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Category: Game Show a Go Go

This is about Game Shows and Video Games together. Usually covers individual games, but sometimes the two cross together in different ways…

Austin Powers Operation: Trivia – A quiz with no mojo.

It’s kind of wild to realize how much Austin Powers made a big impact in the late 1990s. Former Saturday Night Live star Mike Myers does a spoof of spy films, including the James Bond series of films, complete with hitting the right amount of hippie nostalgia. It becomes a box office success with sequels, merchandising, and of course, video games. It also kicked off a brief trend of spy spoof films that felt like them repeatedly saying “get with the times, grandpa” towards the titular 007.

I could talk about those weird Game Boy Color Austin Powers “games” that are mostly just reskins of Windows 98 but themed after characters from the film series, complete with silly jokes. (They made two, like it’s goddamn Pokemon! They were gonna make two more of these!) Hell, there was even a digital pinball game called, appropriately, Austin Powers Pinball. But longtime readers of the site probably know what I’m gonna talk about. somehow, somehow, they made something that seems tailor made for me.

This just screams “I wanna grab this at my local Wal-Mart,” right? (Cover courtesy of Mobygames.)

Austin Powers Operation: Trivia is a trivia game developed by Berkeley Systems, Inc., and published by Sierra Interactive. One of the few Berkeley Systems game show games that has zero involvement from Jellyvision, the makers of the You Don’t Know Jack games. Released in 1999, shortly before Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me hit theaters, this was one of many games that came out of the Jack boom that happened around 1997-2000. Though, this coming from some of the folks who made that series popular really feels like a “from two of the guys who wrote the screenplay of this hit movie” kind of situation.

Now, I like game shows, I like video games that play like game shows, and I am a fan of the classic You Don’t Know Jack titles. I’ve even covered a myriad of Jack knockoffs on the blog before. But this game is a real headscratcher on why it really exists.

The rules go a little something like this: You’re a contestant on the hit game show “Win, Lose, or Die.” You must pick a side – Austin Powers or Dr. Evil – and try to beat your opponent, who has won over $100,000,000 or more in the same game. To win, one must know a bit of trivia.

Sometimes the questions have a year attached, presumably to tie into the time travel theme.

If you have played a You Don’t Know Jack game before, then all this stuff should be easy to remember. Questions will cover either certain moments in history or a bit from the films. Pressing Q/P will buzz in, 1-4 to select an answer. Right answer gets you cash ($5-10 million, usually), wrong answer loses cash.
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September 29, 2026
Searching for Star Wars Jeopardy!: The force was strong with this one.

I gotta say, I’ve been in a rut lately. Having fairly average to unremarkable days, barely inspired to watch, play or even read new stuff. Suddenly, I got inspired by an idea that a friend suggested to me. Thus I started dabbling in emulating old computers. Stuff like PCem and such.

Compared to console emulation, which are meant to just emulate games running on specific hardware, emulating an old Macintosh or Windows PC has a lot more going for it. Adjusting CPU and RAM sizes, installing software and making sure it works, seeing if your PC is even beefy enough to smoothly emulate a virtual machine… Despite all those headaches, I find it fun to mess around with. Turns out tinkering with stuff is neat.

From Super Scattergories. Made by Cyberdice, the same folks who made Outburst. It’s very similar to it, complete with crude jokes.

Throughout this journey I’ve started amassing a large amount of game show and trivia games for the period. Mostly licensed titles like Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud, to more off beat games like Radio Active: The Music Trivia Game (hosted by Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame!), and Outburst, a game I wrote about all the way back in 2014. There was one that seemed to elude me, despite having a MobyGames page and a proper link on the Wayback Machine.

Just slap Darth Vader over Alex Trebek on the 1998 Jeopardy box, and boom, perfection.

