MGM Television and Zynga Team Up to Develop New Game Show Based on the Iconic, Pop Culture Hit 'Words With Friends'

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LOS ANGELES and SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MGM Television and Zynga ZNGA, a leading social game developer, today announced a collaboration to develop a new television game show based on Words With Friends, the world's most popular mobile word game. The show will also incorporate aspects from Zynga's larger portfolio of With Friends word and puzzle games.  

Words With Friends
Words With Friends


MGM Television
MGM Television


Since launching in 2009, Words With Friends has been installed more than 200 million times and is one of the App Store's Top 10 free games of all time. An estimated 55 million Words With Friends matches are played around the world at any given moment and more than 75 million words are played every day.

"The interactive social experience of Words With Friends makes it the perfect mobile game for us to bring to primetime, following our success with Beat Shazam on FOX," said Barry Poznick, President of Unscripted Television, MGM. "Playing WORDS is a daily ritual for some of the biggest names in Hollywood and we've created the perfect format to capture their competitiveness and creative wordplay." 

"Over the past eight years, Words With Friends has proven to be a place where millions of people connect with their friends and family from around the world every day," said Bernard Kim, President of Publishing, Zynga. "We're proud to partner with MGM, an industry leader in creating innovative and engaging programming, to extend the iconic gameplay and rich social experience of Words With Friends, and our broader collection of With Friends games, to new mainstream entertainment mediums."

MGM Television has a proven track record with some of the most popular unscripted and scripted television shows on-air today. The Words With Friends show will join a long list of successful competition series produced by MGM Television, including the recently premiered Beat Shazam on FOX hosted by Jamie Foxx, Steve Harvey's FUNDERDOME for ABC, The Voice (NBC), Survivor (CBS) and Shark Tank (ABC). The MGM Television team is also known for creating quality scripted series including the critically-acclaimed and TCA-nominated series The Handmaid's Tale (HULU), Emmy Award-winning series Fargo (FX), the upcoming series Get Shorty starring Chris O'Dowd and Ray Romano, Vikings for HISTORY, and the upcoming series for AT&T AUDIENCE Network, Condor starring Max Irons, William Hurt, Bob Balaban, Mira Sorvino and Brendan Fraser. 

About MGM Television
MGM Television is a leading producer and global distributor of premium content for television and digital platforms, with distribution rights to original productions and a robust catalog of television episodes and feature film titles including such premiere entertainment franchises as James Bond, Rocky, Stargate and The Hobbit trilogy. Current scripted and unscripted multi-platform projects include Fargo (FX); Vikings (HISTORY); The Handmaid's Tale (Hulu); Get Shorty (EPIX); The Voice (NBC); Survivor (CBS); Shark Tank (ABC); Teen Wolf (MTV); Steve Harvey's FUNDERDOME (ABC); Beat Shazam (FOX); Signed (VH1); Lucha Underground (The El Rey Network). Through its finance and distribution entity, Orion TV Productions, the syndicated courtroom series Lauren Lake's Paternity Court is currently airing its fourth season and is in production on the new syndicated daytime courtroom series Couples Court with The Cutlers. MGM's television programming regularly airs in more than 100 countries worldwide. For more information, visit www.mgm.com.

About  Zynga Inc.
Since its founding in 2007, Zynga's mission has been to connect the world through games. To-date, more than 1 billion people have played Zynga's games across Web and mobile, including FarmVille, Zynga Poker, Words With Friends, Hit it Rich! Slots and CSR Racing. Zynga's games are available on a number of global platforms including Apple iOS, Google Android, Facebook and Zynga.com. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., and has additional offices in the U.S., Canada, Finland, U.K., Ireland and India. Learn more about Zynga at http://blog.zynga.com or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Contact:

MGM
Kristin Cotich
kcotich@mgm.com
(310) 449-3606

Zynga
Erin Smith-Cheng
esmithcheng@zynga.com
(650) 224-2462

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Posted In: Press Releases
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