On September 16, film lovers mourned the loss Robert Redford, star of The Sting, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and many other popular movies. For game show fans, the name Robert Redford is connected with one film where he never stepped in front of the camera: he directed 1994’s Quiz Show, a dramatic retelling of the 1950s quiz show scandal.

The scandal involved the producers of several game shows effectively rigging the outcomes, and claiming that the shows were not rigged. One of these shows was NBC’s Twenty One. Herb Stempel had been winning games and had become a champion, but Twenty One executive producer Dan Enright told him to lose to a handsome, charismatic newcomer named Charles Van Doren. Apparently, Enright promised Stempel a slot as a panelist on a new series in development, but Enright didn’t keep his promise, and Stempel blew the whistle. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to care. Not much happened until another contestant on another popular show called Dotto went public with a similar claim. This led to investigations, a Grand Jury, Congressional hearings, cancellation of many game shows, and federal regulations to prevent rigging in the future.

More than 30 years after the dust had settled from the scandal, Robert Redford made Quiz Show to explore what happened. In 1994, he told interviewer Bobbie Wygant, “[The quiz show scandal] has so much to do with where we are today…where we can be so numb, so cynical, and so…shoulder-shrugging about major moral violations in our lives. Falls from grace, from presidents to military people to political figures, religious leaders… leaves us with this eroded trust, which is sort of a big deal. [A] society without something to trust, a society awash in moral ambiguity is not a great place to be, so how did we get there?”

Robert Redford’s Quiz Show provided a behind-the-scenes look at NBC’s Twenty One, but it mostly ignored the complicated legal questions. It’s a motion picture with no documentary intentions. According to some critics, the movie’s storytelling was no more trustworthy than the producers and contestants who perpetrated the scandals. And, from our perhaps more accurate historical perspective, neither the scandals nor the movie nor the legal and journalistic frenzy surrounding the quiz scandals ought to be trusted.

As with many “based-on-a-true-story” films, Quiz Show used reality as a jumping-off point. In the movie, Charles Van Doren auditioned to be a contestant on Tic Tac Dough (another popular game show from the same production company). That never happened. In fact, Twenty One producer met Van Doren at a party and cast him — with none of the application or testing process common today on game shows. In the film, Stempel fails to answer a question and loses the game. That didn’t happen either. As with any fictionalized account of real events, the movie takes liberties to make the story more interesting. Congressional attorney Richard Goodwin is credited as a co-producer on the film. He told The Washington Post, “[Robert Redford’s team] is not trying to con anyone. They’re trying to make a good movie.”

And that’s reasonable, but as Twenty One co-executive producer Dan Enright’s son Don pointed out in his oral history interview for The Strong Museum’s National Archives of Game Show History, Redford conceded to altering the truth to make a more interesting entertainment product… and added, isn’t that what the quiz show producers were doing?

Apparently, the quiz show producers of the 1950s accomplished their goal. In 1987, film critics Siskel & Ebert enthusiastically reviewed a Shokus Video collection of big-money quiz show episodes from the 1950s. Gene Siskel freely admitted, “I couldn’t care if some of the contestants were briefed beforehand. It is great theater!”

Roger Ebert, reviewing Redford’s Quiz Show seven years later, printed a review that seemed to grieve for what had been lost from television’s past. Ebert admitted that he simply didn’t like modern game shows. Instead, he appreciated the challenging, if rigged, quiz shows of the 1950s.

Ebert also seemed to view the quiz show scandals in the same light that Redford saw them—as the end of something that a nation used to possess. “Now take stock of what we have lost in the four decades since Twenty One came crashing down. We have lost a respect for intelligence; we reward people for whatever they happen to have learned, instead of feeling they might learn more. We have forgotten that the end does not justify the means – especially when the end is a high TV rating or any other kind of popular success. And we have lost a certain innocent idealism.”

That may be true, but an idealist might also believe that it’s better for a game show to be a truly honest endeavor. Because of the scandal captured in Redford’s film, laws were enacted and measures were put into place to ensure exactly that. For over 65 years, game shows have been produced in accordance with these rules.

To learn more about those laws, NAGSH has produced another oral history interview, this one focused entirely on “standards and practices.” These standards and practices are followed by every contemporary game show producer, staff member, network executive, advertising executive, contestant, and host.

The post Robert Redford…and Quiz Show appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

It’s back-to-school time, so this is a reminder to the parents and guardians out there to make sure your students are all stocked up on class supplies—pencils, notebooks, folders, buzzers, and bells. Wait, buzzers and bells?

That’s right. Game shows have gone back to school. In 2024, National Archives of Game Show History co-founder Bob Boden and longtime Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! executive producer Harry Friedman established a curriculum of academic courses about game shows for California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA).

Friedman explains, “I was at a TV Academy Foundation conference about three years ago. I was randomly seated next to Dr. Dina Ibrahim, who was heading up Cal State University’s entertainment alliance. We talked and she seemed intrigued by the work I did. We began discussing game shows, and how ubiquitous they are, and the effect they’ve had on pop culture.”

Friedman, half-jokingly, told Dr. Ibrahim, “I think you should have a course about game shows, how to produce them, and how to develop them.”

To Friedman’s surprise, she liked the idea. Dr. Kristiina Hackel, the head of the Department of TV, Film and Media Studies at Cal State LA, asked Friedman to draft a proposal for coursework. Friedman called Bob Boden and asked if he could help brainstorm some ideas for the course.

Friedman says, “90 minutes later, Bob [sent] me a fully formed 13-week production course schedule. It turned out that this was something that Bob had already tried to create for UCLA, and they didn’t move forward with it. We modified maybe 10 percent of Bob’s original idea, just because the entertainment business had changed enough in that time that the class had to reflect those changes, but everything we needed was already there.”

Students who are interested can take three classes over a series of semesters. They begin with a class called “Get in the Game,” an introduction to game and reality competition shows. The second semester is called “The Game Plan,” focusing on how to develop game show formats and sell them to production companies, networks, and media platforms. The third semester, “Hands on Buzzers,” explores the ins and outs of how to produce a game show.

The professors are game show production veterans Stuart Krasnow, Shannon Perry, Sean Loughlin, and Joey Ortega. Ortega taught high school for three years prior to going into game show production, and that academic background was partly why he was asked to help teach these courses.

Ortega says, “Cal State LA is interesting because there’s such a mix of students. Some are later-in-life students who want to change careers, some are 22 and just about to step in the real world. For the game show curriculum specifically, a lot of our students are media majors; film and television production majors. Many of them hadn’t thought of game shows as a pathway to a career. They came here thinking of a media career in terms of ‘filmmaking’ and the game show classes have taught them that there’s this other route that they can take.”

At a time when the media landscape is in flux, and the way people consume entertainment has changed so drastically in only a single generation, Ortega has been fascinated by learning about what his students already know, and delighted by the opportunity to expand their horizons.

