Con Game Information
The NPL is a puzzle organization, so outside of the main program of games and puzzles, there's a lot of unofficial game-playing and puzzle solving. Trivia games are pretty popular; tmcay has written several fantastic and original ones. But for most of the rest of the peons, the standard is to prepare a set of Jeopardy questions.
I'd been thinking about doing something along these lines for a while, then two years ago, during the convention in San Antonio, two members did a Jeopardy variant called Texas Jeopardy. Because everything is bigger in Texas, each category had an extra question, and each round had an extra category. There were also bonus Daily Doubles and I think there were multiple rounds of Final Jeopardy. It was very wacky and a lot of fun.
And it got me thinking about the game show I really wanted to play at Con. An old one that people haven't talked about in a while. Last year, I didn't go to the convention, so this year, I need to make it happen:Remote Control
Remote Control was a game show that ran on MTV for three years at the end of the '80s. It was focused on pop culture and TV trivia from the '60s and '70s. It had a bizarre sense of humor and a high degree of zaniness. YouTube is pretty light on episodes, but there's a mostly full one in two parts
It also launched the careers of Denis Leary, Adam Sandler, Colin Quinn, and Kari Wuhrer, who would present trivia questions phrased as skits. You can see many, many of these skits at this site.
It seems like it'll be a lot of fun to run and write, and it'll force me to do more wacky fun, which is a mode I've lost touch with.
Things I need to decide:
I'd been thinking about doing something along these lines for a while, then two years ago, during the convention in San Antonio, two members did a Jeopardy variant called Texas Jeopardy. Because everything is bigger in Texas, each category had an extra question, and each round had an extra category. There were also bonus Daily Doubles and I think there were multiple rounds of Final Jeopardy. It was very wacky and a lot of fun.
And it got me thinking about the game show I really wanted to play at Con. An old one that people haven't talked about in a while. Last year, I didn't go to the convention, so this year, I need to make it happen:Remote Control
Remote Control was a game show that ran on MTV for three years at the end of the '80s. It was focused on pop culture and TV trivia from the '60s and '70s. It had a bizarre sense of humor and a high degree of zaniness. YouTube is pretty light on episodes, but there's a mostly full one in two parts
Click to viewIt also launched the careers of Denis Leary, Adam Sandler, Colin Quinn, and Kari Wuhrer, who would present trivia questions phrased as skits. You can see many, many of these skits at this site.
It seems like it'll be a lot of fun to run and write, and it'll force me to do more wacky fun, which is a mode I've lost touch with.
Things I need to decide:
- What's the time range? The original show focused on the sixties and seventies, with a heavy emphasis on shows that got a lot of reruns. Twenty years later, I need to decide whether to keep it aimed at the same TV timeframe, update to a similar retro period (i.e., nothing from the new millenium) or leave the whole thing open to current TV. I'm leaning toward the middle option (before 2000), except that it'll cut off most of the reality TV explosion.
- How many categories? The original show had nine "channels." I'm going to want to expand that, but I don't know by how much yet.
- How many skits? When I know how many categories I have, how many of them can/should be skits? This'll depend a lot on how much help you guys can give me.
- How do I do eliminations? Getting yanked "off the air" was a key portion of the original show. But in a con game, it's more problematic. For one thing, there'll probably be six players, instead of three. For another, they're all going to want to play,
- How do I end the game? Different incarnations of the game featured two different lightning rounds and a bonus round. I'll need to figure out what combination to use.
- Should I throw food at the players?
- Remembering categories. I'll put up the list of what I remember and have researched soon, but if you have your own memories of the game, it'll be helpful.
- Recording skits. I'm going to be running a bunch of stuff off of my iPod with a nice set of speakers. (It'd be great to do with a laptop, but sadly I don't have one.) So I'm looking for people who can record skit-like trivia questions into MP3s so that I can play them. New characters are particularly welcome.