Bonus Game

Bonus Game is a pricing game on the American television game show "The Price Is Right". It is played for a four-digit prize, usually valued between $3,000 and $10,000, and uses small prizes. While not a car game, Bonus Game will be played for cars a couple times per season, as was the case in its very first playing in Season 36.

Bonus Game is the second of "Price"'s original five pricing games, debuting on the show's first episode on September 4, 1972. It is the oldest game that still uses its original set, though the set has been recolored. It is the only one of the still-active original games that was not played on Bob Barker's final episode. It is also the last of the original four active pricing games to be played in Drew Carey's era.

Gameplay

Bonus Game is played on a board with four windows, each of which is associated with one small prize and one of which conceals the word "bonus". While the game uses small prizes, which the contestant can win, the real goal of the game is to win the "bonus prize", which is of much greater value.

The contestant is shown each of the four small prizes, one at a time, each with an incorrect price. They must determine whether the actual price is higher or lower than the one shown. A correct decision wins that prize, and a marker on the board is moved to mark the corresponding window. If the contestant is wrong, the small prize is lost and the marker is removed from the board.

After all four prizes have been played, all four windows are lighted. If the window that lights "bonus" has been marked, the contestant also wins the bonus prize. If the contestant does not win any of the small prizes, the game ends immediately.

Contestants who correctly price all four smaller prizes automatically win the bonus prize, since they mark all four windows. However, unlike in Shell Game, there is no additional bonus awarded for this situation.

History

For the first three taped episodes, the windows were yellow; beginning on September 11, 1972 (the sixth aired episode) they were blue.

In June 1974, the show's staff decided to retire Bonus Game and created Shell Game to replace it; after the newer game's debut, Bonus Game was not played on the daytime show for over a year, although it continued to appear on the nighttime show. For reasons unknown, it was returned to the active daytime rotation in July 1975 and has remained there ever since.

Due to Barker's fur ban, all playings of Bonus Game from the first two weeks of shows have not been reran since their first broadcast; Despite this, an episode in which a fur coat was the bonus prize (November 16, 1972) was mistakenly reran on Game Show Network.

Nighttime Appearances

On the Dennis James version, Bonus Game was played alongside Shell Game during his third season, although it vanished from the CBS show; It is unknown why.

No visual footage of James playing Bonus Game is in the trading circuit; However, a monochrome promotional picture showing him next to a game in progress (with the board showing its name) was shown during the A&E Biography "TV Game Shows".

Foreign versions

In Australia, during the Ian Turpie era, when a contestant got all four decisions correct, not only did they win the bonus prize, they also got a chance to win $50 by finding the "bonus" window in one guess. A similar bonus format is used in Shell Game on the American version of "Price".