Underplayed Gems

Illinois Instant Riches (1994)

Illinois Instant Riches poster
Genre
game show
Country
United States
Length
4 seasons
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this series is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

More series like this

How it feels

Contestants win a spot on a lottery game show by buying special scratch-off tickets. They play on-stage games for cash and prizes.

upbeatlivelyfast-pacedcompetitiveexcitingbuzzygame-show-glowluck-driven

What happens

Illinois Instant Riches (later known as Illinois' Luckiest) is a lottery game show airing in the state of Illinois, as well as nationally on Chicago-based Superstation WGN-TV. The show was hosted by Mark Goodman, with Linda Kollmeyer as his co-host and Bill Barber as announcer. The show was produced by Mark Goodson Productions (later Jonathan Goodson Productions), and premiered on July 9, 1994. The show was renamed Illinois' Luckiest in 1998 and aired until 2000. For contestants to appear on the show, they had to purchase an Illinois Instant Riches/Illinois' Luckiest scratch-off ticket from an Illinois Lottery retailer. Common for the lottery game shows of the 90s, if they uncovered three television set symbols on the ticket, the ticket was sent into a submission address, or redeemed physically at the nearest lottery office. Players were randomly chosen from those tickets to be in the show's contestant pool, but only a certain number of them would be selected to play an on-stage game. Several of the games on this show were transported to and from some other lottery game shows, most notably Flamingo Fortune (Florida), Bonus Bonanza (Massachusetts), and NY Wired (New York); the differences are mentioned in this article. Elements from these games also carried over to the quarterly-based Michigan Lottery game show Make Me Rich. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

This page is from Underplayed Gems. Not quite it? You can browse by genre, country and year, or take this one into the 3D catalogue and ask the Catbot for something closer.