Star Wars Jeopardy! is a fan made Jeopardy!-like game made by Arnaldo “Arnie” Carvalho, a Star Wars fan. This particular fan game was released around 1999 on his own personal website, reviewgames.com, of which he made a Mobygames entry for the game back when the site was still fairly new. I had been made aware of it thanks to friend of the site Bobinator, who had suggested all this Windows PC emulation chicanery in the first place, and thought it would be a funny thing to put aside the UK version of You Don’t Know Jack and The $100,000 Pyramid.
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September 11, 2026
On memes, old game shows and Glunch.

Anybody who has been on the internet long enough will have some goofy image or meme that resonates with them and a group of friends. Something so absurd and silly that it just becomes a part of you, and a small meme along a group of friends. For me, it was Glunch.

There’s something so absurd about this image.

Around 2019, I had shared a post on a my friend mavica’s discord from a tumblr called “VHS Dreams,” which featured a computer graphic with the word “GLUNCH” and some guy making a silly face. I was oddly fascinated by the image, as one of many pieces of ephemera folks discover off a random VHS tape.

With anything that I find and share to folks, I like to know the origins of where it came from. Even if it’s a nugget of trash knowledge. I figured it came from a game show due to the set, and the computer graphic pinpointed it to somewhere in the mid-to-late 1980s. Since I tend to watch a bunch of mostly forgotten game shows, it didn’t take me long to find the show in question: WordPlay, a short-lived game show that aired on NBC daytime from December 1986 to September 1987.

Produced by Fiedler-Berlin Productions, Rick Ambrose Television, and Scotti Brothers-Syd Vinnedge Productions, WordPlay was a game show based off the classic Fictionary parlor bluffing game. If you’re familiar with the board game Balderdash, it’s similar to that.

Allan Kaiser, Tracey Gold and Marc Price give their definitions for “Inscrutable.”

The rules of WordPlay went a little something like this: Two contestants, one often a returning champion, compete. A grid of obscure English language words are shown. A contestant picks a word, of which three celebrities will each give a definition of what the word might be described as, with one of them always having the correct dictionary definition. If the contestant picks the celebrity with the right definition, they get cash, otherwise their opponent gets to pick from the remaining two celebrities to steal.
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March 10, 2026
Wild West Showdown: American Gladiators meets Mad Dog McCree.

Around 1989, a plucky little sports competition show debuted that captured the hearts and minds of Millennials everywhere: American Gladiators, a show where contenders fought against “gladiators,” men and women who had background in stunts, sports or otherwise. Its campy stadium-like presentation combined with the play-by-play commentary of hosts Mike Adamle and Larry Csonka – with a few other folks before and after – it seemed like peak weekend viewing, after the Saturday morning cartoons have ended and you want something else to watch in a pre-internet world. (As a funny coincidence, there’s been rumblings of a new version of AG casting as of this writing, which has me mildly optimistic. Can’t be any worse than the 2008 version where they thought letting Hulk Hogan host was a good idea.)

You can’t tell me kids weren’t trying to imitate this stuff.

The original American Gladiators went off the air in 1997, which lead to a slew of imitators like Battle Dome to take the space. But even during AG’s peak, there were shows taking the formula and putting it in different environments. Stuff like Knights and Warriors leaned more into American Gladiators original intent of being a competition with a bit of a Medieval Times-like theme to it. There was a kid-focused spinoff called Gladiators 2000 featuring a then-unknown Ryan Seacrest. Even Nickelodeon GUTS likely took inspiration from American Gladiators. But there was one of these shows that captivated not just the game show nut in me, but also my friends who weren’t even that big into game shows. That show was Wild West Showdown. Grab your cowboy hat and boots, y’all, we’re heading into the old wild west for this one.

Okay, this isn’t an amazing logo, but hear me out, it gets better.

Wild West Showdown was a short-lived, mostly forgotten American Gladiators clone that aired for one season in 1994. Produced by The Samuel Goldwyn Company and Four Point Entertainment – the same companies that produced American Gladiators – their approach was to take their formula and give it a new twist. While it might seem gauche to rip off your own show, it’s not uncommon: When Allan Sherman and Howard Merrill was pitching a show to Mark Goodson/Bill Todman Productions, I’ve Got a Secret, they pointed out it was basically a ripoff of their existing show What’s My Line?. To which Sherman reportedly said, “You might as well, because if you don’t start copying your shows, someone else will.” (This comes from a memoir from former Goodson/Todman staffer Gil Fates about the history of What’s My Line? and may not be 100% accurate.)