“A lot of my students tend to come into the class knowing Deal or No Deal, Wipeout, and Family Feud. These are the shows that they’ve grown up with. It’s so much fun to introduce them to classic games and get their reactions. I love showing my students Pyramid, particularly the Winner’s Circle round. You can see it in their faces—they are locked in when they see the Winner’s Circle; that game has their full attention every time.”

Harry Friedman says, “I observed classes a couple of times and was blown away. Not just by what the students were learning, but by their creativity, their teamwork, and their work ethic. There were so many transferrable skills being taught in these game show classes that they will be able to take with them no matter what they may end up doing.”

The game show curriculum is still quite new but has already shown the potential for creating careers and impacting the genre. In several weeks, a pilot will be recorded for a new game show format that was developed by a student in the Cal State LA classes.

Friedman explains, “Everybody in the class will be part of the team making the pilot. There will be schedules, deadlines, assigned roles and duties, budgets. Everything involved in making a pilot, and it’s going to involve these students.”

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The author of this article majored in radio & television with a focus on journalism because it was the closest thing available to a game show curriculum. The author seethes with envy at a new generation of college students who have the chance to watch Let’s Make a Deal and The Price is Right because they’re doing homework.

The post Next Game Show Creators appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

After its founding on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer Company had one of the fastest rises ever for an upstart company. Their first computer was named, simply, Apple I, but in June 1977, the company changed the world with the Apple II. With an external shell for containing the components, a built-in keyboard, game paddles, cassettes for saving data, and glorious full-color graphics, the Apple II was credited for expanding the market for computers beyond experts, business professionals, and hobbyists. For the first time, consumers saw a computer that seemed like it could be used by anybody.

The Apple II made such a quick impact after only a year on the market that Apple employees reported to CBS Television City in Hollywood to help get a game show off the ground.

Tic Tac Dough had originally aired on NBC in the late 1950s. Contestants faced a tic-tac-toe grid with a category in each of the nine squares. The champion (playing X) and the challenger (playing O) took turns picking squares and answering questions, earning a square with each correct answer. For a little added suspense and strategy, the nine categories were mounted on nine spinning drums that would rotate after each round of play. A contestant looking to capture their third box for the win could suddenly find themselves stuck with a category that stumped them.

Tic Tac Dough ended in 1959. In 1978, series creators Jack Barry & Dan Enright were riding a new wave of success with The Joker’s Wild, a quiz in which a giant slot machine determined the categories. Looking for another hit show, Barry & Enright reached to a show from their past and decided to launch The New Tic Tac Dough, selling a daytime version to CBS, with a nighttime version to air on local stations across the country in syndication.

Nine Apple computers were purchased to form the game board for the new version; one Apple II for each square on the game board; a tape cassette machine was also attached to each one for data storage. A 10th computer, the Altair 8800 manufactured by MITS, served as a brain of sorts for the entire collection. All nine Apple IIs were connected to the Altair, which would “tell” each Apple computer what it should display at different points in the game.

Bob Bishop, an early Apple employee who designed many of the company’s earliest games (Space Maze and Bomber among other titles) was dispatched to CBS to bring the show to life. He shared his memories in a 2009 interview with Em Maginnis for Juiced.GS Magazine

Bishop remembered, “They needed to put up a giant ‘X’, a giant ‘O’, a dragon, the names of the categories, whatever it is they wanted—somebody had to do that. And so they elected me! It was a fun little thing. I’d never done anything in television before, so it was my first chance to actually go behind the scenes and see what goes on in a TV station. It was kind of a one-shot deal that lasted a few months. There wasn’t that much to do—it was just a matter of programming the computer to do what they wanted. But it was fun because, as you know, when you first write a program, it never quite works right the first time, and even when you think you’ve got it debugged, it doesn’t quite work. I remember we were doing the prototype and the emcee, Wink Martindale, would say, ‘Now, we’ll look at the categories,’ and nothing would happen. Who’s to blame? Everybody’s pointing the finger at somebody else. Usually, it turned out it wasn’t my fault, though!”

Bishop successfully debugged the system and The New Tic Tac Dough was a success. In time, Barry & Enright got more Apple II computers, offering them as prizes in their bonus round, with announcer Jay Stewart even making it a point to hype the computer by touting, “Just connect it to your TV set and you’re ready to program for recording family records, computer games, artwork, music, and it even helps the kids with their math…It’s the same computer that runs our Tic Tac Dough board!”

 Think of what a glowing endorsement that would have been in the late 1970s. A big-time television show in Hollywood used this computer as the central nervous system for their entire production—and you can use it in your own home!

Tic Tac Dough aired for the next eight years, intriguing young viewers who became part of that first generation to live with computers in the home. Two of those fans, Stephen Wylie and Kevin Trinkle, spent the past four months on a labor of love that they finally unveiled on June 20.

Vintage Computer Festival Southwest is an annual gathering of old-school techies displaying their personal collections of classic obsolete computers and other gear. Among the attractions at this year’s event: Nintendo’s Famicom System from the 1980s, with a selection of games sold only in Japan; decommissioned equipment used by the Weather Channel in the early 1990s; Hewlett-Packard’s Pen Plotter, a printer that drew pictures with two mounted pens; Tandy hardware and software sold at RadioShack; and several computer models playing the Oregon Trail on ordinary green-hued monitors.

In the lobby of the Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at University of Texas at Dallas, visitors were welcomed with an eye-popping array of authentic Apple IIs, strung together just like old times to form the game board for Tic Tac Dough.

Trinkle explains, “Knowing the history of Tic Tac Dough and the board being the first use of computer graphics in a TV game show, we thought it would be cool to recreate it on as close to the original hardware as we could. We’re both game show nerds.”

Surprisingly, rounding up nine 1978 computers in working condition was one of the easiest parts of the process! Trinkle says, “I own three of the Apple II machines, acquired over the past six years as part of my private collection. Stephen owns one of them.”

The other five came from local vintage tech enthusiasts. Three of the computers had been dug out of the dirt behind the former site of a computer store in Dallas.

 Without any actual instructions or guidelines from the real show to work with, Wylie & Trinkle studied numerous episodes of Tic Tac Dough, and used their own knowledge and expertise to work backward, figuring out what kind of coding would have to be programmed in order to produce the numbers, words, and graphics.

Trinkle says, “Quite a bit of my first code was thrown out as it was just too slow…[It] all had to be thrown out and rewritten.”

Wylie adds, “I didn’t expect to be writing Apple II code at this point in my life! I hadn’t written anything serious on the Apple II since junior high school over 30 years ago…I had to relearn quite a bit that I had long since forgotten and learn new things in the process.”

