Game show geekery
I think I may have covered the topic before in this space, but I wanted to go back and explain my remark earlier that I won’t enjoy the game play of “Million Dollar Password.”
First, for any of you too young to remember any of the iterations of “Password,” I need to explain the game. It was played by two teams, each consisting of a contestant and a celebrity partner. The object of the game was for one partner to get the other to say a secret “password” by giving one-word clues. The teams would take turns working on the same password — first, the person giving the clues for what I’ll call team “A” would give his or her partner a clue, and the partner would give a response. If that response was wrong, team “B” would take a shot at it, and back and forth until one team or the other got it right. Obviously, each team is listening to the other team’s clues and can benefit from them when it’s their turn
The scoring was simple: guessing a password on the first clue was worth 10 points, on the second clue was worth 9 points, on the third clue 8 points, and so on. The first team to get to 25 points won the game and got to play a “speed round” for cash, guessing as many passwords as possible within 60 seconds.
The original rules of “Password” were simple and elegant. They were also strict. Only one-word passwords were used, and only one-word clues were allowed. There were no names or proper nouns or movie titles or anything like that; just words, from a dictionary. (Sometimes, a particular dictionary would be mentioned by name as part of a sponsorship agreement.) Each password stood on its own.
Later, at the bottom of the post, you can see a clip of this format.
After a while, the producers began to fix what wasn’t broken and changed the rules to create “Password Plus” and then “Super Password,” both of which were pretty much identical. In these variants, instead of the 25-point scoring, each of the passwords was itself a clue to the “Password Puzzle” or “Super Password.” If your team got a password right, instead of points you got the chance to guess the puzzle.
I hated this format. It needlessly complicated the game. Also, if you had any suspicions about what the puzzle answer might be, the passwords themselves started to become easier and less interesting.
I thought, from one of the early descriptions I’d read of “Million Dollar Password,” that it would use a similar passwords-become-clues format. But I read the “Password” Wikipedia entry just now, and it makes it sound like the new show will use a format similar to the “lightning round” or “speed round” from the original show — instead of the teams competing on the same password, each team will separately try to complete as many passwords as possible within a set time limit. I don’t like this either. If they use identical passwords for each team, then only one team can be onstage at a time — which takes some of the fun and camaraderie out of the game. If they use different passwords for each team, it’s possible that a team will sink or swim on the basis of having been given the easier set of passwords.
Yes, I know, I’m a game show geek. Anyway, here’s a clip from the good old days:
.