Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune on the Nintendo 64: GameTek's last hurrah

(As always, any feedback is appreciated!)

Game show video games are fascinating to me. If you’ve been a follower of my work, 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. If you haven’t, let me make this clear: I like game show video games. They’re neat ways to play your favorite shows, and it’s sometimes interesting to see how they adapt certain game shows to video game form. Usually with varying levels of success.

(So flashy, even for 1998.)

For a good chunk of the 80s and 90s, the definitive game show game publisher in North America was GameTek. 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 everything. 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: Frontier: Elite II for instance. Hell, their UK branch their helped distribute the work of Capstone, “The Pinnacle of Entertainment Software” over there. 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 hoorah, by releasing two game show games based on the one-two punch of one Merv Griffin.

(These look like they 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?)

With that preamble out of the way, let’s give these a shot, shall we?

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(I kinda liked this logo. But only because using the actual Wheel as part of the logo makes it stand out more.)

I’ll start by covering the one that came out first: Wheel of Fortune. It’s a… rather interesting adaptation.

(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 puzzle board was revealed, something prominently shown on the cover.

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.

(Save for the weird font usage, this looks about as good as the show, really.)

Interestingly, for the Nintendo 64 version of Wheel, there’s the rare opportunity to actually control the strength of one’s spin. Most adaptations of Wheel just use a sliding gauge the player stops to control the speed, but since the Nintendo 64 has an analogue stick, you can actually shift the stick from right to left to spin the wheel, which makes it feel a bit more immersive. Granted, one could just press the A or Z button to automatically spin for you, but that’s not nearly as cool.

(Sadly not sponsored by Pizza Hut or NordicTrack.)

Like the show was doing at the time, round three is the Jackpot round, where every correct letter adds to a Jackpot that starts at $5,000 each game, and landing on the Jackpot wedge, guessing a correct letter and solving the puzzle immediately awards the jackpot. Also, the $10,000 prize space also makes an appearance, which is the only special prize on the Wheel, as there’s no other prizes or the Surprise wedge. Despite these unusual omissions, it has all the categories that were on the show at the time, including the quirky Same Name and Before & After puzzles.

After the game’s over, the winning player goes to the bonus round. The usual RSTLNE and picking three consonants and one vowel come into play here, and a successful solve gives a flat $25,000. After that, Vanna waves bye-bye and then the credits roll.

(Didn't know Vanna had magic letter changing powers...)

As for the game itself, it’s definitely not a looker for 1997, when 3D graphics were basically the norm. While the Wheel and the puzzleboard are pretty accurate to the show, the rest of the set is incredibly barren, switching between random locales from game to game. Vanna and the contestants are flat sprites, having less animation than previous adaptations on the Super Nintendo. Vanna doesn’t even properly touch the letters, she walks back and forth between the puzzleboard and the letters magically change.

The only interesting thing is having full motion video of Vanna talking in a small box on the upper right hand corner, when she gives comments about what round we’re playing, whether a player hits Lose a Turn, that sort of thing. Granted, the “full motion video” is just a bunch of sprites together, but hey, we didn’t know any better by that time.

(Did they need to do this? No, but it's still neat as heck.)

Like a lot of GameTek adaptations of Wheel, it tries to capture the spirit of the show with so many little flourishes that it seems impressive that they cared so much. I mean, the title screenis a literal recreation of the show’s intro at the time, complete with the show’s theme.

(The designers even decided to model the Used Letter Board, usually kept offstage for players to look at. Though here it's just an obnoxious obstacle. )

There isn’t much else to add to Wheel of Fortune on the Nintendo 64. It’s a perfectly serviceable adaptation for Nintendo’s first 3D console, but could’ve been so much better.

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Onward to the other half of our episode for today, Jeopardy!

(If you’re wondering: Yes, Johnny Gilbert says “THIS! IS! JEOPARDY!” on this screen.)

Compared to Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy! is quite a more complex beast. Since it’s a quiz game that asks for 61 clues between 13 categories daily, this required probably a bit more time in the oven. Which means we get something that feels a little more fleshed out, but has the same problems, which we'll get into in a bit.

("Hey, have you seen my lectern? Seems to have disappeared on me.")

Naturally, we get Alex Trebek as our host here, this time just in FMV form, his host lectern disappearing to the ether.“FMV” Alex does appear in-game, but usuallywhen you’ve given an incorrect response, with him making comments like “Gosh! That’s wrong,” which has that signature Trebek snark that most people are familiar with. Alex does talk a lot in this one, making comments after each guess, so it at least feels accurate to the show.

(Guess we needed 64-bits to introduce a thing like autocomplete to Jeopardy!...)

The most interesting thing about the Nintendo 64 adaptation is that it actually introduces something that would become more common in future Jeopardy! adaptations. The biggest problem with a lot of Jeopardy! games on home consoles is that they require the player to type in their answer, something that really bogs down the gameplay to what is normally a fast-paced quiz game. Here, the Nintendo 64 version introduces an autocomplete option, where typing in some of the letters will show a question filled in if you’re looking for a specific guess. Pressing Z will accept the autocompleted answer as your guess, and it helps make the game go by a little faster.

