Editing Match Game (section)

==1962–69, NBC==
[[File:Dennis Weaver Gene Rayburn Michael Landon Match Game 1964.JPG|thumb|left|[[Gene Rayburn]] (center) hosting a prime-time ''Match Game'' special episode, 1964]]

''The Match Game'' premiered on December 31, 1962. [[Gene Rayburn]] was the host, and [[Johnny Olson]] served as announcer, for the series premiere, [[Arlene Francis]] and [[Skitch Henderson]] were the two celebrity panelists. The show was taped in Studio 8H at [[30 Rockefeller Plaza]] in New York City, NBC's largest New York studio, which since 1975 has housed ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'', among other shows. The show originally aired in black and white and moved to color on June 24, 1963.<ref name="Eyes">{{cite web|title=June 24, 1963…NBC Studio 8H Goes Color – Eyes Of A Generation…Television's Living History|url=https://eyesofageneration.com/june-24-1963-nbc-studio-8h-goes-color-nbc-studio-8h-become-the-peacock-stu/|website=eyesofageneration.com|date=June 24, 2016 |publisher=Eyes Of A Generation|access-date=9 February 2021}}</ref>

Both teams were given a question and each player privately wrote down their response, raising their hand when done. Then each player was asked individually to reveal their response. A team scored 25 points if two teammates matched answers or 50 points if all three contestants matched. The first team to score 100 points won $100 and played the audience match, which featured three survey questions (some of which, especially after 1963, featured a numeric-answer format, e.g., "we surveyed 50 women and asked them how much they should spend on a hat," a format similar to the one that was later used on ''[[Family Feud]]'' and ''[[Card Sharks]]''). Each contestant who agreed with the most popular answer to a question earned the team $50, for a possible total of $450.

The questions used in the game were pedestrian in nature to begin: "Name a kind of muffin," "Write down one of the words to '[[Row, Row, Row Your Boat]]' other than 'Row,' 'Your,' or 'Boat,'" or "John loves his _____." The humor in the original series came largely from the panelists' reactions to the other answers (especially on the occasional all-star episodes). In 1963, NBC canceled the series with six weeks left to be recorded. Question writer [[Dick DeBartolo]] came up with a funnier set of questions, like "Mary likes to pour gravy all over John's _____," and submitted it to Mark Goodson. With the knowledge that the show could not be canceled again, Goodson gave the go-ahead for the more risqué-sounding questions, a decision that caused a significant boost in ratings and an "un-cancellation" by NBC.

''The Match Game'' consistently won its time slot from 1963 to 1966 and again from April 1967 to July 1968, with its ratings allowing it to finish third among all network daytime TV game shows for the 1963–64 and 1967–68 seasons (by the latter season, NBC was the dominant network in the game show genre, ABC was not as successful and CBS had mostly dropped out of the genre). NBC also occasionally used special episodes of the series as a gap-filling program in [[prime time]] if one of its movies had an irregular time slot. Although the series still did well in the ratings (despite the popularity of ABC's horror-themed soap opera ''[[Dark Shadows]]''), it was canceled in 1969 along with other game shows in a major daytime programming overhaul, being replaced by ''[[Letters to Laugh-In]]'' which, although a [[Spin-off (media)|spin-off]] of the popular primetime series ''[[Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In]]'', ended in just three months, on December 26.

''The Match Game'' continued through September 26, 1969, on [[NBC]] for 1,760 episodes, airing at 4:00&nbsp;p.m. Eastern (3:00&nbsp;p.m. Central), running 25 minutes due to a five-minute newscast slot. Since Olson split time between New York and Miami to announce ''[[The Jackie Gleason Show]]'', one of the network's New York staff announcers (such as [[Don Pardo]] or [[Wayne Howell]]) filled in for Olson when he could not attend a broadcast.

On February 27, 1967, the show added a "telephone match" game, in which a home viewer and a studio audience member attempted to match a simple fill-in-the-blank question, similar to the 1970s' "head-to-head match". A successful match won a jackpot, which started at $500 and increased by $100 per day until won.

Very few episodes of the 1960s ''The Match Game'' survive (see [[#Episode status|episode status]] below).