In the grand pantheon of Australian TV game shows, The Price is Right stands heads and shoulders above them all. The 1993-1998 and 2003-2005 runs of the show – helmed by Larry Emdur, the biggest snack to come out of the 90s since Yogo Gorilla Mix – are untouchable; gripping post-school pre-news viewing where ordinary Australians were run through a gauntlet of various tests with all the riches of the world on offer. To the victors, a glittering array of various prizes like his and hers watches, above-ground swimming pools, brand new Suzuki Jimneys, and fantastic home entertainment packages thanks to our friends at Teac Australia. And it all could’ve been theirs if, well…
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After each person came on down, and after the opening bidding round, magic. Pure and utter magic. These Joe and Jane Blow’s were put through all manner of games; some of them fantastic and fiendishly difficult, others pissy and dogshit boring.
The mixture and the mystery kept you coming back time and again, so what better time than now – a completely meaningless Friday – to revisit the show’s glory days by ranking every single game that appeared on the show, from utterly awful to Can’t Miss TV™.
Please note: This is for the Australian version, and very specifically the first and second Larry Emdur runs only. The 2012 attempted reboot does not count, nor do any of the American versions either. In my world, Plinko simply does not exist.
28) BUMP
Bump absolutely sucks. Just an atrocious game all around. The iconography of it is deeply weird – giant Australian flag on the bump font, a squished together Sydney Harbour Bridge, and four red double-decker tourist buses because what better way to show off the Harbour City than with a vehicle no one goes on that’s more closely associated with limey London – and that it bafflingly involved two models to make it work defies belief. Was it a union requirement? Is that rotating platform where they live? Who cares, it all sucks ass.
27) SIDE BY SIDE
The worst Price is Right games required people to put in absolutely no effort and practically begged the contestant to win them. Side By Side is the shittest of that ingloriously turd-like bunch. Losing this game is one of the most shameful acts you could commit on Australian TV. There is simply no way in hell that Fisher & Paykel washer/dryer combo is worth over $2,000, Alan. If you manage to screw this up you deserve to go home with that electric lawn mower you won in the bidding round and nothing else.
26) TWO PRICE TAGS
Only mildly better than Side By Side by virtue of the fact it doesn’t even bother to hide the fact it’s a nothing game. There’s two price tags. Pick one of them ya deadshit. That Larry Emdur managed to squeeze any more than 10 seconds out of this putrid first draft idea should qualify him for an Order of Australia.
25) FLIP FLOP
I hate Flip Flop with all of my being. Pathetic shit. It could’ve been good but it shot itself in the foot by putting up wildly unlikely wrong combinations. Oh you reckon that lovely 3-day holiday to beautiful CALOUNDRA is gonna be worth over nine thousand dollars do ya, Sandra? Get off the stage.
24) SWITCH
Tired of contestants putting in very minimal effort, Switch was a game where “doing literally nothing” still gave you a 50% chance of winning. Even in a coin toss you still have to flip the damn coin. The big Switch wheels made a pretty satisfying thud when thrown though, so that’s enough to shunt it up a few notches.
23) TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE
It’s Side By Side on hard mode. Which means it’s twice as annoying and sucks just as much. What’s the point of putting an incorrect middle number on the board if you’re going to give it away no matter what? Ridiculous, disgusting, and I hate it.
22) SQUEEZE PLAY
“Squeeze Play” sounds like some piss-boring dick-gripping tip Cosmo would’ve included in a 1995 article among 21 other “spicy” “hot” ways to fire up a boring sex life. The kind of game they wouldn’t waste a Jason Lay-Z-Boy on. Hell, they wouldn’t even put golf clubs up for grabs here. We’re talking lawn furniture and crappy luggage sets only. Asshole prizes for an asshole game.
21) GROCERY GAME
If I wanted to use shopping skills in order to score a fabulous prize, I’d go steal shit from a Big W. Next.
20) LINE ‘EM UP
Line ‘Em Up is incredibly strange in the sense that you could never win a brand new car just by itself, you also had to walk away with three shitty, significantly lesser gifts as well. Winning meant you couldn’t leave with just a brand new SEAT Toledo GLX, you had to be saddled with the shameful prize of “bag” as well. What the fuck.
19) ONE AWAY
A deeply boring game whose only saving grace is that it is one of the few Price is Right games theoretically capable of making Larry Emdur read out “$6969” on national TV.
18) SWITCHEROO
The idea behind Switcheroo is that once you’ve put all the blocks in the price tags, you could switch them up if you weren’t sure. The better idea would’ve been giving you the ability to switch your location to literally anywhere else because you couldn’t get the price of a goddamned basic ass rice cooker right.
17) TEMPTATION
Almost completely identical to Switcheroo, except Big Laz got to tempt people with the very tempting option of taking a wad of cold hard cash that might’ve tempted some people out of going for the car. Cannot for the life of me think of why they named the game the way did.
16) MAKE YOUR MOVE
This should be about six or seven slots lower, but I swear I remember one episode where some jacked-up 90s asshat named “Gront” or someshit couldn’t figure out how the sliders worked and nearly reefed the entire game board off its moorings. So because of that, it’s here. No, I won’t be taking any questions.
15) BUY OR SELL
I could find absolutely no footage of Big Laz playing this game and could only manage to pull an image of Bob “Cut Your Cat’s Nuts Off, Thanks” Barker to use for this article, and be fucked if I’m watching that to figure out how this game was played. So Buy Or Sell gets the true neutral half-way mark on this list.
