American game show winnings records

In the United States, a game show is a type of radio, television, or internet program in which contestants, television personalities or celebrities, sometimes as part of a team, play a game which involves answering trivia questions and/or solving puzzles, usually for money and/or prizes. Game shows are usually distinguishable from reality television competition shows, in which the competition consumes an entire season of episodes; in a game show, prizes can typically be won in a single match (in some cases, particularly in the ones that offer record-setting prizes, contestants can play multiple matches and accumulate a larger total).

Since the genre began, many shows have offered prizes of large sums of money to contestants; Teddy Nadler set the original monetary winnings record of $264,000 during his appearance on The $64,000 Challenge in 1957. Nadler was not surpassed until 1980, when Thom McKee won $312,700 on Tic-Tac-Dough. In 1999, John Carpenter won $1,000,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, becoming the first person to win a seven-figure prize on an American game show. Since then, many players have gone on to win that amount and even surpassed it. As of 2015, Brad Rutter is the highest-earning American game show contestant of all time, having accumulated a total of $4,555,102. He succeeded Ken Jennings as the highest-earning contestant by virtue of his victory on May 16, 2014, in the Jeopardy! Battle of the Decades tournament.

Most daytime game show top prizes were limited to $25,000 during the 1960s and 1970s, a restriction made for both budgetary concerns and to assuage criticism from scandals that arose surrounding prime-time game shows in the 1950s. The single day record for shows in daytime television was set by Michael Larson in 1984, who won $110,237 (equivalent to $254,000 in 2016) on Press Your Luck. Larson achieved his record by memorizing the show's board patterns. He repeatedly hit the board's squares that awarded contestants money and an additional spin. That spin would in turn replace the spin he had just used, effectively allowing him to spin the board in the second round as long as wanted. Because of this, his game had to be split into two episodes (which aired June 8 and June 11, 1984), as his turn caused the game to go well over the show's half-hour allotted time. In 2003, Game Show Network produced a documentary about the event.

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