Jeopardy! viewers ‘p-ssed off’ over ‘absolutely ridiculous’ call by host Ken Jennings

Jeopardy! viewers were not impressed on Friday after one ‘absolutely ridiculous’ call by long-time host Ken Jennings during the ‘From The Video Game Manual’ category

Jeopardy! viewers were left raging after one “absolutely ridiculous” call by host Ken Jennings after he failed to award two contestants points after a video game clue.

Ken Jennings

During the September 19 episode of Jeopardy!, contestants Hebah Uddin, a social media moderator and Ph.D. candidate originally from Long Island, New York, Steven Olson, a band director from Princeton, Illinois, and Paolo Pasco, a puzzle writer originally from San Diego, California, all took the stage to compete in the cut-throat trivia competition.

But many viewers at home were left fuming over the result of one of the trivia questions featured in the “From The Video Game Manual” category. For $1000 points, the clue read, “From an N64 game: ‘Recover the pirate helicopter & get to the bottom of this. You are licensed to kill.'”

To this, Paolo buzzed in and answered, “What is GoldenEye?” To which Ken replied, “Can you be more specific?” And Paolo elaborated, “JamesBond: “GoldenEye?” And despite being nearly spot-on with this answer, Ken refused to award Paolo with the points.

Jeopardy

He then accepted a buzz-in from his fellow contestant Steven who answered, “What’s 007 GoldenEye?” Ken once again did not accept this answer.

After denying points to both players, Ken said, “This pains me because you were both so close – GoldenEye is the movie; the game is GoldenEye 007.” Shortly after Ken delivered the harsh ruling, Jeopardy! fans took to a newly posted Reddit thread expressing their anger over the call.

One viewer wrote, “‘GoldenEye’ absolutely should have been accepted, and ‘007 GoldenEye’ probably should have been too. On the box art, the way the logo is stylized doesn’t clearly indicate whether the 007 is supposed to come before or after GoldenEye, and on the title screen, there’s no 007 at all; the in-game name of the game is just GoldenEye.”

They continued in part, “The very first page of the manual before the table of contents does say “Thank you for selecting the GOLDENEYE 007 Game Pak,” but the page that they got the quote in the clue from is titled ‘THE GOLDENEYE STORY.'”

GoldenEye 007

They went on to add, “If they can accept ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ for ‘Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ then there’s no reason not to accept GoldenEye. Ken’s comment seemed to indicate that they needed to differentiate from the movie (even though the clue very clearly indicated it was the video game), but then why do they accept ‘Wizard of Oz’ when referring to the book ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ instead of requiring that it be differentiated from the movie?”

After this convincing argument, another fan replied, “I’m hours away from being able to watch this episode, but I’m already p-ssed off reading this and the PBP on j-archive. I was completely hooked on this game back in the 90s, played it for easily hundreds of hours, and it’s absolutely ridiculous that neither Paolo’s nor Steven’s responses were accepted. I wonder if anyone who was there can chime in if there was a challenge request or a judges’ review.”

While a third person chimed in, “This isn’t this first time the writers have gotten it wrong on a video game clue, in fact I know it happens regularly enough that they should probably find a specific video game expert to consult with on them.”

And someone else noted, “The one a couple months ago where the right answer for ‘The ’64’ version of this video game series’ was somehow supposed to be ‘Super Mario Bros’ and the actual unambiguously correct answer of ‘Super Mario’ was rejected was pretty egregious, but that one at least got reversed after the break; i was surprised this ruling stood.”