Successful game shows with no home editions

[PPatters]

Since it’s come up recently, what about Funny You Should Ask?

[Jeremy Nelson]

The one that eats at me most (especially because I saw a localized version while traveling in Italy but it was 45 euros) though it would be a tough ask for people to play the game straight is Greed.

Ooh, sorry for derailing, but here's what you COULD do:

Play the full money ladder. Each player chooses an answer in the multi-part questions. If your answer is right, you get a share of the pot for the question.

Terminator doesn't eliminate contestants, but you do steal their bank with a successful defense.

[Otm Shank]

The first 70s edition was notable for including a number of questions that were virtually unanswerable due to how general they were.

Yikes! Those were definitely questions where they excluded a multiple choice in the form of "which of these is X" and an integral part of the question. That would take about 5 minutes of frustration before it permanently occupied the bottom of the stack of games on the highest shelf in the closet.

[Jeremy Nelson]

Others with more knowledge can chime in, but I’m guessing Hatos-Hall didn’t put a priority on home games. There was a ten-year gap between the MB and Ideal versions of Let’s Make a Deal, which is surprising given the show itself was red hot during that time. Maybe that’s why they didn’t bother with Split Second. (Another possibility: it would have been impossible to rank the buzz-ins at home by priority. Actually, the demands on whoever would be the “host”—rank the buzz-ins, judge the answers, parse out the money for a correct answer after each question, etc.—probably would take all the fun out of it.)

While I'm sure that they COULD have done a version of LMAD, they could have seen it as a game that requires too much pre-work in the same way that some versions of The Price is Right could be, especially if you planned on using some of the pricing games from Deal. Not everyone can be Monty Hall at home.

Slightly deviating- while Fun House DID get a home verison and a couple of electronic ones, it's interesting that they all used the Fun House trademark but didn't capture the spirit of the show.

[Adam Nedeff]

The one that eats at me most (especially because I saw a localized version while traveling in Italy but it was 45 euros) though it would be a tough ask for people to play the game straight is Greed.

I actually happened to watch the final episode of the Fox version tonight. Remember, it was cancelled abruptly, they didn't know they were taping the final episode--and Chuck mentions during the show that a Greed video game is about to go into production.

[colonial]

Re; Split Second

When I played quizbowl, there was a buzzer system that one or two teams on the circuit would have that was nicknamed "The Knot," as the buzzers would get hopelessly tangled every time you put the system in its box.

It was a system made up of 12 buzzers all plugged into a central port. There was no light system, but rather a rank system on the central port that tells the moderator who buzzed in it what order. The buzzers were separated into three groups of four, so the moderator would have to announce, say, "B2" or "C4." The alphanumeric codes could be found just below the player's button.

A "budget" version of such a system could have worked for a Split Second board game. Have three buzzers plugged into the central port, and players can buzz in after the question is read, with the moderator prompting based on who buzzed in first.


JD

[JasonA1]

It's also been discussed here that the original Split Second didn't rank the ring-ins 1-2-3 like the Monty version did. And the Robb Weller pilot simplified it further by only letting subsequent players ring in after the previous player had been ruled on. So any analog way to buzz in could have worked for a home version.

-Jason

[Matt Ottinger]

The first 70s edition was notable for including a number of questions that were virtually unanswerable due to how general they were.

From what I understand, there was a misprint of some sort that resulted in some questions from the Now You See It game being included.

You've almost got it right, but you're not putting two and two together.  This was a delightful discovery we made a few years ago which made the ridiculousness of the High Rollers questions actually make sense.

Some genius over at Milton Bradley decided that to save a little time, they would copy a bunch of questions from their Now You See It home game and use them for High Rollers.  So, for example, a question asked "Who was a famous Olympic star?" and the answer given was OWENS.  Now with no other context, that makes no sense as a High Rollers question.  There are hundreds of famous Olympic stars.  But when you realize that the question was taken from their Now You See It game, and OWENS was the answer they wanted because it appeared in the grid everything starts to make sense.  All these questions that appeared vague or imprecise in the High Rollers game were "pinned" (as they say in the game show writing racket) in their original Now You See It context by being the answer that was on the game board.

