been created by Glasgow based creative digital agency Chunk.

Players had to qualify online to unlock the application form for the game, which will be shown live on air for six nights from 2 January 2012 and will be presented by George Lamb.

The show comes live from a vault in a real bank where contestants answer quick-fire questions to open safe deposit boxes containing hundreds of thousands of pounds of real money.

Both the online game and the television series were devised by Remarkable Television, an Endemol company.

Online tournaments are running at scheduled times of the day and were promoted from existing Channel 4 game show The Million Pound Drop, with applicants entering an online bank vault and having to answer questions in 45 seconds.

Brian McHarg, Chunk’s technical director, added: “Developing a web-based game that can support the demands of a live television call to action presents some unique challenges, with presenter George Lamb’s live promotion of tournaments during the Million Pound Drop driving around 20,000 players to the online game within minutes.

“Players then remained to play over 155,000 games within 90 minutes and the game had more than two million plays within just two weeks from its launch. Chunk designed and developed the entire system to be dynamically scalable such that it can cope with these massive spikes in player traffic at key times.”