Golden Road
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- This article is about one of The Price Is Right's pricing games. For the album set, see The Golden Road (1965-1973). For the Keith Urban album, see Golden Road (album).
Golden Road is a pricing game on the American television game show The Price Is Right. Debuting on August 19, 1975, it is played for three prizes: A three-digit prize (worth between $400 and $999); a four-digit prize (worth between $1,000 and $9,999) and a five-digit prize. On $1,000,000 Spectaculars, Golden Road has sometimes used a 6-digit prize instead of the 5-digit prize; the game play remains the same.
That five-digit prize represents some of the most expensive prizes offered on the show. Possibilities included a motor home, a cabin cruiser, or an expensive luxury or sports car. The most expensive prize ever won in this game on the daytime show was an $86,743 Dodge Viper on September 28, 2006.
On the primetime version, a Four Winns 268 Vista cabin cruiser worth $105,684 was won on a $1,000,000 Spectacular aired April 9, 2005. The most expensive prize ever offered was a Fleetwood Terra LX 31M motor home worth $107,205, on June 11, 2007; however, the contestant did not win.
[edit] Game play
The game begins with a grocery item priced under $1, whose price is shown to the contestant. The price of the three-digit prize is then revealed, with the hundreds digit missing. The contestant must choose one of the two digits in the price of the grocery item as the missing digit.
If they are correct (and the first prize is set up to ensure an easy win for the contestant), the game continues with the four-digit prize, whose missing hundreds digit is one of the digits in the price of the three-digit prize. If they are correct, they move on to select the missing hundreds digit in the price of the five-digit prize from the digits in the price of the four-digit prize. An incorrect guess at any point ends the game; however, the contestant keeps any prizes they have won up to that point. If the contestant guesses incorrectly on the first prize, the contestant leaves with no prizes.
Usually, only the final prize has repeating numbers in the price; the other two do not.
Since the first two (or three for six-digit prizes) digits of the final prize's price will be shown, the prize is usually billed as "worth more than [however many] thousand dollars" at the start of the game.
[edit] History
Golden Road was created by then-producer Jay Wolpert. [1]
Golden Road's original claim to fame was that it always offered a prize worth more than $10,000, while other games typically offered cars in the $4,000 range (during the time when CBS had a game show earnings cap of $25,000). The prize value has increased steadily since then, as CBS increased the earnings cap to the point where they are usually worth more (sometimes much more) than $60,000 on current playings, thus giving the game continued fame for offering the most lucrative prizes on the show. Understandably, it is also one of the rarest pricing games that can appear on the show.
The first-ever win of Golden Road occurred on Price's first permanent hour-long episode. Contestant Kristi won a 1976 Lincoln Continental worth $12,304.
Except for in its first appearance on a half-hour show, when it was played third, Golden Road is always played as the first game of a show. Since the late 1980s until his retirement, host Bob Barker almost always entered from the back of the audience at the beginning of the show when Golden Road was to be is played, as the game takes up the entire stage and would have been given away with a traditional entrance through the center stage door. One notable exception was on the $1,000,000 Spectacular that aired on May 16, 2007. Bob entered the stage through the center door for this episode; to keep his entrance from giving away the game, the dots that make up the "road" were not used; this change was subsequently made on the daytime show with Drew Carey taking over at the start of the 36th season, although it was undone after only two playings. The dots are now set up during the first One Bid. However, Carey continues to enter through the blue center door and has not yet entered from the audience for this game or any other.
On 1994's syndicated The New Price Is Right, Golden Road began with a two-digit prize or a fishbowl of cash.
