Starcade

Starcade is the nation's very first video game game show.

Premise
Two contestants (sometimes two teams of two) regardless of age, competed in a game of playing arcade games for points & prizes. The contestants were matched according to their ability in playing the games played that day. There were five arcade games played per show, but only four of them were played.

Main Game
Three rounds were played and in each round, a video game question with two choices was asked. The first player(s) to buzz-in with a correct answer won the right to choose a game, but an incorrect answer gave the opponent(s) a game choice. The player/team who chose the game also went first. The object of each game is to score as many points as possible within a time limit; each one was added to the player/team's overall match score.

Time Limits
In the first two rounds, both players/teams played the selected games for 50 seconds, and in the third round, the game chosen in that round was played for 40 seconds.

When the show started, all main game video games were played for 40 seconds. Later the first game was played for 60 seconds while the seconds game was played for 50 seconds. Finally it was changed to the above times.

Mystery Game
One of the five games was the "Mystery Game". The Mystery Game was announced to the home viewer by announcer Kevin McMahan. The player/team who choose that game at any point in the match instantly won a prize.

Name the Game
After the second round, the player/team in lead at that point won the right to face the "Name the Game" board. On the "Name the Game" board monitors are four playing fields of video games. The host would present two video game choices for each field and all the contestant/team had to do was to choose the right game, the one that has that screenshot. If the contestant/team named three or all four games correctly, he/she/they won a prize.

NOTE: Name the Game was also played after the third & final round in the early days of the show. Only the player with the highest score from the third game only will play it.

The player/team with the most overall point total from all three games played wins the match & a prize, and goes on to play one final video game for a grand prize (usually their own arcade game).

Bonus Round
In the bonus round, the winning player/team had a choice of the remaining two video games without even answering a question. The host gave the average scores of 20 other players who played those two games before the winning player/team made a decision. Once the choice was made, the winning player/team had just 30 seconds to play the game he/she/they chose. The object of this game was to beat the average score previously mentioned for that game in order to win the grand prize.

Pilot
The original pilot for Starcade was hosted by Mike Eruzione (famous for scoring the game-winning goal for the 1980 U.S. Men's Olympic Hockey Team vs. Russia) and featured an almost entirely different format. There were three rows of eight players (24 in total) and their own separate arcade game systems. All three rows featured a different video game; in this case, the first one featured eight Defender systems, the second one featured eight Centipede systems, and the third one featured eight Pac-Man systems. Each player had 30 seconds to accumulate a relatively high total. Whoever had the highest out of all eight on their team was selected to play against the two other highest-scoring players on an arcade game (Berzerk in this case) for the grand prize—their very own arcade game (Asteroids Deluxe, in this case) and an Apple II Home Computer System.

Afterwards, the overall winner would play a brand-new arcade game against a celebrity "just for fun". The winner, David Dyche, played the then-brand new video arcade game Donkey Kong against Larry Wilcox, who was known to television fans as police officer Jon Baker on the NBC crime-drama CHiPs.

The original pilot was conceived to sell to NBC, who passed. Three more pilots were shot, featuring a retooled format (more similar to the one described in the above sections) and host Alex Trebek. The pilot was picked up by Ted Turner in 1982, and the show began its life on the WTBS superstation that same year.

Links
Official Website Rules for Starcade [http://www.retroblast.com/Articles/RetroBlast-The-History-of-Starcade.php RetroBlast! - The History of Starcade] Dragon's Lair Project - Starcade retrospective