Golden-Gallery.net

In January 2004, The Price is Right did on-camera announcer tryouts to fill the chair of the late Rod Roddy. Daniel Rosen, former announcer of the Late Show with Ross Shafer on FOX, was tapped as a guest announcer, along with established game show announcers Randy West, Burton Richardson, and Rich Fields.

The week Rosen’s episodes began to air, 35 new members registered at Golden-road.net and 20 new posts were made in less than four hours, praising Rosen’s voice and disparaging the other announcers. Admin ClockGameJohn noticed that all of this activity was coming from the same IP address, including one user who joined the day after Rosen’s first taping. The accounts were banned and the messages have been preserved for all to see.

Rosen’s announcing style was not well-liked on the boards, especially after one show several weeks later aired began with an unceremonious “Uh, here it comes!”. Being compared against established voices did him no favors. Rosen is mostly retired as a TV announcer and currently markets himself as a “Credit Repairman”.

While it’s never been conclusively proven that Rosen was personally the one sockpuppeting those accounts, the idea of this guy trying to con an early Internet fansite in an attempt to sway public opinion is too funny to dismiss.

One popular game that has endured over the years is the FPG, which challenges users to predict the six pricing games that will be played on a Friday episode. On May 5, 2006, Producer Roger Dobkowitz planted an easter egg: he planned six pricing games that would spell out his fan nickname “THE DOB”. (At least four producers on the show are known to have used the resources of a multi-million dollar television production to screw with a niche game played on a fan site.)

During the tapings of the Million Dollar Spectaculars in 2007, a Golden-Road.net user named Voltron291 met Adam Rose in line. Adam ended up being called as a contestant and making it to the showcase round. Voltron signaled Adam a very accurate bid, which Adam took, winning both showcases and a $1,000,000 bonus.

Voltron claimed credit to a producer the next day for giving Adam the winning bid. During the next tapings, Voltron was asked to move from the front row to the back row to be less visible on camera. When Voltron returned several months later with his family, he told many of the first 50 people waiting in line that he was very familiar with the show & its prices and could help them bid in the event any of them were called. During that taping, Voltron was also told that their group would be placed in the back row.

Producer Roger Dobkowitz eventually met with Voltron and explained that having 50 people in the audience looking towards a single person could cause a fairness issue and could cause viewers to suspect impropriety, in addition to looking bad on camera. (Golden-Road.net strongly discourages advertising pricing skills to others in line to those you do not know for this reason.)

This proved to be an important inflection point–balancing “game” vs “show”, with a small group of “Loyal Friends and True” inordinately familiar with the show affecting a show that by its very nature is supposed to test everyday skills and be accessible to everybody.

Two months into Season 37, math teacher and G-R.net member Ted Slauson attended a taping. Shouting prices from the front row, he caused a near-perfect show, including helping contestant Terry Kneiss (who Ted met in line) give a dollar-perfect bid on a $23,743 showcase—the first perfect showcase bid recorded in over three decades.

Ted had, for decades, noticed TPIR had used a rather finite set of prizes, and their prices remained the same each time a prize was used. For years, he had recorded, studied and memorized the hundreds of prices, and his shouted advice helped a number of people win prizes from the late 80’s to the 90’s. He appeared on the show himself in 1992 after 24 visits.

The timing of the perfect bid, however, set off alarm bells on the show staff. At the time many users on Golden-Road.net were extremely critical of TPIR’s new direction, and some crew members privy to backstage discussions had been suspected of leaking behind-the-scenes info to the site. The staff had no way of knowing who this person in the front row yelling exact prices was, or where he got his info from.

A long stopdown ensued, with producers & Drew discussing their options backstage. With imperfect knowledge, producers suspected that somebody backstage (possibly Roger or another crew member disgruntled with Roger’s dismissal) may have illegally passed a script to Ted and hired him to “rig the show”, which would have been a felony worthy of FCC investigation.

Once taping resumed, Drew, believing the episode would never air, revealed the price of Terry’s showcase bid with little enthusiasm. He later stated in an interview that he believed at the time the perfect bid was a product of somebody trying to force them off the air & there was a real chance he would be out of a job.

It was eventually determined that Ted did not cheat and Terry’s win was legitimate, and Terry received his prizes.

Ted has been able to demonstrate that each of the products he had seen had been used on the show before, and had been documented doing the same thing decades prior to Roger’s firing. Terry, implausibly, continues to deny taking advice from Ted and claims he pulled the final three numbers in his bid out by chance.

In the years since TPIR has greatly diversified the prizes it uses to make it difficult or impossible to memorize prices as Ted did.

The story of the Perfect Bid was made into a feature-length documentary by C.J. Wallis in 2017 called “Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much”, which can be viewed for free on many streaming services.

Executive Producer Syd Vinnedge parted ways with the show after Season 37; Mike Richards, former host of Beauty and the Geek, replaced him as EP for Season 38.

During the break between Seasons 37 and 38, Drew Carey started a blog and described his enthusiasm with working with Mike going forward, feeling as though they were on the same page with “everything they loved and hated about the show”.

Part of the “new direction” included new official forums on PriceIsRight.com to “try to answer every question, deal with every conspiracy theory, and debunk or authenticate every rumor. Finally, fans will have a place to go and get first-hand news about the show, instead of unfounded speculation that ends up not being true from a guy who claims to know a guy who knows a guy.”

Although the forums on PriceIsRight.com launched promisingly (with director R. Brian DiPirro and producer Kathy Greco interacting regularly answering fan questions), the forums went under in less than a year, plagued by technical and moderation issues. It is estimated by FPGWillyT that at their peak the PriceisRight.com forums had less than 20% of the activity found on Golden-Road.net.

Mike Richards served as EP from S38 to S47. Opinions on his producing style among the fanbase vary wildly, and it is nearly impossible to distill them into a single representative sentence. But of those who stuck with the show & Golden-Road.net over the years, many will concede that he brought new life into The Price is Right and made the show a fit for Drew’s hosting style.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced TPIR to temporarily move to a restricted audience who had gone through a casting/interview process similar to other game shows. To fill a programming void on CBS, several themed primetime episodes were announced pitting the show’s games against an audience filled with grocery store workers, geniuses, etc. One episode was the Superfan episode, airing on February 1, 2023.

This episode was submitted to the Primetime Emmys and received TPIR’s first Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Game Show. The relationships forged in this episode will never be forgotten.