Taking place in the fictitious town of Broken Neck, the town is constantly harassed by outlaws – this show’s versions of the gladiators – and it’s up to three cowpokes to try to stop the outlaws and hopefully make off with a bit of money in the bank.

Wonder if he loved getting back into the saddle again.

Our host is “West,” played by the late, great Alex Cord, a veteran character actor. Most people will probably know him best as Archangel in Airwolf, a TV series I’ve never seen but cannot deny has quite the banging theme song. While I initially thought this was strange casting at first, it made more sense when I found out he’s been in a handful of western films, as well as bit parts of some notable western TV shows like Gunsmoke. So in essence, this was perfect casting. Cord gives off a storyteller style to the proceedings, talking about the town, its outlaws, and the game outcomes.

Dang, having a lady co-host years before AG did. Inclusivity!

Alongside West, the contestants are interviewed by the local town reporter, K.C. Clark, played by Lisa Coles. She tends to fill the co-host role like in American Gladiators, where she interviews contestants after the game, getting their thoughts on how they did, and telling them if they won or not. So even though the show leans a lot into the wild west theme, there’s still a tinge of the show’s inspiration there.

Partway through the run, they introduced a play-by-play announcer, Joe Fowler, who replaces Cord’s play-by-play while trying to be a part of the proceedings off-camera. This honestly was a grave mistake. While Wild West Showdown is inspired by American Gladiators, Fowler’s commentary feels incongruous to the rest of the show’s overall theme, and completely kills the style the show is going for.

The rules go a little something like this: Three cowpokes – usually two guys and one gal – compete.

This looks like something straight out of Most Extreme Elimination Challenge.

Each of the games varied from show to show, usually with one cowpoke against one of the outlaws in various events, such as climbing a water tower to grab the fuse out of a stick of dynamite, “Rawhide Drag,” where the cowpoke has to grab the harness off a lasso while being dragged by an outlaw in the fastest time, or “Runaway Stagecoach,” where they catch a runaway stagecoach the fastest. Each game is for $100 cash, with the last game being for $200.
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May 25, 2024
Who Wants to be a Millionaire: The Album – One of the strangest soundtracks I’ve seen.

The soundtrack album is a neat little thing. Music used in the film that you can listen to outside of the movie. I always liked soundtrack albums because sometimes you’d find cool songs on there you wouldn’t find anywhere else. It’s one of those things that I tend to grab when I find them in a thrift store because there’s some good songs on there.

Then there’s the “music inspired by the film” soundtracks. Usually made when there’s only a handful of songs that play in the film, yet they have to fill up a CD, so they get a bunch of songs that fit the film for padding. These are a bit less inspired, but can be still interesting based on the song selection. Not particularly my favorites, but if the song selection’s good I can forgive it.

I had recently acquired an “inspired by” soundtrack, and it’s kind of a wild one. It’s not of a hit movie, or a teen drama. It’s… a soundtrack inspired by a game show.

Ah, Regis Philbin in his element: smiling with a wad of bills.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire: The Album is one of those “music inspired by” albums. Released in 2000 during peak Millionaire mania in the United States, the album features a myriad of songs that are, as mentioned on the album cover featuring host Regis Philbin, “inspired by the hit ABC television show.”

Normally, there wouldn’t be a whole lot to say about this kind of album. Since it’s inspired by the TV show, it’s a bunch of licensed songs. But the album does put its own spin on the formula, with not only licensed songs, but two new songs, both themed after the big quiz show.

