Sunday, January 14, 2007

It all adds up

Calculatrivia is a contest created by Games Magazine in 1978. In it's most basic form (which, in that first issue, it was) you'd answer a bunch of trivia questions with numbers for answers. Then you'd plug those numbers into a formula, solve some math, and end up with a final value for X, which was your entry to the contest. The contest was so popular that Games would run sequels and spinoffs (Alphabetrivia, for instance) every couple of years.

In 1987, Games released the first and last issue of "Games: The Video Edition." It's a fun little bit of '80s nostalgia, with a feature on the Miami Herald Tropic Hunt, a trivia quiz using public domain clips from silent horror movies, and video versions of some of their most popular features: Eyeball Benders, Call Our Bluff, and, for the contest, Calculatrivia.

Somebody must have won the "state-of-the-art" CD player prize they were offering. But I don't know who. For me, the bigger question is, what are the answers to the darn questions?

Let's see if we can't work them out? First we'll need the equation and the rules:

equationrules


form

Clicking on the thumbnail takes you to the flickr page for the larger image (I hope).

So we're playing the questions as if this were 1987. Answers round off to 2 decimal places. Let's pretend we're on "21" and take the second part first. (C times M times H) divided by (A + W). I did some still captures of the video, but I couldn't get the sound to work, so no video just yet. Here are the pics for each letter:

A: A Aa (This was a video clue, where the bus drives by.)

C: C (This was a video too, where you could see the cards being dealt.)

H: H (This one was a still shot.)

M: M (I wonder if the Embassy has the same address now as it did in 1987?)

W: W (The caption for this one makes the picture superfluous.)


So, I know this blog doesn't have any readers right now, but maybe I'll see if I can't drum some people up who might be good at/interested in this kind of thing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Part 2 - 264600

A=0
C=21
H=3
M=4200 (safe to assume the embassy hasn't moved, but I'll work on trying to find confirmation)
W=1

Where are the pics for the first part? Don't leave me hanging! I want to go back in time 20 years and win a CD player!