[quote name=\'uncamark\' date=\'Nov 3 2005, 01:53 PM\']As for Matt's comment, I also have the feeling that "Pyramid" was also meant to straddle and that the fact that two self-contained games could be played in a half-hour--or 25 minutes in its CBS days--was also a happy accident.[/quote]
See, you'd think I'd be a good boy and appreciate the support, but my gut instinct was just the opposite for Pyramid. Maybe I'm giving Bob Stewart too much credit as a game designer, but I always felt like Pyramid was designed from day one to have two matches per show. I realize that before they solved the problem of the interminable tiebreakers, they'd occasionally have three Winner's Circles in one program. Still, I always saw that as a cool little quirk of necessity, and they always moved a little faster on those episodes to get back on track.
As long as I'm drumming up support for my position on Feud, keep in mind that similar Goodson-Todman games from that period frequently straddled. Match Game, the Passwords, Card Sharks, even obscurities like The Better Sex were more concerned about their rounds of play than they were in how long those rounds took. The original structure of Feud -- the idea that you couldn't be sure whether the game would end in three or four or even five rounds -- certainly suggests to me that they weren't originally thinking about wrapping everything up neatly in half an hour.
