Hollywood Squares

Sometime in 1989, I was sitting in front of a Hercules monitor, waiting for a game to load that promised Hollywood and fame. What I got was a pixelated version of a TV quiz show where celebrities sit in a giant tic-tac-toe grid and you try to outsmart them. It took me a while to realize this was actually a pretty clever idea.

Hollywood Squares from 1988 is a computer adaptation of the same-named American TV show that ran in various forms since the sixties. Nine squares, nine celebrities, two players or you against the computer. The goal is simple: answer trivia questions, agree or disagree with a celebrity's answer, and get three squares in a row. Tic-tac-toe meets game show — that's it.

The gameplay hinges on one fundamental decision: do you trust the virtual celebrity, or do you think they're bluffing? Questions cover general knowledge in the spirit of American pop culture from the late eighties, so today some of them are culturally specific to the point where they read like a foreign language in English text to a Czech player. The controls are clean — keyboard, no complicated interfaces, nothing getting in the way. The computer opponent isn't a genius, but persistent enough that you can't win without thinking.

What's aged worst is precisely that cultural embeddedness. The celebrities the game references come from a context most modern players don't know, and many questions assume knowledge of American pop culture from the eighties on a level that simply didn't exist in Czechia back then. In 1988, it was probably a nice complement to the popular show for American audiences. For us, it was exotic back then and today it's more of a historical artifact.

Still, the game has its logic and works as a casual quiz for two. The tic-tac-toe mechanic makes it more than just questions and answers — the tactical decision of when to agree and when to disagree adds a layer missing from many similar titles of that era. It's not a game you'd spend an evening on, but twenty minutes on an emulator in your browser? Why not. Especially if you're sitting next to someone who speaks English and feels like arguing whether that answer could possibly be right.