Family Feud

It was so simple it worked: the host asks a question, the studio answers, letters light up on the board. Family Feud ran on American television since 1976, and in 1987 Softie, Inc. brought it to DOS. I remember the first time I saw this game on a floppy disk at a friend's place whose dad worked at some company with American connections. We barely spoke any English, but we figured out how it worked in five minutes.

Family Feud is an adaptation of a TV game show where two families compete to guess the most common answers given by real survey respondents to various questions. It's not about the correct answer — it's about the most popular one. A question might be "What do people feed their dog" and you have to hit on what the most respondents said. Crowd psychology, not an encyclopedia.

The 1987 DOS version offered single-player and multi-player on one keyboard, which was actually a functional format for parties. Controls are straightforward — you type your answer, hit enter, wait for the result. Graphics match the era: simple, functional, with the typical CGA color scheme that was either a privilege or a curse depending on how you were staring at your monitor at the time. Sound came through the PC speaker, so there's not much to say about it. The real problem is the answer database — it's fixed and fairly small, so after a few sessions you'll start memorizing the answers. Replay value drops dramatically because of it.

What keeps this game in memory isn't the technical execution, but the format of the competition itself. Family Feud as a show is still alive today — in the US it's had various hosts from Richard Dawson through Ray Combs to Steve Harvey. This DOS version is just a snapshot of one specific moment when TV entertainment was trying to translate itself into home computers. Sometimes it worked better, sometimes worse. Here the result is acceptable — playable, but without spark.

Today you'll mainly play Family Feud from 1987 if you want to see how the game industry back then tried to cash in on TV licenses. As family entertainment for one afternoon with someone sitting next to you at the keyboard, it still makes sense — if you speak English and don't mind that the question database is smaller than a high schooler's vocabulary today. Playing it in your browser takes two minutes, and that's exactly how long it takes to figure out what this version can do and where it hits its ceiling.