Bamboozle really exploited the potential of teletext. They could have had a text-adventure game on there. More people must have played that game than anyone realized, every time I hear a nostalgia discussion about teletext somebody says..."you didn't happen to play that quiz thing on Channel 4 did you?"
Not mentioned there, but there was one geek aspect of Bamboozle that I remember. Given that a wrong answer would (at the time I played) send you back to the beginning, it was tempting to try and note down the three-digit page number of the question, to cheat and skip back to the latest question. But the use of the 4 coloured buttons meant that the questions could use page numbers with hex letters in them - e.g. 34F - rendering them impossible to type in with a remote control. Sneaky, but it was a source of pride when I had figured out not only that they used letters, but why they used only A-F.
Also, Bamboozle inspired me to waste many hours making drawings on my (even by then) old BBC Model B's Mode 7 graphics.
Still not a perfect cheating deterrent, as when in doubt you could press each button and see which one led to a unique page, as the wrong 3 answers all led to the same losing page.
On my set, at least, you could change which page you were waiting for before it loaded, so you could usually check all 4 in the few seconds between dialling up a page and the data for that page arriving. I often did this, perhaps I should be ashamed to admit.
Haven't looked at Teletext in years (though for some reason last year I needed the "what's on now and next" page and found I could still remember the number) but I have fond memories of Bamboozle, Digitiser and the kids' and music pages, Mega-zine and Planet Sound.
Comments
> This post is going to baffle a lot of US readers.
I must confess, this may have partially motivated my submission ;-)
I also loved the style the article was presented in.
Does anyone remember 'Bamboozle'?
Yes! That's the first thing I thought when I saw this article. My family used to play whenever a new quiz went up.
There were also other pages with jokes where hitting 'reveal' on the remote control toggled the punchline.
None of the other pages we visited ever seemed to make as much use of the remote buttons as the 'games' and fun items did.
Bamboozle really exploited the potential of teletext. They could have had a text-adventure game on there. More people must have played that game than anyone realized, every time I hear a nostalgia discussion about teletext somebody says..."you didn't happen to play that quiz thing on Channel 4 did you?"
As soon as anyone says "Ceefax" or "Teletext" I think of Bamboozle. I'm glad to see I'm not alone and there's even a wikipedia page about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboozle
Not mentioned there, but there was one geek aspect of Bamboozle that I remember. Given that a wrong answer would (at the time I played) send you back to the beginning, it was tempting to try and note down the three-digit page number of the question, to cheat and skip back to the latest question. But the use of the 4 coloured buttons meant that the questions could use page numbers with hex letters in them - e.g. 34F - rendering them impossible to type in with a remote control. Sneaky, but it was a source of pride when I had figured out not only that they used letters, but why they used only A-F.
Also, Bamboozle inspired me to waste many hours making drawings on my (even by then) old BBC Model B's Mode 7 graphics.
Still not a perfect cheating deterrent, as when in doubt you could press each button and see which one led to a unique page, as the wrong 3 answers all led to the same losing page.
On my set, at least, you could change which page you were waiting for before it loaded, so you could usually check all 4 in the few seconds between dialling up a page and the data for that page arriving. I often did this, perhaps I should be ashamed to admit.
Haven't looked at Teletext in years (though for some reason last year I needed the "what's on now and next" page and found I could still remember the number) but I have fond memories of Bamboozle, Digitiser and the kids' and music pages, Mega-zine and Planet Sound.