We start with a rather insipid Millionaire song homage called “I Want to Be a Millionaire,” performed by Jack & Jemma. Jack is one Jack D. Elliot, a remixer/producer of pop artists like The Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. Jemma is his wife, so they were probably trying to see if they could make success as a pop producer/singer duo. As far as I can tell, this didn’t get very far on the music charts anywhere. Even with having veteran music producer David Foster co-producing the record.

“I Want to Be a Millionaire” is a fairly unremarkable dance hit where Jack raps about the show: “Is it A or B or C or D / So I could win a million dollars on TV.” After the verses, Jemma sings the chorus: “I Want to Be a Millionaire / So I can buy anything, never work another day / Ask me nicely, I might share because / I’m gonna be a Millionaire.” That’s all she contributes to the track outside of an occasional “oh oh oh oh,” it’s more Jack than Jemma in this case.

Surprisingly, Regis Philbin appears in the song as well, asking Jack the toughest $1,000,000 question: “What is the name of controversial rapper Eminem?” with Jack making jabs at bands like Sugar Ray while name-dropping Eminem’s real name. I get it’s supposed to be a bit like conventional hip-hop sketches, but this is just… lame. (As far as I can tell, Jack did not got the opportunity to remix/produce something with Eminem. Probably for good reason!)

“I Want to be a Millionaire” is like when you hear a radio station’s morning zoo crew try to perform songs of their own, usually themed on the city or the sports team. It’s kitschy, yes, but it’s not good. Definitely a terrible god damn earworm, that’s for sure.
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April 21, 2023
Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune on the Nintendo 64: GameTek’s last hurrah.

Game show video games are fascinating to me. They’re neat ways to enjoy your favorite shows, it can be good practice for how you’d actually do on the show itself, and it’s interesting to see how they adapt certain game shows to video game form. I never understood why some retro gamers balk at these games, a lot of them seem to miss the point why they’re fun.

If you’ve visited the site before, you’ve probably read a few pieces on me talking about game show games in various ways, from comparing game music versions of iconic game show themes to game show-adjacent games. But if you haven’t, let me make this clear: I like game show video games. And once again, we’re gonna talk about them.

Yes, in this image, it’s deliberately off-center. Don’t ask me why.

For a good chunk of the 80s and 90s, GameTek was the definitive game show game publisher in North America. A subsidiary of IJE Inc, the publisher would license various game show franchises – usually Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, two of the biggest game shows in the USA – and put them out on every platform imaginable. Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis, DOS, Windows, you name it, they likely published a game show game on a system you had.

They published other stuff too: They helped publish Frontier: Elite II for instance. Hell, their UK branch helped distributed the work of Capstone, “The Pinnacle of Entertainment Software.” Despite this, they will always be the game show game guys to me.

Unfortunately by the late 1990s, GameTek was struggling, and in December 1997 they had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Some of the projects they were making, like RoboTech: Crystal Dreams, got canceled. But in spite of the bankruptcy, they had one last hurrah, by releasing two games that they were mostly well-known for: game show games based on the one-two punch of one Merv Griffin.

You can kinda tell these were made in a hurry. (Covers courtesy of GameFAQs.)

Wheel of Fortune – released around November 1997 – and Jeopardy! – released in February 1998 after Take-Two Interactive acquired GameTek’s assets – are the final two game show adaptations published by GameTek. By this time, GameTek was developing the games in-house, forgoing the early NES/SNES days of having contract developers make the games for them. For a company who had a decade+ of game show games under their belt, having their last games be yet another version of Wheel and Jeopardy! was a sad way to go out.

I remember these games because Nintendo Power had covered both games in different issues of the magazine: Wheel of Fortune in December 1997’s issue, and Jeopardy! in the January 1998 issue, of which I owned. It’s surprising to see these games to get a multi-page spread on the magazine.

“Vanna?” I know that these are probably made months in advance but you couldn’t check to make sure that you’re covering the right game show here, fellas?

Why they decided to dedicate magazine space to these two games is a bit weird to me. I know the Nintendo 64 was struggling for a good while, but to give multiple pages about these games makes me think the system’s library was pretty dire until The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Of course, maybe I’m wrong and they always covered stuff like this.

