The 5 Biggest Cheaters in Game Show History
On game shows, cheaters never win. However, they can come pretty close sometimes. Here are the five biggest game show heists by four sinister people who almost got away with it, and one who totally did.Press Your Luck -- Amount Stolen: $110,237
When you sit at home watching TV it's only a matter of time until you hit it big, and that's what happened to Michael. After six months of scrutiny, he noticed a fatal, exploitable weakness in the Press Your Luck scoreboard -- the Holy Grail of creepy shut-in discoveries. He left for Hollywood with the last of his savings and despite looking like an oyster dressed as Santa, they put him on TV.
On Press Your Luck, a box spun randomly around a board and you stopped it with your buzzer to win whatever it landed on. The catch was that contestants could land on a Whammy, which was a cartoon monster that took all your money. Michael discovered that there were two spots on the board that never had a Whammy and the "randomness" was actually the same five sequences over and over. With little trouble, he went apeshit on their cash and prizes. He kept winning and winning until they ran over their broadcast time, and Michael ended the day with $110,237. This was by far the most money ever won on a game show and the biggest victory for questionable ethics since the invention of the penis pump. As he celebrated, karma scratched its head. It didn't really know how to deal with something like Michael, but it knew it had to fuck him.
The producers obviously knew something was strange, but since he wasn't technically cheating, they gave him what he won. In 1984, he had what would be about a quarter million in today's dollars. That's so much more than you need to buy happiness if you're the kind of person content with game show rerun marathons. Michael went a different way with it. He invested all of it into a second get-rich-quick scheme: one dollar bills. This nutbar sat among piles of money and frantically pawed through them with his girlfriend in the hopes of matching the serial numbers read off by a radio game show for a $30,000 jackpot. It was as close to the exact opposite of buying happiness as you can get. Karma shrugged while it watched. "This is really weird," thought the cosmic principle.
On the very first episode, Gabe Okoye and Brittany Mayi were asked to wager their million dollars on whether a Walkman or Post-It Notes were sold first. They didn't agree, which was perfect because the show let couples bicker for 60 seconds before the trapdoors ended their relationship. Gabe thought the answer was Post-It Notes because of a ridiculous amount of knowledge he had about the product's origin, uses and manufacturing process. Brittany thought it was the Walkman, just because. It was such a caricature of every argument I've had with a woman that my glands started preparing my body for angry makeup sex. "What's that musky smell?" shouted my neighborhood over the yowling calls of a thousand cats.
Gabe eventually won out and they placed $800,000 on Post-Its. Gabe was wrong. The trapdoor opened and said the only thing trapdoors say: "What you once loved belongs to the darkness now." They went on to lose the rest of their money too. The only thing Brittany won on Million Dollar Drop was with the final line of every argument she and Gabe would have for the rest of their lives.
Through a strange coincidence, the show was aired two weeks after a Financial Times interview with 3M inventors about the molecular structure of adhesives. In it, extremely boring people learned that Post-It Notes were test-marketed in certain cities before the Walkman and that Gabe was right. So obviously, the show was happy to admit its mistakes and send brave excavators in to retrieve the cash, right? Not even close. Look at the show's format. A pile of money sits there until a tragic spectacle rips it away unless they win, where literally nothing happens to it. That kind of idea really only comes out of your brain if you're some kind of monster. And so the first thing the producers did was deny their error through a semantic argument over the word "sold." Losing that, they offered to have Gabe and Brittany back on the program. But they didn't do that either since the show was canceled. $800,000 has never caused so much confusion and sadness since I distributed 200,000 throwing stars to the homeless.
The show's host, Kevin Pollak, argued that Gabe and Brittany shouldn't have gotten another shot at the money since they didn't know the final question and would have lost it all anyway. Great point, robot. Now, imagine you'd just won a fight with your wife and it turns out you were wrong. Spectacularly wrong, on national TV, and it cost the two of you almost a million dollars. No one has a point of reference for how psychologically brutal that would be. That's like your marriage counselor exploding during an argument and spelling out SHE WAS RIGHT THE WHOLE TIME with her remains. They weren't in any kind of state to play goddamn trivia games after that. Take a look at this misery:
The producers only made this show because there was no money in sitting at the foot of hospital beds and watching terminal patients die.
Twenty One -- Amount Stolen: $140,000 and America's Innocence
The new champion was a teacher from Columbia named Charles Van Doren. Over the course of the next three months he defeated all opponents through a combination of knowing what questions he was going to get and being told the answers to all of them. The piece of trash probably couldn't look his family in the eye when he got home, but his winnings totaled $140,000, and in 1956, that was enough money to have his family's eyes replaced with Vanilla Coke dispensers.
It turns out that Twenty One was fixed almost from the beginning. They made the decision to sometimes "help" their contestants after their first episode featured two morons getting every question wrong. With dozens of people involved, they had to know that their dark secret had a ridiculously short lifespan. Still, they figured Fake Quiz Show would outlast The Dipshits Who Don't Know The Answers Show. When you give someone the option of stupid or evil, most of them are going to go with evil.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? -- Amount Stolen: �£1 million
He had a secret plan, though. In a childish scheme that would have gotten a Home Improvement writer fired, Charles read the answers out loud and his wife and another contestant coughed when he got to the correct one. His cheating was spotted before he got a chance to cash the check, and two years later he was convicted of fraud and forced to pay �ã25,000 in fines. At the end of it, he'd basically funded a �ã38,000 ad campaign to convince the world that retarded people can be assholes too. Plus, in a bizarre victory for the forces of stupid, the investigation into foiling history's most obvious scam cost almost twice as much as the jackpot itself.
For a country that abolished slavery 146 years ago, America still produces a lot of shows that use actual people as prizes. The Dating Game was one of the first. It pitted three mystery contestants against each other in a battle of boner innuendos for a decent shot at casual sex. In 1978, Rodney Alcala appeared on the show as Bachelor #1 and lied his way to a date with "Sensational" Cheryl Bradshaw. Well, maybe "lied" is too strong a word, but it does seem dishonest to not tell a woman that you're coming from and on your way to a murder.
Cheryl chose Rodney for his bizarrely sexual(?) answers, but when she got close she smelled serial killer all over the guy. She refused to go on the date. She would go unmurdered and two sporty tennis outfits furnished by Darling's Tennis Shoppe of Studio City would go unclaimed. You see, women have a special intuition that warns them when a man is carrying a thermos of breast milk or a wallet made of face. Not that I would know, ladies.
It isn't that crazy that a mass murderer and convicted rapist got past the background checks of the 1978 Dating Game. Back then, the only requirement for getting on the show was to get 45 minutes into an orgy without farting. Plus, when you hear his clever answers you'll realize that this maniac was perfectly disguised as a normal.
Seems pretty not crazy to me. He mentioned the night twice and never even brought up how the harvest moon glistens upon hunted flesh. So far, the guy seems alright.
Given how stupid the question was, that's a pretty clever response. It was probably pre-written, though, because that answer works for everything.
OK, yeah. Holy shit, they should have known that guy was a serial killer.