The recreation wasn’t 100% authentic; for lack of an Altair 8800, Wylie & Trinkle used a modern Raspberry Pi to do the thinking for the Apple IIs. The Raspberry Pi also supplied theme music and sound effects. To give some context about what visitors were seeing, Wylie also displayed a Tic Tac Dough press kit from 1978, with photos and information about the show.

Visitors tended to have one of two reactions: “I remember this show!” and “There was a game show that ran on Apple IIs? That’s awesome! I never knew that!”

Dozens of games were played over the weekend, transporting people to television’s past for just a few minutes at a time, and celebrating how far their favorite technology, and our favorite genre of television, have come in the decades since. Wylie & Trinkle are not unique among the fandom either. There are fans who have built their own Showcase Showdowns and Wheels of Fortune in their workshops, fans who have wired their own Jeopardy! buzzers, printed their own giant decks of cards, constructed Match Game question machines and host lecterns. Game shows have inspired hundreds of labors of love from devoted fans.

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The two-part documentary Pee-Wee as Himself, now available for streaming on HBO Max, chronicles actor Paul Reubens’ unexpected rise to fame as the character Pee-Wee Herman. As the documentary explains, game shows had a small role in the rise of Reubens and his bizarre alter ego.

Reubens’ earliest shots at the big time came from The Gong Show. He and actress Charlotte McGinnis appeared on the daytime show as contestants, calling themselves “Betty and Eddie’s Sensational Sound Effects,” in which they acted out an old-time radio show and performed all the necessary sound effects with their mouths. They won the grand prize of $516.32 and were invited by the show’s staff to appear on the nighttime version of The Gong Show; they performed the act again and won the grand prize again.

While many game shows have rules prohibiting contestants from returning, The Gong Show creator/producer Chuck Barris ran his show very differently. There was no limit to how often a person could be a contestant. The only restrictions were that returning contestants had to audition just like anybody else, and that returnees had to do a different act for every audition that they attended. Reubens would perform on The Gong Show, then devise a new act, and call the show to make an appointment for the next audition. By his own count, Reubens appeared on the show 14 times.

Reubens credited the show with giving him unexpected financial security at an unstable time in his life. Chuck Barris courted members of SAG and AFTRA, two performers’ unions (they have since merged) with the promise that he would pay union members “scale”—an established minimum guaranteed payment for a television performance. At the time it was about $250 for each of those 14 performances. Barris also promised royalty payments and delivered when he sold Gong Show reruns to local stations. Reubens received a windfall check for royalties covering the next several years’ worth of Gong Show reruns. Reubens later said that he called off his search for a day job, living off Gong Show money while he was developing material for his theater show.

Reubens created the character of Pee-Wee Herman for a Groundlings performance. Originally, the premise was that Herman was a bad stand-up comic who had trouble remembering the punch lines of his jokes. But Reubens kept adding extra details—playing with toys, throwing candy at the audience, doing bizarre things with his voice—until the character became completely different.

America first met Pee-Wee Herman on another Chuck Barris game show, The Dating Game. Shortly after Reubens developed the character, he was looking through classified ads; Chuck Barris’ staff had placed a large ad seeking people to be contestants on their shows, and Reubens had the inspired idea to audition for The Dating Game, fully in character as Pee-Wee. Reubens, sporting the now-iconic gray suit and red bowtie, walked into the room among 200 dashing young studs and immediately realized that all the attention was on him.

Herman, introduced by host Jim Lange as a comedian whose interests included bird watching, trapeze, and tightrope walking, is still in something of a “beta testing” stage as a character. Watching The Dating Game now, a Pee-Wee Herman fan would notice that the voice isn’t quite right, and that he has thick hair pressed tightly against his head with a gob of grease, as opposed to the short haircut he sported later.

 Reubens actually successfully made a date on his first appearance. As with The Gong Show, he was encouraged to return to The Dating Game a few more times. Unlike The Gong Show, he was not asked to change a thing for The Dating Game. He returned as Pee-Wee Herman. Even if it is not quite the character you know, it’s easy to see why Chuck Barris’ staff was enamored with him. The bachelorette flirtatiously asked, “What do you think of when you hear the word ‘go’”? Pee-Wee responded with an awkward story about driving his Volkswagen Bus to traffic school, and even the other two bachelors get caught on camera chuckling at his odd behavior.

As a follow-up, she said she didn’t like it when a date made things “too easy” for her and asked Pee-Wee how he’d make things a little tough for her. He pledged to wear a tight-fitting bodysuit under his clothes during their date. Jim Lange audibly lost it, guffawing and taking a second to collect himself.

In the seven years following his last shot at The Dating Game, Reubens as Pee-Wee Herman had launched a successful theatre show, adapted that into an HBO special, made 11 show-stealing appearances as a guest on Late Night with David Letterman, starred in a feature film, and launched his own Saturday morning network kids’ show. As Pee-Wee fans and keepers of game show history, we take a little pride in the role that Chuck Barris and the game show genre played in his rise to stardom.

The post Pee-Wee Herman…the Game Show Star? appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

A new movie coming out on April 4, The Luckiest Man in America, chronicles one of the most famous (some would say infamous) moments in game show history. Paul Walter Hauser stars as Michael Larson, an ice cream truck driver who made history in the strangest of ways as a contestant on Press Your Luck in 1984. If you want to be surprised by what happened, stop reading now, enjoy the movie, and come back for the full scoop. If you want the details now, though, keep reading this edge-of-your-seat story.

LET’S GO TO THE BOARD
It probably holds the distinction of being the most famous game show of all time, at least that the average TV viewer can’t remember the name of. Mention Press Your Luck and you might get a glimmer of recognition or dazed look. Mention “the game with Big Bucks and Whammies,” though, and faces glow with memories of the larger-than-life game board with every color of the rainbow, surrounded by the frenetic flashing lights, and the whimsical cartoon characters that popped up every now and then to ruin everyone’s fun.

Press Your Luck was a dream combination of “game” and “show.” Sure, there was a flashy set, noisy contestants, blaring electronic music and sound effects, but contained in that eye-popping package was a game perfectly designed to build to a thrilling climax every day, infused with so much fate, so many unpredictable elements, that it seemed there was no such thing as a “runaway game.” Every moment, every turn counted, right down to the very end.

Press Your Luck originally began life as Second Chance, an ABC game show that survived for only 17 weeks. Host Jim Peck welcomed three contestants each day. Peck would read a trivia question and the contestants would write their answers. Peck would then read three possible correct answers and give the players a second chance to write an answer. Writing the correct answer on your second chance earned a “spin.” Sticking with your first answer and being correct earned three spins.