I’m going into these with the assumption that you know what these shows are and how they play, mostly. If you don’t… well, you might wanna catch up on that first. With that preamble out of the way, let’s give these a shot, shall we?

I kinda liked this logo. But only because using the actual Wheel as part of the logo makes it look cooler to me.

I’ll start by covering the one that came out first: Wheel of Fortune. This was one of the first games I got for the Nintendo 64, alongside stuff like Diddy Kong Racing and Super Mario 64. Me being a game show fan meant naturally I was gonna have this game in my collection.

It’s like I’m talking to Vanna through Zoom.

Much like most Wheel games until around 2010, our “host” is Vanna White, the show’s co-host and letter turner. Or in this case, “letter toucher,” as this was released just as the new modernized puzzle board was revealed, something prominently shown on the cover.

This menu definitely isn’t a looker, that’s for sure…

Like most adaptations, there’s character customization, AI opponent difficulty, even the option to play 3-5 fixed rounds of play, or a “full game” which can go for the maximum six rounds or until the game decides time is up and goes into the Speed-Up portion, complete with Vanna giving the Final Spin of the day.

Wheel‘s core format is fairly simple: A puzzle similar to Hangman is revealed, spin the wheel, land on a dollar amount, call a consonant and hope it’s in the puzzle. Wanna know if a vowel’s in the puzzle? You can buy one for $250. Try not to hit Bankrupt as you’ll lose all your money you’ve earned that round. Highest scorer wins.
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February 27, 2023
Pat Sajak’s Lucky Letters: A crossword game by the Wheel of Fortune guy.

Late last year, I had written about Interplay and Platinumware’s attempt at trying to make a fake game show, Lexi-Cross. It was surprisingly interesting if a bit flawed. At the end of that article, I was reminded of a similar crossword-puzzle driven fake game show. This one came out during the big casual games boom of the mid-2000s, and actually featured someone that until recently, was rather elusive to the world of video games.

He looks… rather airbrushed here. (Cover courtesy of Mobygames.)

Pat Sajak’s Lucky Letters is an interesting breed of game. Developed by Playtonium Games and published by Uclick, it’s a crossword puzzle game stylized like a TV game show, and features an actual host: Pat Sajak, the famous host of Wheel of Fortune. Originally released as a digital game with a trial mode, a later physical “Deluxe” release published by Atari came out in sometime in 2006 on bargain bin shelves everywhere.

I got my copy of this many years ago back in Year One: From a (now-defunct) Value Village in Seattle while I was visiting PAX West – then known as PAX Prime – that I also got complete-in-box copies of The Colonel’s Bequest and Police Quest II: The Vengeance. There were several copies there, one of which had been price-marked down from its normal $20 price down to $1. Knowing my love for dumb game show games, I couldn’t resist the $3 price tag.

I can’t assure you if this is actually on the set of the show or if he’s behind a green screen.

Before I continue, I should clarify a bit who Pat Sajak is for those unaware: He’s the host of Wheel of Fortune, one of the more popular game shows in the United States. Taking over from previous host (and future die-hard conservative Trump supporter) Chuck Woolery in 1981, Sajak has been hosting the perennial game show ever since. Sajak currently holds the record for longest-running tenure of hosting the same game show in the United States – 39 years, beating out the late Alex Trebek’s 36 years on Jeopardy! and Bob Barker’s 35 years on The Price Is Right, respectively – and shows no signs of retiring any time soon.

“And now, here’s your host… Vanna White?”

But interestingly, he never did video games. Like most game shows, there’s been an absolute glut of video games based on the famous puzzle game. But for a good long while, most Wheel of Fortune adaptations usually featured co-host and puzzle board operator Vanna White as host instead, even some of the later games featuring announcer Charlie O’Donnell. But no Pat to be seen, something he’s even pointed out on the show in the past.

