Top Secret

An unsold pilot where three players assume the "identities" of people, places, and things, then try to conceal them from their opponents.

Broadcast
Unsold Pilot March 3 & 4, 1988

Packager
Martindale/Gilden Productions

Host
Wink Martindale

Announcer
Johnny Gilbert

Main Game
The object of the game is to guess the secret identities of the opponents. And here's how:

Each of the three contestants were given a secret identity of a famous person, place or thing, along with four crazy clues which talk about those identities. The clues were given a dollar value based on the difficulty of the clues: $250 for the hardest clue, $500 for the second hardest, $750 for the second easiest, and $1,000 for the easiest; so the higher the value the easier & less crazy the clue. To earn clues, the contestants must answer a toss-up question posed by host Martindale. While a question was read, a six-monitored randomizer with money values from $100-$1,000 was active; it stopped when a player buzzed-in to answer the question. A correct answer won the landed money amount, but a wrong answer eliminated that player from the next question. Now, the player who won the toss-up question used his/her score to buy one of the four clues from one of his/her two opponents; the player in control had three seconds to answer and if the controlling player can identify the identity of the player whose clue he/she bought, the player won $100 and the player with the identity was knocked out of the game. The winner of the game was the one who was the last player standing or is the player whose identity was not guessed after all of his/her clues were bought, and that player won the right to player the Super Sleuth round.

Super Sleuth (Bonus Round)
In the Super Sleuth round, the winning player had 60 seconds (one minute) to identify six identities correctly. On each identity, three clues were given one at a time and the player must guess after each clue. Each correct identification was worth $200, and getting all six identities before time ran out won the grand cash prize.

Two games were played each show with the first Super Sleuth win being worth $5,000, and should any one player make it to Super Sleuth the second time on the same show, the payoff was $10,000. If no player won both games, the player with the most combined total money (main game & bonus game) supposedly returned as champion.

Merchandise
Believe it or not, A Board Game was released by Parker Brothers in 1988, which was based on the proposed TV show which reached the pilot stage but never got picked up. for that reason, and because rival company TSR already released a game called "Top Secret" in stores. Parker pulled all of its copies from stores, making this relatively recent game a very "hard-to-find" collectable.

Music
Ed Lojeski

Links
Rules for Top Secret Top Secret @ The Game Show Pilot Light