Jeopardy! on the NES: “I’ll take three games in one review for $1000, Alex.”

Jeopardy! (1988), Jeopardy! Junior Edition (1989), and Jeopardy! 25th Anniversary (1990)
Developed by: Rare
Published by: GameTek
Released in: NA

Jeopardy! has been on TV in some form or another since the 1960s, and is still trucking to this day. Nearly sixty years worth of questions and answers is a lot to wrap your head around. Though you’d think it would be kind of tricky to kick off a multi-media franchise surrounding a quiz show, of all things, those crazy bastards in the marketing department found a way; there are boatloads of Jeopardy video games, board games, and apparel like this for some reason:

I’m quite the fan of the show, actually – I used to tune in religiously as a kid with my parents, and now, my wife and I watch it most nights over dinner. There’s a cozy familiarity that comes with TV shows that have been on for such a long time, and Jeopardy is no exception. It’s kinda exciting when a skilled player bets big and wins even bigger, and it’s a little hard to watch a poor fool dig themselves deeper into the negative amounts of money. I also like the sound that plays when someone finds a daily double. Pew pew! Pew pew! Pew pew pew-pew pew pew pew! Hehe.

I’m into game shows like Jeopardy because I’m a bit of a trivia/general knowledge quiz enthusiast, so I was actually quite looking forward to giving the Nintendo editions a spin. There were a grand total of four Jeopardy games made for the NES; I thought I was being slick by knocking out three of them in one review, but I have yet to play the “Talking Super Jeopardy” game because I didn’t know it existed until just now. Oops. While that one looks like Jeopardy Very Cool and Exciting 2.0 Edition and will be looked at another time, the three I’ll be talking about today are essentially the exact same game, right down to the music and graphics.

If you’ve seen the show, the game plays the exact same way. If not, here’s a quick run-down: there’s a big board with multiple categories on it, and five questions to each category. Each question is worth some money; get the question right, get the cash. Sometimes Daily Doubles pop up, which allow the player to wager up to as much as they currently have in winnings – if you get that right, you’re rolling in the dough. If not, you’ll be sitting in the poor house.

The video game version isn’t exactly a winner in the graphics department, with the “highlight” (if you want to call it that) being the bizarre player character sprites you can choose from. They all have a little animation when they get an answer right or wrong, often making them look even more bizarre and off-putting than they do by default. It’s awesome.

Jeopardy! was the only one to use the gorgeous cast from the first picture, while Anniversary and Junior re-used the second set. I prefer the bizarre caricatures from the first one myself – they look like they could have been extras from some off the wall 90’s cartoon, like Rugrats or something. It’s a crying shame that there’s no Alex Trebek to be seen here – I can only imagine how he would have looked drawn up in these styles. Or better yet, maybe he’d be hyper realistic, to off-set the strange cartoonish vibe. Sadly, we’ll never know.

Other than the goofy player sprites, the graphics are the exact same between the three games, with little more than a palette swap and an extra graphic on the title screen between them. But hey, it’s not like Jeopardy for the NES needs to blow you away with never before seen effects and elaborate music. It’s Jeopardy for the NES, for Christ sake.

Anyway, going into these games, I was a bit worried that they would be too topical to have any fun with. I’m pretty good on my 80’s pop culture, but actual important knowledge from a bygone era? Like, who was the secretary of state in 1987? Some bald old guy, probably. I don’t know. Ask me something I’d actually know, like questions about the fifth emperor of the Ming dynasty. My fears weren’t all that founded, though; while a couple “of the time” questions inevitably cropped up (there were more than a few about late 80’s Saturday Night Live), they were few and far between. Jeopardy! relies on a lot of general knowledge, so there’ll be at least one category you smash out of the park.

Jeopardy! and Jeopardy! 25th Anniversary are, for all intents and purposes, the exact same game. 25th Anniversary boasts that it has “1,500 new questions” compared to its predecessor, but I coincidentally got the same question about Benjamin Spock in both games, so who knows. The Junior edition is much much easier, as you would expect. It asks a lot of questions to do with cartoon characters, nursery rhymes, and colours – which I guess is what you would call the little kid equivalent of general knowledge, hence why my score for the final in that game was so massive. Junior came out between its two bigger brothers, so I can’t help but wonder if the first Jeopardy! was met with complaints from parents that little Bobby thought it was too hard. Not that I’d blame little Bobby. I don’t know shit about war generals, or the year 1956 either. I’d reckon that Junior would actually still be fun and accessible for kids today, if kids knew what a Nintendo Entertainment System was.

There’s not a lot else to say about Jeopardy! on the NES, so I’ll not prattle on about like, game mechanics or whatever. If you like things like general knowledge quizzes, it’s pretty entertaining for a 20 minute burst (which is about how long it takes to finish a game). If you’re an old-school parent who still has a NES knocking around your house and your kid actually has an interest in this sort of thing, they’d probably get a kick out of Jeopardy! Junior. But if you don’t fall into either of those categories, you probably shouldn’t bother buzzing in.

Initial Interest Rating: 6/10
Final Rating: