3 Strikes (pricing game)
3 Strikes is a pricing game on the American television game show The Price Is Right. Debuting on February 12, 1976, this game is played for a luxury/sports car that costs at least $30,000.
Gameplay
The contestant is shown six discs, five of which have a unique digit which is in the price of the car, and one which has an X, called a strike. The discs are placed into a bag and shuffled around.
The contestant blindly draws a disc from the bag. If they pick a number, they must decide which position in the price that digit is (eg: the first digit). If they are correct, the disc is discarded in a slot in the game board and the digit is lit up in the price display. If they are incorrect, the disc is returned to the bag to be drawn and guessed again. If the contestant draws a strike, a strike marker is lit up on the board, and the strike is returned to the bag.
The contestant may continue to draw as many times as possible until they draw the strike three times, which ends the game. If the contestant draws and correctly positions each digit in the price before drawing three strikes, they win the car.
History
From the game's premiere in 1976 through February 1998, there were three "X" discs placed in the bag, and drawn strikes were not returned to the bag, but discarded in the slot in the game board, which prompted the next strike indicator to light up above it. The current format took effect at the end of the 1997-1998 season, after the producers reasoned the use of five-digit cars was resulting in a decreasing win rate.
The 3 Strikes set originally made no references to baseball at all, aside from the name. The baseballs on the gameboard were not added until the early '80s, the bag was made to look like a baseball in the late '80s, and the baseball "NO" graphic, for when the contestant guesses a position wrong, was only used from 1998 through 2002 (from the late 1980s until 1998, it was the word "NO" in a black circle). The current graphic is simply the word "NO". The Davidson version used a different graphic for this situation, which showed a green outline of the selected number window melting off the board and falling to the floor.
Through the early 1990s, the game was played using both four- and five-digit cars. Except for the first few times it was done, when five-digit cars were offered, the game was known as "3 Strikes +". Even though four-digit cars were no longer used in the game after June 17, 1993, it retained the "3 Strikes +" name until February 10, 1994 (although the + sign was absent on January 27, 1994).
On 1994's syndicated The New Price Is Right, the first digit of the car's price was given for free.
On February 28, 1992, 3 Strikes seemingly fell victim to a cheater. A contestant was down to two discs, a strike and the last number. She drew a disc out of the bag, then quickly put it back in Before anyone else could see what it was. A few seconds later, she drew the number and won. Although the show's staff has never publicly accused the contestant of cheating, the game used new strike discs whose color scheme more closely resembled that of the number discs for several months after her episode, and 3 Strikes + was not played again for the remainder of the season.
A contestant also cheated in the game in 1988; she began to pull the third strike out of the bag, then put it back, thinking no one would notice. Bob Barker, the host at the time of the incident, did notice, and he chided her for it. She ended up pulling the third strike all the way out on a later draw.