In the mid-2000s, he started a puzzle game brand called Pat Sajak Games that briefly existed to sell puzzle books featuring him and his likeness, but it would also branch out to something that until then had been rather elusive to him: the burgeoning video game market. Which leads us to Lucky Letters.

It’s almost like I’m on an actual game show!

The game has three modes of play, all around the concept of crossword puzzles. One is the main Lucky Letters mode, which is the meat of the game. The others, the Lucky 10 and Lucky Players we’ll get into in a bit. But how does Pat Sajak’s Lucky Letters play?

Excuse me, Pat, am I supposed to be seeing the circuitry on this podium?

The rules go a little something like this: There’s a crossword puzzle based on a theme (TV shows, locations, current events, etc). When the game starts, the player can choose a few letters randomly chosen to fill out the board. After that, the game will randomly pick a word out of the crossword, and give it a cash value from three slot machines of various values. The goal is to fill in the crossword clue by selecting correct letters from a pile of random letters. Each correct letter gives you money, but you lose money if you pick a letter not in the word, which will also end that turn.
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August 18, 2021
Candy Crush: From mobile game phenomenon to short-lived game show.

As someone who loves the world of game shows, I’m honestly amazed that there haven’t been many game shows based on video games. We have game shows based on board games – Monopoly, Scrabble, Scattergories, stuff like that. We had game shows that used a bunch of video games as its base like Starcade and Nick Arcade (ugh). But rarely one adapted from a single video game.

There’s only been one other attempt to make a video game into a game show, and that was the rather short-lived adaptation of You Don’t Know Jack way back in 2000. Cut to 2017, where a major television network greenlit a game show based on a video game property that, while still big, was well past its prime. And it floundered for nine weeks in primetime.

No “saga”s to be found here.

For a brief period in the summer of 2017, CBS aired a game show based on the hit mobile game franchise Candy Crush Saga. Called simply Candy Crush, it definitely fulfilled my curiosity of “what would a game show based on a popular mobile game be like?” But does it actually work as a game show? Judging by how short-lived it was, the answer is “probably not.” Despite that, I’m still curious about it. I’d seen an episode before when it was still new, but I needed to refresh my memory on whether or not it was any good, or if it deserved to be sent to the trash.

Since this game show is based on a hit mobile game, naturally I had to play a bit of the game show’s inspiration first.

A sample Candy Crush Saga game in action.

Candy Crush Saga, the first in a long-running franchise by King Games, has a fairly simple premise: Using a board of various pieces of candy, one must try to match three of the same kind of piece by swapping two pieces connected to each other. Every level has a goal: hit a score threshold, eliminate a specific number of pieces, etc. Failure to do the challenge gives you the option of either spending gold bars – the game’s premium currency – to get extra turns, or losing a life and starting the level over. Each level introduces new hurdles to the gameplay, and there’s really no end goal, the levels keep going until you get bored or bother to complete them all, of which there’s over 1,000 levels worth.

I’m familiar with match-3 puzzle games – Bejeweled was played many a time in my high school years – but the sickly sweet style of Candy Crush Saga was a bit off-putting to me. It doesn’t help that a lot of the time the game often played itself, where I’d make one move and suddenly set off massive chain reactions for big points. But I understand the game’s addictive appeal, including how friends talked about the progress they made back in the day.

Hearing some guy go “Tasty” when I do big combos is rather offputting, combined with the ’70s looking font being used everywhere.

Fun fact: Until this article, I had never actually played any of the games in the Candy Crush series. Mobile and Facebook games are not something I dabble in too much these days – save for the occasional blog post like the most recent post about Bingo Story’s cross-promotion with The Price Is Right – but I figured it would be wise for me to finally get in on the game just for a better frame of reference on what the show was about. It was alright, but I stopped at around level 147 due to the game constantly losing connection and making it difficult to make progress. I wonder how far my friends ever got.

But enough about Candy Crush the video game. How the ever loving heck do you make a game show out of it? Let’s find out.

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I mean, you’re certainly not getting someone like Todd Newton to host your big money game show.

