DICE Feature: 'The Battle Of Bunker Hill: Celebrity Designers Get Fingers On Buzzers'

On DICE 2006's second afternoon, 'The Battle Of Bunker Hill', was trailed as a mysterious showdown between two game design giants, but turned out to be a gigantic woodgrain TV, a couple of old couches, a game of Pong, and a handful of industry legends playing a rather amusing game show. In this write-up, including pictures of the game show showdown as it happened, Frank Cifaldi explains of the set-up: "The Battle of Bunker Hill was a trivia game show, along the lines of Family Feud. The rules went something like this: two teams of four people competed against each other to name the top five most popular responses to relatively straightforward, video game-related questions. The team in control of the board was determined at the beginning of each round by an impromptu game of Pong, in which every team member, eventually, would have to participate. The winner would then hear the question, and determine whether to play – that is, attempt to correctly identify all five answers – or pass it on to the other team. The playing team gives responses, one at a time, with exactly three chances (“strikes”) to answer incorrectly, at which point the opposing team has a chance to “steal” by supplying one of the remaining answers. If they fail to do so, the original team – despite having three strikes – gets the points. Audience participation was heavily encouraged. In fact, we were asked to scream and be "irritating," something of a specialty for this writer." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including news of who exactly won when Sid Meier and Will Wright battled it out at Pong (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).