Game Shows on the Macintosh
If you own a Macintosh computer and enjoy game shows, you may have had problems finding game shows to play on the Mac without using Windows emulators. I have found a few: some commercial and some made by nonprofessional programmers. The shareware games are not GameTek quality, though. Mac OS users who do own Windows emulation software, or a Mac mini that also runs Windows XP, may want to visit BASIC Games and BigJon’s PCGames.
Commercial Games
- MacMatch by Axlon Inc. was an early (1985) commercial Mac game resembling Concentration. It had black-and-white graphics, a 64-panel board and only one rebus: “Many hands make light work”.
- Lexi-Cross by Interplay is a futuristic hybrid of Wheel of Fortune and CrossWits for two players, or one player against the computer. The cyborg host, Chip Ramsey, looks like Bob Goen without his mustache. You have to be willing to pretend that all eight classical planets and Pluto are inhabited.
- GameTek, Sony Imagesoft, Hasbro Interactive, MacSoft and Freeverse have made CD-ROM editions of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! for Macintosh computers.
- You Don’t Know Jack by Berkeley Systems is an offbeat three-player trivia game, oriented at college students. After a false start by Warner Bros., Paul Reubens [Pee Wee Herman] found a way to work You Don’t Know Jack into his schedule for Carsey-Werner and ABC-TV.
- There is now a Macintosh CD-ROM game of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, made by Buena Vista Interactive.
- As of September 2008, Ludia and FremantleMedia have made The Price Is Right available for all operating systems except the Sony PlayStation 3.
Homemade Games
I once linked to sites with clones of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! for Mac OS, but those sites are no longer accessible.
- FLASHGames²: Christopher Colbourne and Dan Berger have created Shockwave Flash versions of the bonus rounds from the following game shows (struck-out games were removed from the site on 2007 July 14):
- The Big Showdown
Bullseye: pilot and series
- Card Sharks: Bob Eubanks format
- Caesars Challenge: first bonus round, with single nine-letter word
- Classic Concentration: two versions of the car round
- Dream House
High Rollers: Wink Martindale format
The Joker’s Wild: 1977-86 syndicated format
Russian Roulette
- Scrabble
- Strike It Rich: Joe Garagiola format
- Super Pay Cards!
Tic Tac Dough: CBS and syndicated series
- Whammy! The All New Press Your Luck
- Joytube also has Flash versions of popular game shows.
- Pacdude Games has Flash versions of the Blockbusters bonus round, the Clock Game from The Price Is Right, Deal or No Deal and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (called “Generic Quiz Game”), as well as a few original games. The last two games have some poorly researched questions, and repetition is inevitable.
Game Shows I’d Like to See for Mac OS
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Doubtless there are many older game shows, described in the Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows, which could be adapted for Mac OS (Seven Keys, Eye Guess and Haggis Baggis come to mind). I also would like to see some original TV-style games not based on existing game shows (e.g., Combination Lock).
I have come up with some ways it could be done. I also have downloaded a copy of TNT Basic and begun creating my own game show programs for Mac OS X. My first TNT Basic project, with help from a Canadian programmer, is the Secret “X” game from The Price Is Right. It is freely available on my downloads page.
If you’ve written a freeware or shareware TV-style game for the Macintosh, or know someone who has, let me know!
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James H. Vipond