This show was hosted by actor/TV personality Mario Lopez. Getting a somewhat-notable TV personality to host your game show is the expected for game shows in the modern age, and does surprisingly well despite not having a lot to do. Naturally, there’s a bit of post-production voiceover in spots, but otherwise he seems nice, friendly, and genuinely wanting to be there. He gets a B+ in my book.

Shockingly, this is not Mario’s first foray into game shows, as he hosted the second season of the oft-forgotten, yet fascinating Masters of the Maze in the mid-1990s. Now that’s an interesting kids game show that nobody really remembers.
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March 18, 2021
Game Show Themes vs. Their NES Counterparts Volume 3: The Sludge of Hi-Tech Expressions.

Several years ago, I had came up with one of the silliest music-related posts yet: Comparing iconic game show themes to NES versions of the same. Since there were a lot of game show games on the NES, I figured it would be an interesting little thing to write about. In addition, it was an exercise to see how composers took the Ricoh 2A03 sound chip on the NES and make good tunes out of them, while also seeing how accurate their arrangement of the show’s theme was.

Volume 1, published back in 2013, covered most of the first wave of GameTek game show games, which were all developed by Rare. David Wise, who at the time was Rare’s sole composer, did a fine job in most cases, even if it felt like he deviated from the source material in some cases, like with Double Dare.

Volume 2 was published several years later in 2019, and covered the post-Rare era of GameTek game show games from 1990-92, where various companies such as Softie, Incredible Technologies and Imagitec were now developing the games. In that post, we had we had fairly notable composers like Barry Leitch and Rob Wallace, to lesser-knowns like Leif Marwede and Mike Pierone give their own unique spins of the likes of stuff like American Gladiators, or in the case of stuff like Classic Concentration, completely original work.

But GameTek wasn’t the only publisher of game show games for the NES. There was another. One publisher that was known rather infamously for their average to poor quality games. As someone I know from the game show community once said, “If the game features this logo, stay far away.”

The bane of many a licensed game from the 80s to the mid 90s…

Hi-Tech Expressions is a fascinating publisher. They never created any original works, they were strictly a company who licensed existing properties and had contract developers make those games for them. The modern equivalent these days would be someone like GameMill Entertainment: Their bread and butter strictly making games based on existing licenses from TV shows or movies, rarely if ever making original IP of their own compared to similar publishers who’d go on to do bigger things, like THQ.

Most of Hi-Tech Expressions’ games were mediocre-to-bad, and their NES output was no exception. They graced us with three NES game show games, all in varying levels of quality. But we’re not really here to gauge if the games are any good, we’re here to see how accurate the composer’s tunes were to the theme song the show was based on. Let’s get to it.

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Fun House (1990)

If only the game was as cool and flashy as this title screen was.

The NES version (composed by George “The Fat Man” Sanger):

COMPARED TO:

The Fun House theme from 1988-1990 (Composed by an unknown composer at Score Productions):

Fun House on the NES is a rather… bizarre beast. Rather than taking the Double Dare approach of trying to translate the action-filled gameplay of the kids game show to the NES, they opted to make a completely different game entirely. In Fun House for the NES, your character rollerskates around arenas while grabbing tokens and avoiding obstacles under a stringent time limit. It takes some of the elements of the TV show and slaps it into something that is only tangentially related to the source material. It’s the most oddball out of all the game show games I’ve ever played, that’s for certain.

This game wreaked havoc on my thumb for the brief amount of time I played it.

Lennard Feddersen of Ironwind Software came up with the original concept, and this game really feels like a reskin of an existing idea. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hi-Tech just took his proof of concept, slapped in 8-bit J.D. Roth and called it a day. (Feddersen would later make a spiritual successor to this game on the Game Boy a few years later called Out of Gas.)

It’s a funny coincidence that I get to cover another game composed by George Sanger, aka “The Fat Man.” I liked his music in the recent entry I made about Lexi-Cross, and he doesn’t disappoint here either. It’s clear Sanger wasn’t given the theme to adapt to the NES sound chip, so he opts for original tunes instead. It doesn’t resemble the rockin’ theme song from the show, but it’s a good tune in its own right.