After four questions were played, everybody redeemed their spins on a looming eighteen-square game board. A blinking frame of lights flashed from square to square on the board, almost faster than the eye could see it. Some of the spaces contained cash, some spaces had gift boxes; when landed on, the gift boxes would reveal prizes. The players built up their scores with all those prizes and money. But three of the eighteen spaces were Devils. Landing on a Devil cost the player everything; no matter how far they were into the game, a Devil always cost players their whole haul. A player also had the option of passing spins to the opponent with the highest score. A second round was played, with higher money amounts and more valuable goodies on the board, plus a big money space that could be worth up to $5,000 and an extra spin. No matter how far behind a player was, that available extra spin meant it was always mathematically possible to catch up. Combined with Devils that could wipe out an entire score at any minute, and you had a game that could not possibly decided until the very last spin.

Despite the show coming and going in 95 episodes, creator Bill Carruthers and ABC daytime boss Michael Brockman were confident that he had hit a winning idea. In 1983, Brockman, now at CBS, was looking for a new game and asked Carruthers if he could tinker with Second Chance. The tinkered version was called Press Your Luck. The question round was scaled back considerably to a simple ring-in-to-answer game that sped up proceedings considerably. The spin board was now stuffed with slide projectors that alternated between three options each, for a total of 54 unique possible results on each spin. There were more spaces that offered extra spins, which meant more time spent hitting the button and collecting goodies…or “Whammys,” the funny red blobs that replaced the original Devils. The penalty was punctuated nicely in Press Your Luck. When a contestant landed on a Whammy, there was a brief time-out for an animated Whammy cartoon, with the Whammy mocking the contestant, activating weapons (which usually backfired), or referencing trendy songs and TV commercials.

Carruthers also made a slight aesthetic change to the board; the flashing light now blinked from square to square a bit slower. It still moved fast enough that contestants couldn’t really make sense of where the light was until they hit their button to stop it; it just wasn’t moving with the strobe-like speed of Second Chance’s light.

Early in the developmental stages of Press Your Luck, Bill Carruthers made it known to CBS that he wanted the lights to be controlled by a computer system that could handle 12 patterns in which the light could flash. With the technology available at the time, a computer system that could truly randomize the light would have been prohibitively expensive, but Carruthers thought that a computer alternating between a dozen patterns could create the illusion of randomness convincingly. CBS agreed to the suggestion initially.

When the Press Your Luck pilot was shot, Carruthers was given a system that had five patterns. Carruthers said that would do for the pilot, but if CBS picked up the series, he needed a dozen of them. But when CBS put Press Your Luck on the schedule, Carruthers went to his new network bosses and reminded them of his request.

“We just don’t have the money for it,” he was told. “We can only give you five patterns.”
Carruthers, in a prescient moment, warned the network, “I want to go on the record right now, I believe if we only have five patterns, we’re going to have a situation where a contestant memorizes the board.”

The retort came from another staffer in the room: “We should be so lucky if we get viewers who care about this show enough to watch it every day and memorize the way the lights flash.” Carruthers’ warning, was forgotten about until May 19, 1984, a day when Carruthers, who served as his own director, watched the game in the control room, saw what one contestant was doing, and pulled off his headset in exasperation.

“He’s done it,” Carruthers announced.

HERE COMES THE ICE CREAM MAN
Michael Larson was an eccentric Lebanon, Ohio, native whose mother optimistically described him to the Cincinnati Enquirer as “…[E]xtremely smart and very intense. Once he gets his mind set on something, nothing deters him. He follows through on anything he sets out to do.”
His brother, James, had a grimmer assessment, later telling Game Show Network, “He was doomed to self-destruction.”

In his younger years, he seemed musically inclined, playing the organ and singing with a jazz band. But by day, Michael Larson worked various odd jobs during his adult life, never concerned with finding a career and far more interested in finding a get-rich-quick-scheme that would set him up for life. He spent the better part of ten years driving an ice cream truck, which meant that he was rendered unemployed every year when autumn and winter struck Ohio. Larson spent his days watching a bizarre arrangement of multiple televisions and VCRs in his living room. It wasn’t a matter of vegging out, his common-law wife later remembered; he seemed to be watching all of the sets as if he was searching for something; he just didn’t know what it was.

Larson found Press Your Luck shortly after it bowed on CBS in September 1983. He became fascinated with it, to the point of watching it and recording it daily to re-watch the games later, and after a few months, Larson figured out Bill Carruthers’ big secret. Larson spotted the patterns.
Larson bought a plane ticket and took a journey to Los Angeles to visit the Press Your Luck production office. There, he met contestant coordinator Bob Edwards and show creator Bill Carruthers. Larson, a natural born salesman, won over Carruthers quickly with his tale of flying out to Los Angeles just to be a contestant on his creation.

Edwards was wary. After Larson left, he voiced his concerns. “There’s something about this guy that worries me.”

Carruthers liked Larson, and admitted later that he should have trusted his contestant coordinator’s gut.

ATTACK ON THE SHOW
Larson’s memorization efforts were focused mainly on two of the eighteen spaces of the board. One square would cycle between $1,000, or $1,250, or $1,500 in round one, and then $3,000, $4,000, and $5,000 in round two. The other square cycled between $500, $750, and $1,000 in round two. And in round two, all of those cash values had extra spins attached to them. Larson didn’t necessarily know WHAT he’d land on when he pressed his button, but as long as he landed on those two spaces, he knew that, #1, he would never hit a Whammy, and #2, his turn would never end because he’d keep piling up those extra spins.

Behind the scenes, chaos erupted. The control room was packed with staffers and CBS executives who had all figured out exactly what they were watching, but nobody could grasp for a reason to stop it from happening. So even after Carruthers declared that Larson had gamed the system, everyone recognized that the only thing they could do was keep tape rolling, even though Larson was about to take his 30th spin and that the taping for this 30-minute game show was approaching the 45-minute mark.

Larson had already set a CBS daytime game show record when his score reached the $80,000 mark, but he kept going until he crossed the $100,000 mark. Larson would later admit that he suddenly went blank when he hit six figures and couldn’t remember the patterns anymore; the past hour left him mentally spent. He passed the spins to his opponents. Disaster almost struck when they passed spins back to him, but Larson survived on pure luck and finished the game with $110,237, almost entirely cash. (He also got a sailboat and a vacation in his till.) CBS executives and lawyers desperately searched for something or evidence that Larson had cheated. They wanted to find a rule to say that he wasn’t entitled to the winnings, but the efforts were in vain. Larson had played the game perfectly ethically and just beaten the system.

Robert Noah, another venerable game show producer, told TV Guide, “What everyone was finally forced to acknowledge was that what he did was legitimate. It was like being a card counter at blackjack. After all, nowhere in the rules did it say that you couldn’t pay attention.”

CBS edited the game and spread it out over two days, but the network was so embarrassed that a contestant had beaten their system that they aired it with no fanfare. In the coming years, reruns of Press Your Luck would go into syndication and on USA Network, but Larson’s games were never included in the rerun packages. His amazing performance evolved into something of an urban legend; he was errantly blamed for the show’s cancellation. In some circles, the story went that CBS cancelled the show because Larson drained the network of so much money. It was actually just the opposite; word of mouth triggered a ratings spike for Press Your Luck in the months following Larson’s performance, and the show stayed on the air for two more years.

