Editing Game show (section)

===1980s–1990s===
Game shows were the lowest priority of television networks and were rotated out every thirteen weeks if unsuccessful. Most tapes were [[Lost television broadcast|wiped]] until the early 1980s. Over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s, as fewer new hits (e.g. ''[[Press Your Luck]]'', ''[[Sale of the Century]]'', and ''[[Card Sharks]]'') were produced, game shows lost their permanent place in the daytime lineup. ABC transitioned out of the daytime game show format in the mid-1980s (briefly returning to the format for one season in 1990 with a ''Match Game'' revival). NBC's game block also lasted until 1991, but the network attempted to bring them back in 1993 before cancelling its game show block again in 1994. CBS phased out most of its game shows, except for ''The Price Is Right'', by 1993. To the benefit of the genre, the moves of ''Wheel of Fortune'' and a modernized revival of ''Jeopardy!'' to [[broadcast syndication|syndication]] in 1983 and 1984, respectively, was and remains highly successful; the two are, to this day, fixtures in the prime time "access period".

[[Cable television]] also allowed for the debut of game shows such as ''[[Supermarket Sweep]]'' and ''[[Debt (game show)|Debt]]'' (Lifetime), ''[[Trivial Pursuit (American game show)|Trivial Pursuit]]'' and ''[[Family Challenge]]'' (Family Channel), and ''[[Double Dare (franchise)|Double Dare]]'' (Nickelodeon). It also opened up a previously underdeveloped market for game show reruns. General interest networks such as CBN Cable Network (forerunner to [[ Freeform (TV channel)|Freeform]]) and [[USA Network]] had popular blocks for game show reruns from the mid-1980s to the mid-'90s before that [[niche market]] was overtaken by [[Game Show Network]] in 1994.

In the [[United Kingdom]], game shows have had a more steady and permanent place in the television lineup and never lost popularity in the 1990s as they did in the United States, due in part to the fact that game shows were highly regulated by the [[Independent Broadcasting Authority]] in the 1980s and that those restrictions were lifted in the 1990s, allowing for higher-stakes games to be played.

[[File:Milonario El Salvador.jpg|thumb|The 1998 British game show ''Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?'' went on to be licensed internationally ([[¿Quién quiere ser millonario? (Salvadoran game show)|Salvadoran version]] pictured).]]
After the popularity of game shows hit a nadir in the mid-1990s United States (at which point ''The Price Is Right'' was the only game show still on daytime network television and numerous game shows designed for cable television were canceled), the British game show ''[[Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?]]'' began distribution around the globe. Upon the show's American debut in 1999, it was a hit and became a regular part of ABC's primetime lineup until 2002; that show would eventually air in syndication for seventeen years afterward. Several shorter-lived high-stakes games were attempted around the time of the [[millennium]], both in the United States and the United Kingdom, such as ''[[Winning Lines]]'', ''[[The Chair (game show)|The Chair]]'', ''[[Greed (game show)|Greed]]'', ''[[Paranoia (game show)|Paranoia]]'', and ''[[Shafted]]'', leading to some dubbing this period as "The Million-Dollar Game Show Craze". The boom quickly went bust, as by July 2000, almost all of the imitator million-dollar shows were canceled (one of those exceptions was ''Winning Lines'', which continued to air in the United Kingdom until 2004 even though it was canceled in the United States in early 2000); these higher stakes contests nevertheless opened the door to [[reality television]] contests such as ''[[Survivor (franchise)|Survivor]]'' and ''[[Big Brother (franchise)|Big Brother]]'', in which contestants win large sums of money for outlasting their peers in a given environment. Several game shows returned to daytime in syndication during this time as well, such as ''Family Feud'', ''Hollywood Squares'', and ''Millionaire''.