MACHINE GUN KELLY was spinning around on his chair. As a player on a game show, MGK (as this young rapper’s nametag read), had far less gravitas than the average TV contestant — but he sure was fun to watch. The bottle of Champagne that he occasionally swigged from one recent Monday afternoon probably had something to do with it.


Time for another question from the show’s host, Peter Rosenberg. “Dr. Seuss or Dr. Dre: who wrote ‘With my Triple-Sling Jigger, I sure felt much bigger,’ ” he asked another player, the comic actor and rapper Donald Glover. MGK began to climb out of his chair and onto his desk. Mr. Glover, who raps under the name Childish Gambino, cracked a few penis jokes before getting to the answer. Spoiler: it was Dr. Seuss.


Just another typical taping for “Hip Hop Squares,” a new MTV series that reboots the classic “Hollywood Squares” game show for the YouTube generation. On “Hip Hop Squares,” set to have its debut on MTV2 on May 22, the nine squares of the tick-tack-toe board are filled with a rotating cast of rappers, D.J.’s, comedians and sports and television personalities, and they field questions about music, history, pop culture and the Kardashians.


As on the original series, contestants must agree or disagree with the stars’ answers to score an X or an O, and the stars, who are given the answers beforehand, do their best to entertain or confuse with shtick and attitude.


“Why you got to ask me that, that’s disrespect,” Fat Joe responded to a question about what kitchen utensil a pig’s private parts most resemble. A contestant who wrongly doubted the veracity of an answer provided by Ghostface Killah was quickly chided: “You should always trust the Wizard of Poetry.”


MTV hopes the series — it has ordered 20 episodes, all filmed at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn — will attract the core audience of what it calls “male-ennials,” networkspeak for young men aged 12 to 34.


“We were looking at content that would be familiar but that we could update,” said Paul Ricci, the senior vice president for programming and production at MTV2. The network licensed the rights to “Hollywood Squares” from CBS this year, and brought in Mr. Rosenberg, a D.J. with the hip-hop station Hot 97.


“You tell everyone the concept,” Mr. Ricci said, “and they immediately get it.”


Of course the original concept has been in the entertainment ecosphere for decades. “Hollywood Squares” began in the mid-1960s and, over the years, has hosted a wide roster of quippy celebrities and has-beens, Paul Lynde to Florence Henderson to Charo; some became mostly famous as squares. To come up with questions for its version, MTV drafted producers from the show’s last iteration, which began in 1998, with Whoopi Goldberg as center square.


But there are departures from tradition. For starters, the green room is on camera, complete with a stocked bar, and the celebrity players are invited to drink. Cocktail waitresses show up on the neon-blue-and-pink set; an in-house D.J. adds to the clubby vibe. A third of the players wore sunglasses during the taping. At one point MGK somehow ordered a slice of pizza.


“We wanted it to feel a little bit unpredictable, a little bit bumpy,” Mr. Ricci said. “Yes, it’s a genre show, but anything can happen within that space.”


Casting for that unpredictability was key. “There’s so many charismatic personalities” in hip-hop, Mr. Ricci said. Among the first to sign on was Ghostface Killah, the Wu Tang Clan member, rap eminence and connoisseur of ’80s TV.


“I knew it was going to be big,” Ghostface said of the show, sitting on a green-room couch after a taping. “MTV do what they do to the third power, you know what I mean? They do it big.”


He did have one concern. “They should have some real nice music” for the theme song, he said. “Like when you hear ‘Pyramid’ ” — he sang the theme song for “$20,000 Pyramid.” “You know what I mean? Everybody knows ‘The Price is Right.’ ” He sang that one. “What is this one going to be? Something that’s” vehemently — he used a different word — “unique.”


But he was having fun on the set, he added. “Everybody’s loose, that’s what makes it so good,” he said. He let out a stream of profanities, gleefully, naturally. “Whatever you want to say, you just say it,” he added, “That’s why I say it feels real.”


The Ghostface Killah stamp of approval helped to pave the way for other stars.


“I was like, ‘I’ll do it if I get Ghostface’s episode,’ ” said Mac Miller, the Pittsburgh rapper, who served as center square for several episodes.


Mr. Glover, whose rap name comes from the Wu Tang name generator, also said that meeting Ghostface was a highlight. “I came in, and he was like, ‘Hey, what’s up son,’ and we dapped, and he was like, ‘Yo, keep making that money, do it!’ ” marveled Mr. Glover, best known as a star of the NBC comedy “Community.” “That was really cool. I didn’t even think he knew who I was.”