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Filming a multi-camera sitcom with a live studio audience is probably pretty fun, and when it comes to Chuck Lorre’s hit CBS series “The Big Bang Theory,” the cast has been pretty clear over the years that one (very good) episode in season 7 was particularly delightful to film.

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In Jessica Radloff’s 2022 book “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” main cast members Jim Parsons, Simon Helberg, Kunal Nayyar and Mayim Bialik — who played Sheldon Cooper, Howard Wolowitz, Raj Koothrappali, and Amy Farrah Fowler — fondly look back on filming the season 7 episode “The Scavenger Vortex,” where Raj sets up a scavenger hunt for his friends and goes all out. So how did the episode even come into being?

Co-executive producer and writer Eric Kaplan explained that his brother did a lot of group scavenger hunts, and he felt inspired by the idea but needed a collaborator to really make the pitch work. “In the world of nerds, there’s a lot of competitive real-life puzzle solving, which has always intrigued me for some reason yet to be determined,” Kaplan told Radloff. “So I was always pitching, ‘Why don’t they do some kind of scavenger hunt?’ I think it was [writer and executive producer Steve] Molaro who cracked the case when he said that Raj should be the master of ceremonies for it, which I liked. A lot of stuff came together in that episode, and I was quite pleased with the payoff.”

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As far as Nayyar was concerned, “The Scavenger Vortex” was one of his very favorite experiences working on the show because Raj really gets to go all out as the “master of ceremonies,” so to speak. “That’s the most fun I’ve ever had shooting because they said, ‘Just go nuts! Be more and more insane,'” Nayyar recalled. “Anything I got to do with Raj doing showmanship — like when he starts playing music and uses pyrotechnics to kick off the scavenger hunt — was so much fun.”

Parsons also told Radloff that he found himself overjoyed by Sheldon’s in-universe reaction to the idea because, for once, Sheldon got to express childlike glee. “The word ‘gift’ is what comes to mind because I loved that the writers allowed this crotchety, stuck-in-his-way character to have these little moments,” Parsons said fondly. “For it to be Sheldon who had the attitude of ‘Oh! This is wonderful!’ […] that is just the best type of craft work in writing and characters that you can have.”

The way that the pairings shake out in “The Scavenger Vortex” is also a big part of the episode’s overall success. Raj, the mastermind behind the whole thing, doesn’t compete himself, so Sheldon ends up with Penny (Kaley Cuoco), and Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) pairs off with Howard’s wife Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz (Melissa Rauch). Howard and Amy round out the competition, and as Steve Molaro told Jessica Radloff, “The Scavenger Vortex” opened up new writing avenues for the show as a whole.

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“Because of that episode, we started crossing the streams in ways we had never crossed them,” Molaro revealed. “It was the first time Leonard and Bernadette were ever alone in a scene; same with Howard and Amy. We always felt you could take any two of these characters and put them in a scene and it would probably be good, so that episode is just the shining example of that.”

These new pairings are fun, too. Bernadette’s competitive side truly emerges for the first time and she ends up punching Leonard in the arm when he’s not doing enough to help their team win (in Radloff’s book, Galecki recalls that in real life, “I kept telling Melissa to hit me harder because you couldn’t kill a fly with her punches”). Elsewhere, Howard and Amy spend a big chunk of the episode bonding over their unexpected shared love for musician Neil Diamond, and it’s safe to say Mayim Bialik loved getting to hang out with Simon Helberg.

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“I’m obsessed with Simon Helberg,” Bialik gushed. “It’s as if the teacher paired me up with my favorite person in kindergarten that I got to play with all day. He takes his craft so seriously, and he’s so hilarious, plus an incredibly intelligent comedian.”

Ultimately, the search for the prize — a gold coin — turns out to be hiding in everyone’s pockets because Raj was so excited about the entire enterprise that he didn’t plan things particularly well and just wanted everyone to succeed. (“I just loved at the end of the game when everyone was really pissed at me!” Kunal Nayyar told Jessica Radloff in her book. “Raj was like, ‘We’re all winners!'”)

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As funny as it all is on screen — and as apparently fun as it all was to shoot — one actor on “The Big Bang Theory” had some reservations about this particular episode, partially because of the specific way it was shot. “That was also such a fragmented episode, and we didn’t shoot a lot of it in front of the audience,” Simon Helberg revealed in the book. “I remember feeling a little disjointed doing it. At the table read, I thought it was one of the best episodes ever, but then when we shot it, I just never felt particularly satisfied or comfortable.”

Ultimately, Helberg received comfort from a Warner Bros. executive who watched the episode before anybody else. “I was more dissatisfied with myself, but then I remember Peter Roth—who saw a cut of the episode before we did—saying, ‘Oh my God, this episode had me rolling on the ground!'” Helberg recalled happily. “People still talk about that episode. So it’s funny because sometimes there is a bit of a disconnect between your experience and the actual result, which is another huge lesson I learned on the show: Don’t trust your feelings.”

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“The Scavenger Vortex,” along with the rest of “The Big Bang Theory,” is streaming on Max now.