Now that I have seen the new "½-Off" game on TPIR, I thought it was quite good. It reminded me of a game that was once played on the old Ohio Lottery "Buckeye 1000" TV game show of the 1970s, back in the days when playing the lottery meant buying tickets with pre-printed numbers on them and then waiting for the outcome of a once-a-week number drawing.
In this case, the regular "Buckeye 1000" game tickets carried an extra 5-digit number in the ticket's top margin, which you matched with the 5-digit winning lottery number that was drawn on each week's show. (The regular 5-digit numbers on the tickets won you either $250 or $500 if you matched them with that number.) If you matched this special number on your ticket, you qualified for this special limited-run game that was played on the show along with the regular TV game that paid the winner up to $1000 a month for life, with a $400,000 minimum payoff.
There really wasn't much to the game, however: Sixteen qualifying players would be seated in a gallery (like on Jackpot) with cards numbered from 1 to 16. They would stand up at the start of each round of play and then a wheel with segments alternating "High" and "Low" would be spun that would eliminate half of them from further play (either the players numbered 1-8 or the players numbered 9-16, depending on what the wheel stopped on). The eliminated players would then sit down and a second wheel with segments alternating "Odd" and "Even" would be spun to eliminate half of the remaining players, narrowing the field to four.
These four players still standing would then turn over their number cards and on the card backs would be one of the letters "X," "T," "R," and "A" (the game was set up so that no two players would have the same letter at this point). One more wheel was spun with those four letters on it, and the player holding the letter corresponding to the one the wheel stopped on would win the prize for that round and be eliminated from further game play entirely.
My memory is a little hazy on the prizes for each round in this game, but I think it was played for $5,000 in the first round, $10,000 in the second, and $25,000 in the third, with all of the other players getting $1,000 for qualifying for the show.
Now to the guy who created this game for The Price is Right: How about coming up with some new and interesting games for the Ohio Lottery's current Cash Explosion Double Play show? They've had that same boring game for years, which is why I switched to the Powerball Instant Millionaire lottery show that airs opposite it in the Greater Cincinnati area.
Michael Brandenburg
(and I hope you'll have it up and running starting October 2, 2004!)