14) RANGE GAME
The game prop may have looked the super computer in a dope low-budget 1970s sci-fi about a mad scientist who puts people brains in monkeys to create Very Powerful Monkeys™, but the mechanic of allowing people to win not for being right, but for being in the vague vicinity of right is a fucking cop out and you know it.
13) RACE GAME
PRO: Slick TV studio floors plus encouraging contestants to run meant this game had the highest chance of someone eating shit.
CON: Nobody ever ate shit.
12) FIVE PRICE TAGS
Now here’s a point-and-guess game you can set your watch to. Taking all the milquetoast who-gives-a-crap-ism of Two Price Tags and tacking three additional price tags onto the board adds some much needed respectability to proceedings. ‘Course that’s immediately whittled away by the fact people could win up to four guesses making the whole thing about as exciting as a damp thumb in the ear. Still, when it was good, it was pretty good indeed.
11) COVER UP
I have no idea why I like Cover Up as much as what I do. Maybe it’s the neat, angular lines of the game board. Maybe it’s the pleasing pastel colour palate that evokes a balmy summer evening in 80s Vice-era Miami. Or maybe it’s the fact that it’s statistically the most difficult game in Price Is Right history that all-but guaranteed soul-crushing defeat for any stooge unlucky enough to draw it. No Suzuki Jimney for you, my dude.
10) MONEY GAME
A Princely game of match that at a minimum sent you home with around $300 in 1990s money, which by today’s standards, when adjusted for inflation, equates to approximately $16 billion. Plus this is the one where they’d give away the real weird big prizes. You want a three-person river kayak and accompanying set of road skis? It’s yours now, babey!
9) ANY NUMBER
Very few games on The Price Is Right made room for proper humiliation, but Any Number having a worst-case scenario of “you go home with about $2.53” is as degrading as it gets. It’s infinitely worse than leaving with nothing. You hate to see someone walk away with the Piggy Bank. It’s a sell-the-house-and-leave-town scenario. There’s simply no coming back from it.
8) MAGIC NUMBER
The coolest game of them all. The space field? Cool. The number spinning music? Cool. The fact the number counter moved at roughly the speed of light meaning landing on a specific number was impossible but that didn’t stop anyone from endlessly trying to get to whatever dumbass lucky number they had in their head? Also cool. The cool 3D spinning wheel? Very cool.
7) CLOCK GAME
No moment of Price Is Right was funnier than some schlub trying to guess the price of a $499 JVC Camcorder and Hi-Fi VCR, starting at $900, immediately panicking, and burning all 30 seconds by going down in increments of $10. Just some dickhead in his Jeans West best swanning up to the stage completely convinced a full set of hardcover Encyclopædia Britannica books is gonna cost $846 on the nose, being wrong and immediately loading his dacks up. It doesn’t get any better than that.
6) SAFE CRACKERS
That there are five games better than Safe Crackers, which whips objective sack, is a testament to how good The Price Is Right was. We have your prizes. We’ve locked them in this big fuck-off vault. If you’re good enough to crack the combination, the riches inside are your reward. Sure, Fort Knox might hold oceans of gold. But only the giant Price Is Right safe could protect the most precious cargo of all: an Electrolux non-bagless vacuum and steam mop.
5) SHOWCASE
The great equaliser. The final boss. The Aggro Crag of Australian Game Show TV. No other game in television history tested people’s retail acumen quite like the show-closing Showcase. And no other game lumped as much utterly useless shit onto unsuspecting citizens. The sheer number of given-away two-person Sea-Doo Jet Skis slowly gathering dust around Australia must be staggering. All withering away virtually unused; resigned to a slow death sitting next to a rotting outdoor spa in a backyard in suburbia because although they might be worth a combined $26,000, no one in their goddamned right mind is buying a brand new second-hand one of those from the fucken Trading Post.
4) DICE GAME
Dice Game kicks ass. The best non-car game in the bunch by a country mile. The genius of dice game lay in the fact that a savvy dice roller could guarantee victory by rolling up 1s and 6s, allowing them to cruise to an easy win. The kicker was that producers somehow managed to find a way to only select contestants who had never laid eyes on dice before in their lives, meaning people tossed up 4s on the reg by throwing it like a damn frisbee. Absolutely top shelf.
3) BIG WHEEL
I would die for the Big Wheel. I would march into the maw of Hell itself if the wheel asked me to. The only Price is Right game in the history of the show that could, given half a chance, eat an unsuspecting contestant whole if they weren’t careful enough. The Big Wheel is good, and just, and it is my friend.
2) HOLE IN ONE
Hole in One is everything great about The Price is Right: Completely pointless retail guessing as a means of determining what advantage someone had in a challenge totally unrelated to anything else about the show. The only time in your life where knowing for sure how much a bottle of Duck toilet clearner costs would ever come in handy. And as if that weren’t enough, the game also served as the routine enforced humiliation of Larry Emdur by making him attempt a test putt each time, thus revealing to the entire nation that his short game sucks ass and shit.
1) CLIFF HANGERS
The King. The legend. The creme de la creme. The only challenge in Game Show history where failure resulted in sending a fictional character to a horrible, craggy death. Little Cliff might be the most resilient underrated figure in Australian TV history. If you think hard enough about it, the premise of Cliff Hangers becomes utterly absurd: The entire goal of the game is to take control of a mountain climber and prevent him from reaching the summit of a peak. If he gets to the top, he dies, and you lose. It’s life and death. It’s do or die. It’s the greatest game in the history of The Price Is Right, plain and simple.