AFTERMATH
For obvious reasons, Bill Carruthers finally got his wish, and then some. CBS enhanced the computer system and added 20 more patterns to the game board. A short time later, Larson curiously called Bob Edwards’ office and asked if the show was planning on having a tournament of champions any time soon. Larson’s inquiry was politely ignored.

But amazingly, tragically, the reason Larson wanted to come back was because his money was already gone. After paying income taxes, he still had a pretty good chunk of money left, about $70,000. As Larson’s common-law wife later recalled, things went seriously wrong because of a “radio contest,” although the contest she described sounds suspiciously like something another game show, Sale of the Century, did later in 1984. The show offered a $40,000 cash jackpot to contestants who mailed in $1 bills with serial numbers that matched a pre-determined series of digits. Larson went to the bank, withdrew a significant amount of money in $1 bills and brought it home in grocery bags, so he could go through the whole pile every day. One night, he and his wife left the house. When they came back, the grocery bags were gone. Whatever was left after the burglary, Larson lost in a failed real estate investment.

Larson’s life would take some mysterious and bizarre twists in the coming years. Larson, who admitted to Peter Tomarken after the game that he couldn’t afford to buy his daughter a present a few days earlier, promptly bought some toys and sent them off to her. And then he vanished for a while. When the area newspaper tried to write a story about the local boy who made good, they couldn’t reach him.

His mother told the paper, “He just took off Sunday night by plane on a vacation. I have no idea where he went but I’m sure it’s towards the west coast.”

Over the next decade, most of his family had no idea where he was even living. FBI agents contacted his brother one day asking if he knew Larson’s whereabouts. Larson resurfaced briefly in 1994 after the release of the film Quiz Show. The film’s focus on the quiz show scandals of the 1950s reignited interest about the noteworthy contestant of 1984 who had swindled a game show. Larson appeared on a few news and talk shows and granted an interview to TV Guide, enjoying the 15 extra minutes of fame that the movie afforded him. But the movie left theaters, the interest faded away, and so too did Michael Larson. On February 16, 1999, Larson died at age 49 from throat cancer. When his family was notified, it was the first time any of them learned that he had been living in Florida, more or less hiding from the FBI and the SEC, due to his possible involvement in a telephone-related con game.

Larson’s triumph and tragedy were chronicled in a 2003 Game Show Network documentary, titled Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal, a project overseen by NAGSH co-founder Bob Boden.

In April 2025, the wide release of the film The Luckiest Man in America, starring Paul Walter Hauser as Michael Larson, will immortalize the story on the big screen.

DO YOU REMEMBER…THESE OTHER MOVIES INSPIRED BY GAME SHOWS?

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002): Based on Chuck Barris’ “unauthorized biography” about his claims that he was a CIA assassin during his years of producing and hosting shows.
Legends of the Hidden Temple (2016): More than 20 years after the original series ended, Nickelodeon unleashed a delightful made-for-TV movie about a group of kids who wander into an abandoned amusement park attraction and discover it’s Olmec’s temple.
Quiz Show (1994): A dramatization of the turmoil at Twenty One during the quiz show scandals, and how contestants Herb Stempel and Charles Van Doren were affected.
 

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The most prolific name in the history of game shows was a man who once admitted to TV Guide, “I’m certainly not the man who appeals to women ages 18-35.”

Bill Cullen was right about that. He appealed to everybody. For 40 years, he appeared on one game show or another; often one game show and another. His gigs overlapped and he had no qualms about taking on whatever work he was offered.

Born in Pittsburgh on February 18, 1920, Bill Cullen was stricken by polio as a baby and devoted his youth to conquering it. Despite being slowed down by a prominent limp, he took boxing lessons, he played sandlot ball, and even gave auto racing a try. Once out of high school, he got a job at his father’s garage, repairing engines and driving the tow truck. He would entertain customers by impersonating radio stars while he made his repairs on their car. When a salesman from local radio station WWSW came to the garage one day, Bill’s father talked him into giving the boy a job.

Bill, only nineteen years old, made the most of the opportunity. He secured a commercial endorsement deal for a local business and local newspapers would quote some of the jokes he made on the air. He developed something of a reputation for being WWSW’s on-air class clown. Convinced nobody was listening to the dull records he had to play sometimes, he would play the records backwards or toot a toy whistle. He would give wildly wrong accounts of the game in progress when he called play-by-play for sports, or ignore the game altogether and read the comics to listeners instead. Fearful of falling into a rut, Bill moved to New York City when he was 24 years old to see if he could get hired by one of the major radio networks.

As Bill would modestly point out himself, polio had kept him out of the military with World War II raging, but that prominent limp made him very employable. Many announcers in New York had left their jobs to serve in the military. Bill served as announcer for seven different shows during his first two years at CBS, and supplemented his income as a joke writer.

A fellow joke writer, Bill Todman, was looking to get out of the writing end of show business and focus on show development and production. When Todman and business partner Mark Goodson sold a show, Winner Take All, to CBS, with Bill Cullen as announcer. After only three months, Bill got the promotion to host. He never looked back.

More shows would follow: Catch Me If You Can, Hit the Jackpot, Beat the Clock, Act It Out, Meet Your Match, Quick as a Flash, Fun for All, Professor Yes ‘N No, Walk a Mile, Place the Face, Bank on the Stars, Stop the Music, Name That Tune, Down You Go, The Price is Right, Eye Guess, Three on a Match, Winning Streak, The $25,000 Pyramid, Blankety Blanks, I’ve Got a Secret, How Do You Like Your Eggs?, Pass the Buck, The Love Experts, Chain Reaction, Blockbusters, Child’s Play, Hot Potato, and The Joker’s Wild.

Did you get all that? A total of 29 game shows as permanent host. He also served as guest host for a few other games, Strike It Rich, To Tell the Truth, He Said She Said, and Password Plus. It’s a resume that overshadows even his closest contenders, Wink Martindale (17 game shows) and Tom Kennedy (15 game shows).

Over the years, Bill would talk at length about the skills required for a game show host. His modest attitude betrayed the actual work that he put into it. While he would repeatedly insist it was an easy job, the more he talked about it, the more apparent it was that Bill cared a lot about the art of hosting a game show, and that he put a great deal of thought into it day after day after day.

“Being a master of ceremonies? An easy job. Whenever the networks have a new job, they always complain that all the MCs are working and they can’t find a new one. That’s nonsense—anybody in show business can be an MC. All you need is to be reasonably okay in appearance and to have a good voice. The rest you pick up as you go. The hardest things to learn are pace and anticipation. And the only way to learn them is through experience. You’ll learn how to pace a show so it builds to a climax, and how to anticipate the good things and the possible problems. When you have job security, that helps. If you know you’ll be back on the next day, you don’t have to press so hard. When a contestant says something funny, you don’t have to try to top him.”