Apparently, this was all lost on the poor soul who was tasked with filling up the quiz book.  You have to wonder if it ever occurred to anybody at MB what went wrong, or whether they even perceived it as a problem.

[Dbacksfan12]

I wonder if Matt O. will chime in. 

You people are covering it nicely.

Fandango comes to mind.

It is extraordinarily rare (I had a copy once and may have sold it to one of you fine collectors), but there IS a Fandango Quiz Book.

Well, I’ll be.  Thanks for the correction—if you remember, was it just a book of country music trivia, or was it formatted in categories closer to the show?

[SuperMatch93]

You've almost got it right, but you're not putting two and two together.  This was a delightful discovery we made a few years ago which made the ridiculousness of the High Rollers questions actually make sense.

Some genius over at Milton Bradley decided that to save a little time, they would copy a bunch of questions from their Now You See It home game and use them for High Rollers.  So, for example, a question asked "Who was a famous Olympic star?" and the answer given was OWENS.  Now with no other context, that makes no sense as a High Rollers question.  There are hundreds of famous Olympic stars.  But when you realize that the question was taken from their Now You See It game, and OWENS was the answer they wanted because it appeared in the grid everything starts to make sense.  All these questions that appeared vague or imprecise in the High Rollers game were "pinned" (as they say in the game show writing racket) in their original Now You See It context by being the answer that was on the game board.

Apparently, this was all lost on the poor soul who was tasked with filling up the quiz book.  You have to wonder if it ever occurred to anybody at MB what went wrong, or whether they even perceived it as a problem.

Ah I see, I was under the impression that it was an accident rather than a shortcut. Thanks for filling that in.

[Strikerz04]

The one that eats at me most (especially because I saw a localized version while traveling in Italy but it was 45 euros) though it would be a tough ask for people to play the game straight is Greed.

The one that eats at me the most is the Australian boxed version of Temptation that we never got here. Might it have been a rare box game that was even better than the show if it had come out here?

I had bought one off of eBay from 2007 that was $90AU that I still have. Just seems rare.

[Sodboy13]

The one that eats at me the most is the Australian boxed version of Temptation that we never got here. Might it have been a rare box game that was even better than the show if it had come out here?

The prize cards are modern, die-cut, and glossy, and the Quizzard buttons are red and round, and that's about it. The rules and contents are exactly the same as previous versions of the $ale home game, though I think there may have been a Burglar card added to the Fame Game deck. No Vault, no speed rounds, no jackpot building, and the same buying or passing of "Winner" cards at the end of each game, except this version's biggest card is $500,000 in gold bars.

[BrandonFG]

Others with more knowledge can chime in, but I’m guessing Hatos-Hall didn’t put a priority on home games. There was a ten-year gap between the MB and Ideal versions of Let’s Make a Deal, which is surprising given the show itself was red hot during that time. Maybe that’s why they didn’t bother with Split Second. (Another possibility: it would have been impossible to rank the buzz-ins at home by priority. Actually, the demands on whoever would be the “host”—rank the buzz-ins, judge the answers, parse out the money for a correct answer after each question, etc.—probably would take all the fun out of it.)

There was a board game in the early-90s also called Split Second, but of course not related to the show. However it used the concept of being first to have the right answer, and contestants wrote their answers on a dry-erase pad attached to a bizarre spring-like arm. I imagine a home edition for the show could use a similar setup for three people.

[TLEberle]

“Tom Kennedy action figure not included.”

Rubber bands provided the movement for the race to be first to answer simple and fast trivia questions or the more interesting how many crayons from a pound of wax sort.

These days you could run it from a website, but you could also throw wooden balls in a funnel and that gives you an order.

[alfonzos]

I have never tried it but I have always thought that the Slam-O-Matic device from Hands Down (by Ideal or Milton Bradley) would make a fine buzz-in device for "Split Second." The player who responded first would be on the bottom, the player would responded last would be on the top.