A History of Golden-Road.net
(and the Internet, and game show online fan communities in general)
The history of Price is Right fansites is nearly as old as the idea of Internet fan communites themselves.
The mid 90’s was an era where Internet usage was becoming more accessible to the average household, but the high barrier to entry still meant most people didn’t. To access the Internet, a user needed to own a computer, be capable enough to operate it, pay for access, and have the time and inclination to get on. This limited the most of the Internet’s userbase to IT professionals & college students. Going online was active, not passive.
But the Web 1.0 era was very fertile ground for a certain group: Game Show Fans. Internet users could find online online text-based bulletin boards for their own niche interests called “newsgroups”, and the “tv.game-shows” branch was a common place for game show fans to get questions answered, play “net” versions of their favorite games, and hear legends passed down from others.
As internet access became more common, the online bulletin board alt.tv.game-shows became a ground for getting industry insiders in touch with ordinary game show fans. For the first time, game show fans with internet access from all across the country could connect with each other, share stories, and even arrange meetups. It also facilitated “Tape Trading”.
In the mid 90s, the only way to watch your favorite TV shows after they had aired was to record them on your own VCR. Almost no game shows got official home video releases; their seasons were far too large and their audiences too niche compared to shows like Star Trek or I Love Lucy. While some older game shows reran on cable channels like USA Network or the new Game Show Network, viewers who weren’t able to watch or record those broadcasts as they aired would usually never be able to see them again.
But an internet community allowed game show fans to “Tape Trade”: the ability to solicit and offer their unofficial collections of their own homemade recordings & mail personalized copies of VHS tapes to each other. In order to see copies of their favorite programs, early game show fans had to first learn to develop their own collections & form a network of online friends that could be trusted to return the favor.
This tight-knit community helped boost interest in all game shows, including The Price is Right, the only network game show at that time airing first-run episodes five days a week. TPIR was benefiting from a surge in popularity among college students (perhaps Happy Gilmore had something to do with it) intending to trek down to Los Angeles and try their luck on the show itself.
As Web 1.0 developed from text-based Usenet groups into the World Wide Web, the wealth of information on the Internet enabled & encouraged fans to watch & recap the show every day, see photos, learn the rules to every game, and become minor experts on TPIR in the hopes that someday they too might Come On Down.
College students weren’t the only ones with an interest in this online community. Industry insiders, including producers of The Price is Right, saw the burgeoning online game show fan community as an key marketing tool. The official CBS.com Price is Right page went so far as to host online chats with Bob Barker, and producers answering an endless list of fan questions submitted via email. But these were the days before dedicated social media managers or online PR lackeys, and producers realized that on their own they would never be able to give TPiR anywhere near the online presence their fans could.
So they decided to let their rabid online fanbase do their marketing work for them.
In 1999, college student and Price is Right fan Marc Green was offered a deal at the crossroads: he would be invited backstage to the Price is Right to watch several tapings at the cost of becoming ineligible to be chosen as a contestant. Marc accepted.
Armed with a digital camera, Marc was permitted to take photos of the production booth and some of the game storage areas, which he hosted on his personal AOL page titled “The Golden Road”.
This feature quickly made his site a major draw. Over the next two and a half years, Marc had made several more visits backstage, and his “Bonus Page” had grown to well over 20 pages of photos.
Around January 2002, Marc migrated his page off AOL hosting software. With “goldenroad.com” having been claimed by an advertising service and “golden-road.com” by a Grateful Dead enthusiast, Marc settled on purchasing the domain “golden-road.net”.
Around this time Marc joined an early Bravenet forum called “The Price Is Right Update Message Board”. The board software was primitive (it only stored the most recent 250 posts) but it attracted an active following recapping and discussing episodes daily, and the owner eventually passed moderation duties to Marc.
For several years both “The Golden Road” and “The Price is Right Update Message Board” grew as separate entities.
In May 2003, Marc gave golden-road.net a major relaunch. Together with John Sly (a fellow fan who had recently appeared as a contestant playing Clock Game), he merged the forums of “The Price Is Right Update Message Board” with his own photo site, creating the “NEW” Golden-Road.net. The relaunched site was a smash, attracting 56,000 pageviews in 48 hours. Within a month, over 250 users had created accounts.
It quickly became the premier place to discuss The Price is Right, read daily episode recaps and host discussions, play fangames, and see the latest backstage photos from Marc and John’s trips.
A chat room was soon added so fans could discuss TPIR live as it aired, fan games were created around the airing of the show, and the show’s producers gave it their blessing as an “unofficial official” fansite.
If you were online and a Price is Right fan, all roads led to the Golden Road.
In 2006 the site moved off of its PHP-Nuke forum software to Simple Machines forum software (where it continues to this day). Nearly every post made over the past 17 years has been preserved.
The forums contain over 4,000 recaps of TPIR episodes through the years (with new episodes added every day), 20 years of competitive and collaborative forum games, a detailed timeline chronicling TPIR’s 10,000 episode history, thousands upon thousands of photos, and discussions of nearly every aspect to capture a fan’s imagination.
Every weekday at 11AM EST, fans gather in the Discord server to jointly watch the day’s episode, playing games and joking around alongside Drew and the contestants.
To this community, The Price is Right is not just a TV show. It’s an online community that’s endured through the years, providing entertainment, joy, & comradery to thousands of TPIR fans over the years.
There is nowhere else on the Internet like it.
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