“[I am] dependable to a fault, never late, always reasonably amusing without insulting my guests or doing anything to them I wouldn’t want done to myself. The contestants who come into my arena have one shot at it, and I think they should have their day. Me, I’ll be back the next day and the day after that.”

“I know my trade…I absolutely never let anything upset me—on the air, I mean. If an error is made, I figure there’s always tomorrow. I refuse to get aggravated. To me, that’s the secret of my success—no, better say longevity. And it shows. I’m not one for making a big deal of it.”

Bill’s greatest successes were a nine-year tenure as host of The Price is Right; those nine years were contained entirely within his 15-year run as a regular panelist on I’ve Got a Secret. They were, by far, the two most popular game shows on television during Bill’s golden era. At the same time, he was New York City’s #1 disc jockey, dominating drive-time radio for six years.

Bill’s success during those years would either help or hinder him later, depending on how you look at it. His phenomenal success during that period ensured that he could continue working for years afterward, as long as he wanted, and that he’d be handsomely paid for it. But he never hosted another show that achieved the heights of success that he achieved with Price and Secret.

Candidly, it was because in many cases, Bill was being used to prop up weaker games. Bob Stewart was the creator of Eye Guess, the first show Bill hosted post-Price. Stewart bluntly referred to his own creation as “third-rate” and said that the success of the show was entirely thanks to Bill Cullen. Later shows on Bill’s resume would have extraordinarily short runs—Winning Streak in 1974 lasted six months, and Blankety Blanks ran a paltry ten weeks in 1975.

After the cancellation of Blanks, Bill said, “I’ve been fortunate…The passage of shows hasn’t hurt, because I don’t get blamed for it.  It does hurt me in another way, though, because I feel a certain amount of responsibility.  But you make yourself realize that nothing more can be done about it.”

But to his credit, it was probably because of Bill that those shows got on the air in the first place. He could give extra luster to a rusty concept, and game show director Bruce Burmester theorized that if a viewing audience liked a person on their screen enough, they’d be willing to go along with that person. Bill could win over viewers enough that they’d at least give the show a few chances before switching the channel to something else. Even to the very end of his career, he was more than a bargaining chip for a weak format; he could be salvation. One of his final shows, 1984’s Hot Potato, was pitched to NBC executives, who said that they would specifically buy it if Bill Cullen was hired to host it.

Bill would continue hosting game shows until 1986, at which point he retired without any fanfare and settled for a quiet happy retirement of swimming, reading, and long naps in a big comfy chair. He even did retirement perfectly.

Adam Nedeff is the author of Quizmaster: The Life and Times and Fun and Games of Bill Cullen, published by BearManor Media. The new 2nd edition of the book went on sale on February 18. National Archives of Game Show History co-founders Bob Boden and Howard Blumenthal both provided interviews and research for the book.

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While going through some filing cabinets filled with memos and paperwork from the CBS game shows of the 1980s, we found a marvelous document titled, “I Heard It on the Pyramid-Vine.” The authors, Jerry Martz and Tom Buchanan, were CBS audio technicians. Both of them worked many tapings of The $25,000 Pyramid and The $100,000 Pyramid. As a refresher on these shows, celebrities and contestants teamed up for a game of word association. One player had to describe a series of seven answers that their partner couldn’t see, and the partner tried to guess as many as possible in under 30 seconds.

The pressure of performing under the clock in front of a national audience was enough to turn many minds blank over the years. At some point, to entertain themselves, Martz and Buchanan began noting their favorite bad answers at the tapings they worked, usually noting the episode number for each one. In 1987, they compiled them into “I Heard It on the Pyramid-Vine” and made copies for staff, crew, and executives. The first section of the document was called “Wonderful Clues that Just Wouldn’t Work.”

• BEAVER
  “Busy as a…” “…Seal.”
  
• PRAIRIE
  “Bury me not on the lone…” “…Range.”
  
• SHRIMP
  “A little crustacean is a…” “…Vegetable.”
  
• ALL ABOARD
  “A train conductor says…”  “…Bye-bye!”
  
• HARNESS
  “A racehorse wears a…” “…Helmet.”
  
• PEACOCK
  “The NBC mascot is a…” “…Ostrich.”
  
• CARDIGAN
  “A sweater that buttons down the front is called a…” “…Scarf.”
  
• HIVE
  “Bees live in a…” “…Hut.”
  
• A CLUB
  “A robber knocks you out by hitting you on the head with a…” “…Jackhammer.”
  
• TANK
  “You go to a gas station to fill up your…” “…Trunk.”

The next section is from the Winner’s Circle, where one player gave a list of items, and their partner had to name the category that those items fit into.

• PLANTS
  “Diffenbachia…Pathos…” “…Greek gods!”
  
• TYPES OF CHEESE
  “Edam…brie…” “…Breads!”
  
• WHAT A WIG MIGHT SAY
  “Eva Gabor is going to put me on her head again.” “…What Johnny Carson might say!”
  
• TYPES OF TEA
  “Orange pekoe…Constant Comment…” “…Cleaner.”
  

The next section is titled “Ridiculous Clues That Elicited the Right Answer Anyway.”

• SUBMARINE
  “An underground boat with a periscope.”
  
• A MOAT
  “The thing over the alligators.”

• A SNORKEL
  “The thing that sticks out of the water when you SCUBA dive…”
  
• A PICKLE
  “A dried cucumber.”

• JULIA CHILD
  “She’s a television.”
  
• A ROPE
  “Very fat string.”

• LOBSTER
  “A fish with claws.”
  
• A DINOSAUR
  “A rhinoceros is one.”

Hope you enjoyed a good laugh!

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“We surveyed 100 people. The top six answers are on the board…”

You probably easily guessed those iconic lines come from Family Feud. But have you ever wondered who those 100 people are?

Writing material and building each episode is plenty of work for any game show. When Family Feud started production in 1976, the staff took on an even bigger challenge. Not only would they write the material (the questions), but they would also collect answers from scores of people, tabulate the results, figure out what would and would not play as entertainment, and then build each show. Here’s how they did it…

In the weeks leading up to the first tapings, when surveys had to be taken for the earliest episodes of a not-yet-seen game, the survey respondents were audience members for other game shows from Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions. Studio audience members at Match Game, The Price is Right, and To Tell the Truth would be given pencils and asked to fill in their answers to the list of questions that they were given.

The system worked pretty well. The show was able to avoid “regional bias,” which can affect polling results. For example, if a national survey asks people to name a fast-food restaurant, but a disproportionate number of respondents are from southern California, “In-N-Out Burger” might end up being a very popular answer, even though the regional chain is unknown in most of the country. Fortunately, people who attend TV tapings in Los Angeles were rarely residents. They were usually tourists from all over the country. So, no regional bias.

