In 1983, a simple game debuted on The Price Is Right and would quickly become one of the most iconic features of daytime TV. It was Plinko, a game that has since graduated well beyond its television origins. Today, Plinko has been recreated and reimagined all over the internet, and here you can find the full journey of how it became an international hit.
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Plinko on The Price Is Right
The Price Is Right needs no introduction – the original American version is the longest-running game show in existence. Not only that, but its British spinoff was also one of the UK’s biggest game shows hosted, for a time, by entertainment legends like Bruce Forsyth. At their height, both featured Plinko as one of their pricing games where adults competed for the top prize.
As mentioned, Plinko first debuted in a January 1983 episode of the American show. It was a heavy hitter with a top prize of $25,000 in ‘80s dollars, closer to $97,000 (or £70,000) accounting for inflation. Today, it’s most often played for $50,000 (£37,000) and remains the highest-priced game on the show.
It’s also responsible for some of the show’s most iconic moments. In the early days, it was common for mechanical mishaps to disrupt the game and get a laugh out of the audience. Though it was removed from the aired version, there’s also a famous story from 2008 where a contestant accidentally played at a Plinko board that had fishing wire in, to guide the ball to $10,000. It was there for promotional reasons, to show the game at its best, but one lucky woman racked up $30,000 before the crew realised it was left in. Showing true sportsmanship, they let her keep the money and play a whole new game of Plinko that they could air. It held a Guinness World Record for costliest game show mishap, but they turned it into a nice story that proved the show tries to stay on the contestants’ side.
The Surprising Origins of Plinko
How Plinko came to be is its own story. By all accounts, the game was created by executive producer Frank Wayne before its ‘80s debut. It had the highest possible cash prize right from the start, which helped put it in the spotlight for early viewers. While the game show feature was all Wayne’s idea, many have noted that its gameplay is strikingly similar to a Japanese parlour game that was all the rage in the ‘80s – pachinko.
Pachinko was (and still is) found in many Japanese arcades, where players sit and launch metal balls into a vertical field full of pins. The balls bounce around and, if you’re lucky, they can drop into prize pockets that keep the game going and win you rewards. The game, and its lively arcade environment, became part of Japan’s ‘80s aesthetic alongside bright neon lights, City Pop, and the booming economy of Japan before it crashed in 1992. The number of pachinko parlours peaked in 1997, with some 18,000 operating across all four of Japan’s islands. Their prevalence has been slowly declining since, with there being approximately 7,500 parlours as of 2024. For those curious about everything the country has to offer, we’ve covered Japan a lot in our travel blog.
The origins of pachinko itself are murky – it was very likely brought to the islands by an 1800s game called Corinthian bagatelle. This is one of the earliest games we know that uses fixed metal pins, and the player shoots a billiards ball to bounce off of them. It never took off in the West, being outshone by pool, but a version of the game made its way east. It was called billard japonais, a Western-made game that seemed to know its target audience right from the get-go. That game is the common ancestor of both pinball and pachinko.
Like many games today, it started as a toy before becoming something more, something that adults played and socialised over. Also, like slots, pachinko games started out mechanically and later made the switch to electronics, with flashing lights and other effects that made the experience more exciting and immersive. Then, on the other side of the world, a TV executive thinks up a game show feature that smooths out pachinko gameplay onto a flat plane, played with flat chips instead.
Plinko Makes Its Way Online
Once Plinko hit the air waves, it easily made its way across the world thanks to The Price Is Right’s over 50 regional spinoffs. However, in the late 2000s, it’d make its biggest leap onto the screens of players in the burgeoning iGaming industry. Many of the games we’ve mentioned have made their way online – slots, pinball and of course, Plinko. Even card games made their way online, as all these games got a digital makeover when they were recreated and reimagined using computer-generated graphics.
Simulating gravity is something that we cracked quite some time ago with the physics engine, so it became possible to host your own Plinko game on-screen with a falling chip and realistic pin collisions. This resulted in games for adults that played a bit differently from the usual casino classics, instant win games like themed Plinko or interactive scratch cards. Digital Plinko versions like the Pearl Plinko series made changes to the original game, setting it deep in the ocean instead of the classic Americana aesthetic of the original game show.
The same thing happened with slots – the internet made it possible to delve deeper into new, ambitious, sometimes zany settings that you couldn’t explore with a cabinet. With Plinko, it also meant that everybody could get a taste of the action without being the ‘lucky’ contestant plucked from the audience at a The Price Is Right taping.
After a long, world-spanning journey from the West to Japan and back again, Plinko and games like it have become more accessible than ever before. Thanks to the internet, it has evolved from a game show favourite to something that anyone can summon on their screens.