Home Game

"You don't get to come back tomorrow. You don't even get a lousy copy of our home game. You're a complete loser!" —Don Pardo, "Weird Al" Yankovic's I Lost on Jeopardy!

When a Game Show has been around for a while, loyal fans will want to play the game at home. In fact, the very first radio quiz shows had home games in the form of quiz books, originally created as advertising premiums.

Home adaptations of television game shows are made mostly of paper, cardboard and plastic, and often the game play has to be changed significantly to fit the relevant constraints. Since the 1980s, many home games have been created for popular home computers and video game consoles. Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune are probably two of the biggest examples in recent years, at least from the game show front.

Often given as a Consolation Prize in the actual game show, naturally as Product Placement.

Matt Ottinger has more information on home versions of game shows.

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Fictional examples:

• In The Running Man film, an audience member who gets to choose the next stalker to send after Ahnold, is given a copy of The Running Man home game. It is not elaborated how the home game manages to recreate a game show that kills its contestants.
  • Smash TV, an arcade game that can be described as a combination of The Running Man and RoboCop, awards 'Our Exciting Home Game' as a prize in the final level. It goes meta in the console ports — you're awarded a Home Game in the Home Game!
• When Garfield of Garfield and Friends has a Dream Sequence in which he is a contestant on a game show called Name That Fish, one of the things he wins is a copy of the home game. It appears to be a box with fish sticking out.
• Fictional game show Numberwang in That Mitchell and Webb Look is revealed to have an equally overly complicated home game; featuring a pair of 400-sided dice that are too small to see with the human eye, a wig of the host's hair, a rotating board, and a 37-volume rule book, "so you can say 'That's Numberwang!' with confidence!"
• Also featured is the opposite of this trope: game shows like Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary, which were, of course, home games made into game shows.
  • Scrabble then had its own home game entitled TV Scrabble.
• In an episode of The Fairly Odd Parents, a knight tries to pull out the Sword in the Stone, but apparently breaks his arm doing it. He is then awarded the "Sword in the Stone Home Game"...and breaks his fingers trying to pull it out.
• In Homestar Runner, Homestar's game/talk show "The Show" offers runners-up "a year's supply of our home game", according to the Strong Bad Email geddup noise.
• In an episode of Histeria!, the Spanish Inquisition gives its victims the "Convert or Die" home game if they choose the latter in order to make their time on Death Row more enjoyable.
• In Ratchet: Deadlocked, the announcer will occasionally remind viewers to purchase the Dreadzone Home Game. Given that Dreadzone is essentially a reality TV show about brutal gladiatorial combat, well...
• Parodied in Whose Line Is It Anyway?. Apparently, it comes with a blow-up doll version of Drew Carey.