If you read about great British successes in late ‘90s video games, it’s usually about Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto and Goldeneye 007, or maybe at a push Driver or Colin McRae Rally. It’s certainly not about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. Yet it was, for a while, bigger than them all.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? spent 18 (eighteen) weeks at the top of the UK charts. In an alternate world where it didn’t exist, I would now be playing Championship Manager 00/01, FIFA 2001 and Driver 2, a pretty standard set of big sequel releases for the end of the year. Instead, those all stalled at #2, and FIFA 2001 is the only yearly FIFA to date which I won’t be playing. Even that football juggernaut was no match for the UK’s best-selling game of 2000. Four months after its release, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? became, appropriately enough, the first video game to sell a million copies in the UK. It may even have saved publisher Eidos in the process. When they ran Tomb Raider into the ground (2000’s fifth game in the series, Tomb Raider: Chronicles, didn’t get any higher than #5) Millionaire stepped up in its place.
Yet when I had a look for any twentieth anniversary retrospectives about the game with this historic achievement, I couldn’t find any. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? the game doesn’t even have its own wikipedia page. It gets one sentence on the main page for the game show format. Eidos released some games, it says. Nothing else of interest here. For all its success, it’s been forgotten even more thoroughly than the game of The Phantom Menace.
It is a game unashamedly based on a different experience, an attempt to replicate the vastly successful show that ruled TV in the UK and then much of the world. Some parts can’t be replicated. The computer game might show you pictures of cheques made out to Player 1 once you get to £32,000 and beyond, but it’s clearly not actually going to pay you any money. You don’t even get the thrill of going after twenty quid like on the very popular pub quiz machine version. That element of the game is missing. It is Millionaire without the million.
There was more to the show than the big prize, though. The first time someone won a million pounds on UK TV was in 1999 on TFI Friday, but that didn’t make the same impact. The Millionaire format, its accessibility and its steadily ratcheting tension, didn’t just rely on the stakes but on the journey there. From early questions with joke wrong answers (or the occasional bizarrely challenging one), across all kinds of subjects, through to the usual ending point of a stab in the dark or a walk away.
It is a format which feels rather familiar from the world of computer games. You work your way through fifteen increasingly difficult levels, with a failure throwing you back out to the beginning. You have a set of single use power-ups, which you can use strategically to make particular levels easier. Your progress is tracked by an escalating score. The similarity is unsurprising since Millionaire is, after all, a game show, and computer games didn’t develop in isolation or as a development from cinema. Outside of the scale of the prizes, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on TV was always rather like watching someone sit down with Chris Tarrant to play a pub quiz machine, an entertainment which started becoming a thing at much the same time in the ‘80s as home computer games started getting big enough for anyone to want them to have their own chart.
In the computer version of Millionaire, you don’t quite sit down with Chris Tarrant. The graphics are largely confined to quick CGI sequences sweeping around a couple of empty chairs in front of an empty audience, before zooming in on a screen with the questions on. A lot more emphasis is placed on the sound, which makes full use of all of the evocative musical cues of the show and a range of recordings of Chris Tarrant doing all of the intros and results for each question and assorted other chivvying along. He doesn’t actually read out the questions, but it does enough to give a sense of the pacing and tension of the show. Little details like how whether you get asked the famous “is that your final answer?” or not depends on both how far along you are and how quickly you click an answer are helpful too.
If you do something like phone a friend for the £100 question, Tarrant comments on it. When you phone, you get pre-recorded answers from one of a handful of people which actually do reference the question rather than just saying “B” or “C”, too. When I had a question about classical music, ‘Jane’ on the other end of the line said that she’d accidentally turned on Classic FM yesterday before guessing the wrong answer. ‘Mark’ made a non-joke about Liz Taylor’s marriages which felt exactly like something someone might say on the show. In response to a question about Northern Irish geography, both ‘Ross’ and his accent identified correctly that he was the right man for the question.
What reviews I can find don’t appear to have been particularly complimentary about the game. It is true that around 1,000 questions split across fifteen levels is a pretty desultory number for any kind of lasting appeal, but the game was surely more for gatherings than extensive solo play anyway. It kind of demands you to provide your own audience, and the hotseat multiplayer mode was presumably well-used. Much of the appeal may have come straight from the basic concept — you might not manage to get through to appear on the TV show, but you can get to have the experience — but getting it right enough wasn’t a foregone conclusion. It’s not hard to imagine Hothouse doing it differently, saddling the game with an uncanny valley Chris Tarrant, slowing it down too much or not enough, and losing the atmosphere that it succeeds on. It is a simulacrum that works, and that is an achievement.
You could put the combined forces of big gaming being outdone by a simulacrum of a TV show down to gaming still being a relatively new medium. Perhaps, still establishing its own place in culture, it was vulnerable to being mobbed by the established forces of television, by people with no interest in games but fondness for a show. Except games weren’t the only medium this sort of thing was happening in.
The eighteenth and final chart with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? at #1 was announced on 11 March 2001. The following day, the pop group Hear’Say released their first single, “Pure and Simple”. It went on to become 2001’s second-best-selling single and the UK’s fastest-selling debut single ever, despite being a bland All Saints/Oasis cut-and-shut which existed primarily as merchandise for the phenomenally successful TV show Popstars. The precursor to The X Factor, Popstars was, like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, a key part of ITV’s Saturday evening primetime schedule. The half-century old institution of the British music charts was no less subject to TV’s reach.
No, the Millionaire takeover wasn’t a sign of the weakness of the cultural position of games. It was a sign of its strength. For a popular phenomenon with the right kind of alignment, playing a game version of it was just an obvious thing for huge numbers of people to choose to do. Because huge numbers of people already liked games, for a wide definition of games. Millionaire wasn’t even a case of people owning PCs for web browsing and spreadsheets and playing this one game alone. The majority of copies eventually sold were on the PlayStation.
There would be a limited window for anything like Millionaire to make the kind of chart impact that it did, with widespread internet adoption and then smartphones meaning these kind of experiences wouldn’t usually involve spending £35 on a physical disc for much longer, but its popularity was part of a wider long-term trend. Trivial Pursuit showed that as early as 1986 video games were far from the exclusive preserve of exclusionary self-proclaimed Gamers, however much they might retrospectively claim otherwise. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? reinforces that, by the year 2000, they were completely outnumbered.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? spent its eighteen weeks as the UK’s #1 game across three different spells at the top. Click through to the next page for the full details of what was at the top of other charts during that time…