(This is a $1,000 clue?! Hell, even on the show this wouldn't be any higher than a $200 clue in Single Jeopardy!)

The downside is that while that makes it more user-friendly, the game is still a slog to play. Every clue starts with a 10 second lockout timer, so players can read the clue, then a timer that goes for 15 seconds. This means each clue can take 30 seconds if no one decides to ring in, or upwards of a minute or so once a player buzzes in and start typing. An incorrect response resets the timer to 5 seconds, and ideally that’s what I would’ve made the timer from the start to speed things up a little.

(Loving the Daily Double logo that looks like it was made in a graphic editor in 30 minutes.)

Like the show, there’s Daily Doubles on the board where the player who chose it can wager any or all of their money on a challenging clue. While the game does tell you the critical info – how much each player has, the minimum and maximum wagers – it’s a bit more clunky than it should be.

The rest of the game is pretty self-explanatory at this point. Double Jeopardy! doubles the dollar values and has two Daily Doubles, then Final Jeopardy! is the wagering portion where players are given some time to write down their response to a challenging final clue. Here the timer’s extended from 30 seconds to 60, which gives us an extended version of the Final Jeopardy! think music, but hey, nothing wrong with that.

(Blast it, the dreaded Opera category. The bane of a Jeopardy! player's existence.)

After Final Jeopardy!, the game ends with a player being crowned the new champion, and the option to either start a new game with the same players, a new game with different players, or quit, which starts with Alex saying that “we’ll play again soon,” rolling the credits and… oddly sitting on several minutes of a black screen before a goofy easter egg pops up. After this, you’ll need to reset the console to get back to the main menu.

(Don't ask me why everyone looks so stoic.)

A lot of the same problems that plagued Wheel of Fortune are in this version too: Stiff sprites with limited animations, a barren but mostly accurate set, and lots of “FMV.” The sound effects are off too: expect to hear the Final Jeopardy! p-TING! After every clue, and hearing unusual sounds to indicate which player rang in. Makes sense, since Alex can’t really call out player names, but even some Jeopardy! games mitigated that by having him say “Contestant #1” or something.

Even the AI has flaws. While it does actually give incorrect responses rather than generic “ZWXYZ” messages like the Game Boy Jeopardy! games, it doesn’t really do math very well: Their default wager in any Daily Double or during Final Jeopardy! is half of their earnings, which can lead to a minor problem.In one game I played, one of the AI opponents hit all three Daily Doubles and ended up with a weird score like $3912 or something by the end. While scores like that do happen on the regular show, it’s incredibly uncommon, and it just seems like they didn’t give good wagering strategies to the AI.

(Look out Jeopardy! Anytime Test, I'm coming for you!)

I will admit that even though I’m a mild fan of the show, I am incredibly bad at Jeopardy!. It took me about 6-7 games with the AI set to “Average” difficulty to even win a single game, and that required me to basically be conservative with my wagering in Final Jeopardy! once I figured out the AI’s wagering strategy is not anywhere close to an actual human’s.

And that’s it for Jeopardy!. It’s not a clunker, but it could’ve been so much better.

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Honestly, in spite of some of my complaints, for 1997-98, these are perfectly serviceable adaptations of the big game shows on the market. If you wanted to play these game shows without digging up your Super Nintendo, these worked fine, provided you didn’t pay too much for them.

(While it took me several tries to win Jeopardy!, I won Wheel of Fortune on my first try. Turns out puzzles are easier than trivia!)

While GameTek may be defunct now, the Wheel and Jeopardy! licenses were still white hot, so it didn’t take long for them to find a new home. Hasbro Interactive would acquire the licenses and release new Jeopardy! and Wheel games for the PlayStation and PC. This would continue well into the 2000s as Hasbro Interactive was bought by Infogrames and folded into Atari. (The modern-day Atari, the one that tried to go into cryptocurrency and hotel chains.)

The license for Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! played a bit of publisher hopscotch after that. Currently, Ubisoft released modern adaptations for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2017. So it’s not like GameTek folding was the end of those video games, as there’s always gonna be new video game consoles and people who wanna play their favorite game show at home.

If you want to play these games, the only viable option is the secondhand market. Unfortunately the retro collecting scene is going through a phase where all games have jacked up prices. Even loose cartridges for these two go for $15-20 each according to pricecharting.com.

Rarely do I recommend this, but I think you’d be better off emulating these games or hunt down an Everdrive 64 if you insist playing them on real hardware. Though, there’s little incentive to really play either of these versions, since they’ve been usurped by better versions out there, some of them even made by fans. But they’re an interesting curiosity into the dying days of GameTek.

I’ll miss you, GameTek. You may not have been the best publisher around, but at least these game show games were in the hands of people who are least cared a little bit, compared to other companies like Hi-Tech Expressions, or in more recent cases, Ludia. The less said about stuff like The $1,000,000 Pyramid and Family Feud 2012 Edition, the better.

(Screenshots were taken in the Simple64 emulator, and may not be 100% accurate to how these games are on real hardware.)