Once production started on Family Feud, the staff needed to build a mailing list to collect survey responses, but they were uncertain whether the idea would produce the responses they needed. For the first few weeks of Family Feud on ABC, episodes included an announcement giving an address for viewers to write to if they wanted to fill out the surveys that would be used in the game.

The response was tremendous. Thousands of people wrote in to be one of the 100 people surveyed.

With so many eager volunteers, the show figured out how to use the help most effectively. They divided a map of the USA into four sections. To prevent the regional bias, every survey they mailed out was sent to an equal number of people living in each section. Each week, the staff prepared a list of 50 new questions. Those 50 questions would be mailed out to a total of 200—not 100—people.

Producer Cathy Hughart Dawson (host Richard’s former daughter-in-law) explains, “Sending out 200 surveys was a way to guarantee that we’d get 100 responses. If we just sent out 100, we might not hear back from everybody.”

The surveys were opened in the order that they were returned to the office until 100 surveys had been collected. Next, a staff member called a tabulator would gather the 100 answers given for every question. The tabulator was not allowed to editorialize or make judgment calls—instead, they simply counted the results, word-for-word, letter-for-letter, exactly as each respondent had written them.

The questions and the tabulated answers were then passed along to Cathy Hughart Dawson. She would pore through the individual answers and combine answers that expressed similar ideas. For example, let’s say a question was “Name something you buy at a pawn shop.” If 11 people wrote “jewelry,” 9 people wrote “necklace,” 6 people wrote “earrings,” and 5 people wrote “bracelet,” she might combine those answers to show that 31 people said “jewelry.”

As Feud viewers know, an answer not said by anybody in the survey group gets a “strike” in the main game, or a big fat zero in the scorekeeping in the Fast Money bonus round. But even answers given by multiple people could end up on the chopping block.

Cathy Hughart Dawson explains the logic, and the process. “For the Fast Money round, we want the contestants to have every opportunity, so every answer that was said by at least two people counted if the contestants said those answers. For the main part of the game, here’s what sometimes happened. We would get questions with a long list of answers given by two or more people. It would just work out that once I had combined all the similar answers, it would still be something like 15 answers that had been said by two or more people. Playing a round with 15 answers would mean it would take a prohibitively long time to play. When that happened, I would make a judgment call about how many answers we wanted on the board.” 

The reason the show has the freedom to do that is because of the language used to introduce each question—“We surveyed 100 people, the top 6 answers are on the board…” Five people may have said a given answer, but if those 5 people were only enough to make it the 7th most common answer in the survey, it’s fine for the show to omit that answer, because they’ve explicitly stated that they want the top six.

The only restrictions that the show had to adhere to in that situation was that they couldn’t skip over answers. If the Feud staff liked a particular answer that was given by 11 people, and they liked one said by 6 people, they couldn’t skip an answer given by 8 people. The answer given by 8 people would have to be included on the show, too.

One quirk of Family Feud—the game is about guessing what many people think, not necessarily what people know. Factually incorrect answers are given the same consideration as correct answers, and an answer that’s somehow “wrong” could appear on the board if enough people said it.

Because the show had so many volunteers (compensated with souvenir bumper stickers and buttons reading “I’m a Family Feud Pollee!”), the 200 people who received a particular survey were moved “to the back of the line” on the mailing list, and another 200 people were mailed the following week’s survey questions.

Volunteering for the show’s surveys didn’t mean you were giving up your chance to win money. People who responded to the surveys were still eligible to be contestants if they could round up four family members to join them as a team. Potential contestants weren’t even asked if they were part of the survey mailing list.

Dawson says, “I don’t think that ever came up, but if it had, I would have felt that there was no conflict of interest or unfairness in having a survey taker be a contestant on the show. We had a massive number of survey takers that we rotated through, and we conducted new surveys every week, so if you were a survey taker and you became a contestant on the show, the odds were already astronomical that you would get a question that you yourself answered. But let’s say you did. You still have to come up with answers that the other 99 people said. And maybe you were the only one to say your answer, which means it’s a strike, so even if you give your own answer, you might hurt your team instead of helping them.”

Richard Dawson’s version of Family Feud ended in 1985. When the show was revived in 1988 with new host Ray Combs (until Dawson returned for the 1994-95 season), they continued using the same mailing lists and continued building them the same way. Josh Guers, who supplied the sample surveys seen with this article, wrote to the show for a school project and ended up on the mailing list.

When Family Feud returned in 1999, a third-party company was hired to compile the surveys for the show using methods of their own design. Today, it’s as simple as picking up the phone when it rings. Family Feud starring Steve Harvey has a research firm, Applied Research West, call 100 people on the phone and compiles their answers for many questions used on the current version of the popular series.

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It seems strange that game shows have a signature microphone. If you watch a comedy sketch spoofing game shows, then the host character is usually holding a long, pencil-thin microphone. Watch reruns of classic game shows, or even the game shows of today, and you’ll see that same long, thin microphone. What happened? Why did the game show genre develop an affinity for such a specific microphone design?

The early days of television produced sound through bulky microphones; overhead boom mics were used for drama and comedy shows. Talk shows and game shows used large microphones, often models like the giant, pill-shaped RCA 77-DX, usually attached to a base on a desk.

Handheld microphones were only occasionally used. Bud Collyer made use of a handheld microphone on Beat the Clock, a clunky model with a heavy cable that Collyer would often have to tug and unravel throughout each episode to allow him more slack. Monty Hall had a bulky handheld microphone for Let’s Make a Deal that connected to a battery pack in his back pocket, eliminating the issues with slack and the risk for tripping.

There were also microphones that could be worn, called lavalier microphones. Inspired by the jewelry of the same name, a lavalier microphone had a cigar-sized microphone in place of the pendant, attached to a necklace worn by the emcee. These were usually used by emcees on game shows that didn’t require much movement. Allen Ludden wore a lavalier microphone on Password. Bill Cullen used one for the original Price is Right, and Gene Rayburn wore one for The Match Game on NBC. The only drawback was that if the emcee moved around a little too much, the microphone could waver or rub back and forth on the clothing, causing interference. This could be ameliorated by anchoring the microphone onto a small plate and having the emcee wear them together. It solved the technical issues but created the obvious problem that the plate attachment was distracting and a bit silly-looking; the host appeared to be wearing armor. Gene Rayburn would occasionally use the plate & cigar-sized microphone combo as a handheld device, which looked awkward.

In 1969, Sony rethought the design of lavalier microphones and introduced a significantly scaled down model, the Sony ECM-50. The microphone shrunk down from a cigar to about the size of a thumb tip. Instead of being worn as a necklace, it clipped onto clothing, rendering the name “lavalier” inaccurate, although it remained the common term for such a microphone.

