Mindreaders ROM: My 2007 April Fools Day Prank
Sorry, game show fans, there is no 1989 Mindreaders ROM: I made up the entire story, and all the "screenshots" were done in MS Paint, using edited sprites from GameTek's Price is Right C64 game. It was a pretty elaborate joke, and I had a lot of fun setting it up! I took down the link once April Fools Day ended and admitted the prank, but never removed this page. I did get a couple emails from people telling me I did a pretty convincing job on it back then...and then I found out just how convincing when this page was re-discovered in October 2013, and taken as real. I assumed that since there was no link to it, it wouldn't get found again...proves how much I know!
The below text and pictures are exactly how the page looked back then, minus a couple grammatical errors.
A ROM has recently come into my possession, and it’s based on…of all game shows…Mindreaders. Mindreaders is generally regarded as G-T’s weakest effort, so why base a video game on it?
The story of this ROM is an interesting one. Goodson Productions hoped to revive Mindreaders in the late-80s, and thought a good way to garner interest in the format was a new computer game. Mimi O'Brien in particular loved the concept of Mindreaders, shoehorning part of the format into Eubanks’ version of Card Sharks. Knowing Card Sharks was on its last legs, she wanted the concept to live on, so she commissioned GameTek to create a game. The end result was this Commodore 64 ROM. It’s complete and playable…to some extent.
The format of the ROM is extremely faithful to the original show…which proves to be its downfall. Each game involves eight players; four on the mens’ team, four on the womens’ team. Contestants picked which player would be the captain (the mindreading job the celebrity held on the TV show) for each team, and which players would be controlled by the CPU.
A yes-or-no question would be asked that probed the personal opinions of the teammates. The three teammates put in their answer without the captain looking, and the captain had to guess what they answered, one at a time. Predicting correctly won $50, but predicting incorrectly gave $50 to the other team, and the other team’s captain could mindread the remaining teammates. This process is repeated with a new question for the opposing team. First to $300 wins the game and goes on to the bonus round.
The bonus round is played with ten lumps of color…er, audience members. Like the Audience Poll questions on Card Sharks, each teammate predicted how many people answered yes to a yes-or-no question. Getting it on the nose won $500, but being one or two off still won $200.
Since my teammates are still controlled by the CPU, I’d better hope I get lucky and they pick good ones!
Finally, the teammates are asked to mindread the captain, majority rules. If they guess correctly, the team’s earnings were multiplied by ten. Hurrah!
Three games are played, and after that the game was over. The whole exercise was quite pointless; how on Earth the players were supposed to mindread a bunch of pixels is beyond me.
The game was finished in late March of 1989, and it was test-marketed in northern Virginia in early April. The result was overwhelmingly negative. Players complained that the game basically boiled down to chance when playing solo. And even if they managed to gather enough friends to play the game, it just wasn’t fun. Thanks to its poor play-testing, release of the game was cancelled, and all copies were returned to GameTek. Most of the graphics were later integrated into a sightly-less-crummy Price Is Right game, meaning the rom ended up being of SOME use. All traces of the game were thought to be destroyed…until today!
I have a Commodore 64 emulator, so I’ve played through it a few times. I’ve noticed a few nice touches, like actual questions from Mindreaders & the early days of CS ‘86’s audience poll format. But overall, I wouldn’t recommend this game for a fun time. Maybe for rarity factor, but that’s the only reason this thing should be sought out. If you have any questions…or for some twisted reason you WANT the Mindreaders ROM…by all means drop me a line.
Go back
