Range Game
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Range Game is a pricing game on the American television game show The Price Is Right. Debuting on April 3, 1973, it is played for a prize worth more than $3,000 (occasionally a car).
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[edit] Gameplay
The contestant is shown a scale representing $600 worth of prices. Somewhere on the scale is the price of a prize.
A red window representing a $150 range (dubbed the "range finder") moves up the scale. As soon as the contestant believes that the "range finder" covers the price of the prize, he presses a button to stop it. If the price is indeed covered by the "range finder," he wins the prize.
[edit] Rule changes
- When the game debuted in 1973 Range Game used a $50 "range finder." The winning spread quickly increased to $100 and just as quickly to the current $150.
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- During a brief time in the 1970s syndicated version, the "range finder" provided a $200 spread.
[edit] Trivia
- As a running gag, host Bob Barker tells the contestant that, once the range finder has been stopped, the "range finder" cannot be restarted for 37 hours. (On the Primetime Specials, the "range finder" cannot be restarted for 48 hours.) This joke originally used other absurd numbers and extended into days, weeks, months, etc.
- The correct price is never in the area covered by the rangefinder at the beginning of the game.
- The Range Game board was originally blue and did not contain the game's name. The "Range Game" logo was added early in 1976, and the board's current color scheme debuted later in that year.
- If the "rangefinder" reaches the top of the scale, it stops automatically. This has never been known to happen.
- Given the fact that the "rangefinder" is manually operated, it often stops about $2 later than it should. This has caused two contestants to lose the game by $1.
- On October 15, 1996, a contestant lost Range Game by less than $1; Bob decided to award him the prize.
- A few times over the years, Range Game has been played for a range (a stove). A range was also the Item up for Bids offered immediately before the game's first playing.
- Range Game is one of the few games that is revealed before its prize is (although this is variable, as the prize has been revealed first on a number of recent playings).
- Range Game is generally played for a car a few times each season.
- On the Doug Davidson syndicated version of Price, Range Game was used as the Showcase (although Doug never acknowledged it as "Range Game"). A completely new prop was constructed for the round, and the contestant selected at random a length for the rangefinder; the lengths came in increments of $1,000 and fell between $4,000 and $10,000. Whereas the normal Range Game board's scale covered a range of $600, the Showcase version's covered a range of $60,000. A $5,000 range would be equivalent to the original $50 range back in 1973, but the value of the showcases arguably justified the difficulty.
- Range Game is the first game to have its own unique "thinking music". The same song was also used in Blank Check until the late 80's.
