Ultimate Game Show’s Frequently Asked Questions

Unfortunately they are NOT! We have a registered trademark on this name. Unfortunately there are a lot of unscrupulous and uncreative people out there who would rather just “borrow” someone elses name than think of their own. We waste a lot of time “asking” these people to stop stealing our brand name . So with the exception of two European companies and a team building company from the East Coast, anyone else you see offering a game show prouduct called some deriviation of Ultimate Game Show is doing so without our permission.

Not at all. Obviously that makes up the majority of our formats, but we have a variety of games based on physical challenges, games of chance and even horse racing.

There are alot of factors that would affect that but in our experience, yes it will. The key is planning and presentation. The success of a game show depends on alot of elements that are not directly related to the game show itself. We will discuss these with you during your pre-production planning process. In fact, the techniques we share could help your entire meeting. It’s sad to say, but we’ve been at events watching while the CEO is on stage giving his keynote to an audience that isn’t listening or even interested. We probably could have helped them with both of those things.

These are often a worse choice than the disc jockeys. There are  numerous party rental/inflatable companies who rent outgame show systems (often obsolete technology) along with their inflatable bounce houses and carnival games. Typically these companies don’t even provide a host, leaving your group to entertain itself. If you’re lucky they will send a high-school/college aged staff member to run the equipment, otherwise you are on your own there too.  The Ultimate Game Show ^® team believes that your group deserves better than that! You aren’t likely to trust your meal to an inexperienced caterer, so why would you take a chance with your entertainer, when you consider that the entertainment leaves a far greater impression in the minds of your guests than any other element.

Yes, there are a number of disc jockey companies who offer game shows (often under the name Game Show Mania) as an add-on to their DJ services. The problem is that these are wedding DJ’s who only host a few (if any) game shows each year. The majority of them don’t even own the game show equipment, but have a buddy who does and will rent it to them on those rare occasions they book a show. While some of these may be very talented disc jockeys, they simply don’t have experience hosting game shows. On the other hand, we’ve done thousands of game shows

Yes. We like to say we get to travel around and ask people things they should already know for a living. We are one of only about a half dozen full-time game show production companies in the country. We offer two different interactive experiences through our parent company Bryan Quinn Productions. Besides game shows we present remote control NASCAR-style racing events offered through our other company Checkered Flag Interactive Racing™. This realistic racing experience is another form of corporate event entertainment that is often booked by customers that have already had several game formats and are interested in trying something completely different.

The bottom line is that we are a full-time, high-end, talent-based event entertainment company. We are NOT a DJ or party rental company, nor is this a side job for us.

Over time, we have launched a media production branch since people were asking if they could hire our in-house cinematographers, editors, animators, web designers and game developers. But these projects are done during travel and non-performance days.

No we are not. We are a totally independent event production company. We also have no aspirations of being TV stars, nor are we trying to sell game show ideas to TV production companies. This is not because we aren’t ambitious. It is quite the opposite. We are solely focused on providing the most professional productions available for corporate and special events.

Absolutely! For even bigger wow! factor from your game show production you can add a celebrity to host the game. Because of our partnerships with several talent agencies we can get just about any current or retired TV game show host you can think of. The possibilities don’t stop there though, we can essentially get celebrity you would like. But we do recommend staying with someone who has experience hosting game shows, otherwise we will run into the same problems described in the previous question.

We don’t recommend this. No matter how funny the boss or “Bob from accounting” may be, he doesn’t have the years of experience running a game and handling extra competitive contestants. Our hosts are the most experienced in the business! In our company’s history we have had only a handful of unsuccessful productions, and the only thing those events had in common was that they all had a client-provided host, as opposed to one of ours. The hosts weren’t familiar enough with the game format to host it. And our technicians couldn’t anticipate what they were going to do next because they hadn’t worked together before. Our hosts and technicians have all worked together on hundreds of events, making for cohesive productions. Several years back, Alex Trebek and Pat Sajak swapped game shows for an evening, and neither was very good because the crew didn’t have a sense of their timing and they just weren’t familiar with the game.

You Bet! We believe that asking customized, client-specific questions in conjunction with our proven pop culture and general trivia questions is a critical aspect of a successful game show production. It is our “stock questions” that ensure the entertainment value as they are written to be very amusing, often eliciting hilarious answers from contestants. The most effective ratio of custom to pop culture questions varies based on the nature and objective of the event. You will provide us with your custom questions, as you know your material and training goals better than we ever could. Then, capitalizing on our experience we will edit your questions, making them better game show questions.

This is a difficult question to answer. The biggest reason is that those companies are too small for the TV production companies to bother with or even know about.  Believe us, this is extremely frustrating, as it creates a competitive disadvantage for a larger organization such as ours who is on the radar of these TV companies. Another common reason is that they just don’t care and do it anyway.

Because we are not allowed to. Those games are trademarked and copyrighted. We certainly offer game formats that are “inspired by” TV game shows, but offering exact replicas or advertising that you offer a specific TV game show is illegal. These TV production companies watch our industry and do send out very nasty letters if you cross the line.

That is a difficult thing to answer since our different game formats have different requirements. On the smallest end of the spectrum, our “Head-to-Head” podium has a footprint of only 3′ wide by 2′ deep.On the other end of the range, our “Tic Tac Whoa!” show features an 18′ high by 18′ wide squares set. The size we need will be determined once we have established which game format we are presenting. We will do our best to work with the space you have available and can often be flexible. But depending on the scale of the production you have requested, there will likely be minimum stage dimensions that must be met.

All of them! No matter which game format you choose, we have developed all of our productions to be as much fun for the audience as the contestants. The exact number of contestants who will be specifically involved varies greatly based on the game format you choose. Some clients want to use the game show format to disseminate large amounts of information and in those instances we often only have three or four contestants, who’s goal is to educate the audience with their answers. On the other hand, we have clients who want to involve everyone. And for them we suggest one of our our audience response based game formats, where we put a wireless keypad in the hands of every guest, allowing them to all compete at the same time. These keypad based games have been our most popular game formats for the past several years.

Absolutely! Since every one of our productions is customized to fit the needs of each client, we have presented game shows at a wide range of prices. Our smallest productions are comparable with the fees charged by a band or high-end DJ. Of course the fees for our larger shows go up from there. Our prices are based on the size and game format of the production, as well as the location and length of the event.