Although the Sony ECM-50 was tiny, that microscopic microphone was a big advancement for sound production. It was more sensitive, and it responded strongly to bass tones, which gave anchormen, game show hosts, and talk show hosts a satisfying richness to their voices that other microphones couldn’t provide. The Sony ECM-50 almost immediately became industry standard.

Sony quickly introduced a variation on the design, the Sony ECM-51, which took the tiny thumb tipped microphone off the clip and onto a thin rod, akin to the antenna on a portable radio. The rod expanded like a radio antenna, too, allowing the user to nearly triple its length just by pulling on the sturdy tip. Concealed from a viewer’s sight was the tiny button at the base labeled “cough,” which allowed the user to mute the sound with one press of the thumb.

The Sony ECM-51 popped up on TV news in the 1970s; they were popular for press conferences and in-studio interviews; but because the microphone was so sensitive, and because it was so receptive to bass sounds, the ECM-51 was almost completely useless for field reporters; the slightest breeze would render a man-on-the-street interview inaudible.

Since game shows didn’t go into the field that often, there were virtually no disadvantages to the Sony ECM-51, and the microphone became ubiquitous on game shows during the 1970s and 1980s: Hollywood’s Talking, The $10,000 Pyramid, Now You See It, Tattletales, Celebrity Sweepstakes, High Rollers, Wheel of Fortune, Musical Chairs, Hot Seat, You Don’t Say!, Card Sharks, The $128,000 Question, Double Dare, and Celebrity Bowling all made use of the Sony ECM-51, but the game shows that would become most closely identified with the mic were The Price is Right starring Bob Barker, and Match Game starring Gene Rayburn.

The Price is Right and Match Game were the games that most aptly showcased the benefits of the Sony ECM-51’s design, too. The pencil thin design allowed for multitasking. Bob Barker could open an envelope and read the actual retail price without having to put the microphone down. He could reach for props and hold onto a nervous contestant without giving concern to where the microphone was drifting while he was taking care of all that business.

Over on Match Game, Gene Rayburn almost always kept the microphone extended to maximum length (he eventually had a custom mic built, based on the Sony ECM-51 design but with no variance in size, it was just permanently fixed at that maximum length). He could talk to contestants without moving his arm around. If a technical problem rendered the panel’s microphones or the contestants’ microphones useless, it was nothing for Gene to tip the microphone forward to make everyone’s voices heard; he didn’t even have to reach out to do that. And in the case of Gene Rayburn, a born ham, the Sony ECM-51 was a perfect prop for physical comedy. He threw it like a javelin, played it like a flute, waved it like a wand, conducted invisible orchestras, and dueled invisible fencers.

Like any other technology, microphone designs kept improving and evolving in the decades to come. But The Price is Right, year in and year out, saw Bob Barker walking around the stage with the Sony ECM-51. Even when wireless microphones became the norm, Barker, wary of interference issues that sometimes plagued the early wireless models, insisted on his wired Sony ECM-51. When the microphone finally just plain wore out in 2002, he got a new microphone, but not a particularly different one. He was still using a long, thin model, similar to the Sony ECM-51, and to the very end of Barker’s tenure in 2007, he hosted The Price is Right with yards of microphone cable dragging behind him.

When Drew Carey took over in 2007, a lot about The Price is Right changed…but the style of the microphone stayed the same. Carey finally brought the show into the wireless era; his microphone had a battery pack at the bottom, storing a single 9-volt. But it was still that long, thin design that Bob Barker unintentionally made a trademark over the preceding 35 years.

An NBC executive once explained the importance of a microphone as a part of a show’s visual language. When The Tonight Show first launched in 1954, host Steve Allen, a former radio disc jockey who sometimes interviewed guests during his radio shift, had a desk with a large microphone on it, mainly because, number one, it was the set-up he was accustomed to, and number two, with the limited technology at the time, the show pretty much needed a large microphone on the desk.

By the 2000s, with Jay Leno at the helm and everyone wearing lavalier microphones, the large microphone on the desk wasn’t needed anymore, and yet, it had been there for five decades. Someone recommended removing the unnecessary desk mic, but the NBC executives shot down the suggestion because it was part of “the visual language” of the show. People expected to see that microphone on the desk.

Likewise, the long, thin microphone had become visual language for game shows. In the summer of 2016, Alec Baldwin insisted on a Sony ECM-51 as a condition for signing on to host the new Match Game. As silly and strange as it sounds, it wouldn’t feel right if Match Game used any other microphone.

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The National Archives of Game Show History has been fortunate to have many eager contributors donate their prized possessions to be preserved. Among the many treasures that have been donated: set pieces, handheld props, question cards, photographs and slides, tickets, and scripts.

“Wait a minute, scripts? Game shows have scripts?” you might be asking.

Game shows do have scripts, but not in the sense you’re thinking. It’s important for everyone to be on the same page, literally and figuratively, with how the game is played; the terms the show uses for specific parts of the game; and where on the stage the host and contestants should be for each part of the game. So yes, a script is necessary for a game show.

What makes game shows different from any other genre, of course, is that most of the “performers” have never seen the scripts for a game show. The contestants are real, everyday people who have been briefed on the rules before going onstage, but now, they’re on their own, with only the host to guide them through the next 30 minutes or so.

Here we have a look at two types of scripts that game shows might use.

The first is a script for Let’s Make a Deal, hosted by Monty Hall in 1984. Let’s Make a Deal has always presented a broad and perpetually changing array of “deals” and mini games. Each deal and each game involves many different possibilities—the announcer walking out with something concealed in a box on a tray; an enormous box on the display floor; three curtains or three doors, any of which can be hiding anything; etc. Many deals also have built-in variables. “If the contestant chooses option A, then thing 1 happens. If the contestant chooses option B, then thing 2 happens.”

Because of the broad variety of elements and possibilities, every one of the thousands of episodes of Let’s Make a Deal had a unique script.

Many game show formats are more consistent than Let’s Make a Deal. Family Feud, for example, is a series of survey questions where families try to guess the answers that the survey group gave, until reaching a goal score. The winning family plays Fast Money. It’s the same every day. For game show formats that are so straightforward, the show uses what’s often called a “shell script.”

A shell script is a single script that covers everything that could ever possibly happen during the game, and the same script will be used for every episode until some change is made to the way that the game is played. A shell script could be used for years on end. Here’s a look at a shell script that Family Feud was using in 2001, when Louie Anderson was hosting.

Feud would be considered by many viewers as a “simple” game, which is why it’s so surprising to see how intricate this shell script is. Broadly, it’s an easy game to explain, but there are a lot of tinier mechanisms that could potentially come up in each game, and the shell script needs to cover each of them. Over time, the host will become so accustomed to explaining these details that explaining them will sound more natural than it reads on the printed page.

So there you have it. Yes, game shows do have scripts.

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