8-bit J.D. Roth is… weirdly smiling at you.

The rest of the soundtrack has a fair share of catchy tunes, but they do sound a bit loud and shrill in spots. Most of the time, the music is overshadowed by the obnoxious sound effects. For a game released in 1990, it’s rather disappointing. The music’s probably the only good thing about it. Then again, I can’t think of a game where The Fat Man’s music was actually really bad.

Surprisingly, Fun House’s composer credit is currently unknown, as of 2020. A majority of the other Score Productions themes over the years now have proper credits, of which I’ve been using for the past “Game Show Themes vs. Their NES Counterparts” entries. I have an inkling that the composer might be Michel Camilo, Paul Epstein or even Edd Kalehoff, but until someone has proof, this will go uncredited for the time being.

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November 19, 2020
Lexi-Cross: A futuristic game show game from the past.

Game show video games are a fascinating genre to me. Often criticized rather poorly by gamers who quite don’t get it, these sort of games are a fun little piece of entertainment for me. Some of the ones I like are straightforward adaptations of Jeopardy!, Concentration and High Rollers. They may have their own quirks, but they’re enjoyable well enough.

I even like the ones that aren’t based on standard TV game shows. I’ve written about ones using licensed properties like Outburst or MTV’s TRL, for example. But the ones I’m most interested by are the ones that aren’t based on any particular property or license, yet are clearly taking a few ideas from contemporary game shows. This one’s no exception.

Sadly, the host is not a female murder-cyborg who looks like a reject from Rise of the Robots. (Cover courtesy of Mobygames.)

Lexi-Cross is one of the rare video games that’s influenced by game shows, but is not based on a game show or an existing non-game show property. Published by Interplay and developed by Platinumware – mostly consisting of ex-Cinemaware employees – this game came out around 1990 and had been mostly forgotten. Unless you’re like me and you roamed Home of the Underdogs.

Yep, much like Blood II: The Chosen, Strife and several other games I’ve written about on this site at this point, that abandonware website rears its head once again. Home of the Underdogs made me aware of this game back in the late ‘90s. Considered a “Top Dog” on the website, given to games that were highly recommended by the site’s curators, combined with its game show sheen, made me incredibly interested in it.

Before finding it on Home of the Underdogs all those years ago, I had played a demo of the game on a Windows 95 machine. Since Windows 95 machines were just a pinch more powerful than 1990-era DOS machines, in rare cases the game would act rather strange, where the game’s “cursor” would act up and get stuck in a loop before crashing. Even when writing about this game for this article, I still worried of that particular bug occurring again, yet it never did in my several playthroughs of this game through DOSBox.

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She’s so… angular. and robotic.

The world of Lexi-Cross takes place in the distant future of 2091, and there isn’t much of a plot to go on. You meet up with a contestant coordinator as you put in your credentials – your name, date of birth, preferred board colors and your home planet. While I decided to be a smelly human being on Earth for these screenshots, there’s nothing stopping you being an alien from any of the other eight planets in the solar system. Afterwards, you’re whisked out of this room, switching to a camera of the game itself.

It’s just like cyberpunk! Except it looks particularly more dated here somehow.

Our host is Chip Ramsey, and for the most part he just interjects once in a while and gives a brief rundown of the game and not much else. I can’t blame you if you forget that he’s there while you’re playing the game. To me, he looks like a cross between a Terminator and one-time Wheel of Fortune host Bob Goen. Considering how Wheel of Fortune was pretty big by 1990, this makes perfect sense. I’ve seen some people compare Chip to Chuck Woolery, but I’m not seeing it. I even made this joke image to prove my theory:

Seriously, I can’t be the only one who sees the resemblance.

There’s even a small robot model named “Robanna,” who doubles as your cursor in-game. This, combined with the host, shows that Platinumware was clearly influenced by the famous game show involving wheels and letters.
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October 23, 2020