Your assignment: Break the Bank....

[Jimmy Owen]

Let's say you were working for a game show company that had licensed the "Break the Bank" title for a new game show.  Would you go with a format that had been used before, modify it or create something totally different?

[dazztardly]

It would be neat to see a modern re-tooling of Kline's format if that's possible. Otherwise, it might be best to just start from scratch.

-Dan

[Sodboy13]

I'm fixing "The Bank Job" and slapping that title on it.

[WilliamPorygon]

Presuming I had the rights to all three, the 70s game was the best for my money.  Though I wonder how many possible ways there are to arrange the board given the rules it has to follow (no blank squares touching, the three of each matching value touching, etc.)  Looking it up on the Wiki, the 40s-50s game sounds like it's pretty much a lower-stakes WWTBAM with one wrong answer being allowed in lieu of lifelines; and while I like the concept of the original format of the 80s version it really plays like a confusing cluster**** in practice.

(For that matter, I wonder what's the shortest and longest times taken into the prize vault in the 80s game?  The puzzles generally aren't that solvable until at least the 40-second question, but even so, a winning team could potentially have anywhere from 70 seconds to 8 1/2 minutes, which seems troublesome from a production standpoint.)

[Jamey Greek]

I'll make it a trivia game with categories and make it kinda like TTD and TJW.  There will be a prize category and some other special categories

[BrandonFG]

I'd prolly change the title altogether, but go with the 1985 rules (Farago era). "Break the Bank" sounds pretty generic, or like a fake game show from a sitcom episode.

Then again, generic titles seem to be the thing nowadays, so who knows.

[Neumms]

The 80s version seems best for dim modern audiences. I was thinking about this while reading Adam's book on Gene Rayburn.

Scrap the boring question part. Three couples each get a turn in the prize vault with the sane time limit or, to solve the pace issue that hamstrung Rayburn, picking four or five games. The couple who earns the most bank cards gets to try them in the lock at the end of the show.

[clemon79]

You're all off your twigs.

Break The Bank CLEARLY wants to be a game of definitions.

[Unrealtor]

Though I wonder how many possible ways there are to arrange the board given the rules it has to follow (no blank squares touching, the three of each matching value touching, etc.)

I don't feel like figuring it out precisely, but some quick back of the envelope calculations make me think that it's well into the millions. If you just take the "center" box of the $100/$300/$500 groups (the one that's touching both of the others) and the wild card, you get 20 x 17 x 14 x 11 = 52,360. If you then say that each of the three groups has about four possible arrangements for any given "center" box (the actual number is 1 in the corners, 3 along the edge, and 6 elsewhere), that's a factor of another 64, which takes you over 3 million possible combinations before you start looking at the arrangements of money bags in the remaining spaces.

[TLEberle]

Four celebrities sit down the left side of the board and play either-or questions like All-Star Blitz in an effort to match a cash prize. The end game is a series of true-false questions in the fashion of the "celebrity factoid" game from H2. Each correct judgment wins a square as in the second Bank Vault end game.

and scene.

[jimlangefan]

Let's say you were working for a game show company that had licensed the "Break the Bank" title for a new game show.  Would you go with a format that had been used before, modify it or create something totally different?

For me it would be a toss up between reviving the '70s version or bringing "Break The Safe" over from the UK and just calling it "Break The Bank".

[Sonic Whammy]

I thought someone we know was trying to do that. He just called it Combination Lock.