Wheel Of Fortune Is Completely Changing Its Puzzle Board
The show will never be the same.
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With its first pilot airing in 1975, the game show Wheel of Fortune is swiftly approaching its half-century anniversary. Believe it or not, a lot about the program has changed over the decades and one of its biggest changes is about to come. The game show’s iconic puzzle board is being replaced… with lasers.
Over the weekend, the game show fan site BuzzerBlog reported that Wheel of Fortune‘s puzzle board had been replaced with a new one. No longer appearing as a bank of individual monitors, the new board resembles “one massive LED display.” The new board uses Lidar technology–Lidar stands for “light detection and ranging”–to track where Vanna White or another hostess presses the screen without using touch actuators.
While visiting Los Angeles, Buzzerblog’s Cory Anotado took the Sony Pictures Studio tour, including a visit to the Wheel of Fortune set. He was surprised to find the puzzle board missing from the set–even though, as he writes, “[t]he set is basically permanent, and the wheel and the puzzle board rarely get put into storage.” Tour groups that followed him, however, reported seeing a new puzzle board up. BuzzerBlog also heard from audience members who attended tapings of the show, who reported hearing from both White and host Pat Sajak himself talking about the new tech coming to Wheel of Fortune.
In a December 2021 interview, the game show’s head of electronics, Bill Monk, talked about how the new puzzle board would work. Monk said, “It’ll be a beam of light, if we change it out, where they put their finger through, we’ll know where the XY coordinates, so we’ll know to trigger that box.” Sony reportedly promised BuzzerBlog more information closer to the premiere of Wheel of Fortune‘s upcoming 40th season. The previous season ended in June, with the new season debuting Monday, September 12.
With its long history, Wheel of Fortune often seems like one of those TV stalwarts that never changes. BuzzBlog jokes that the “audience’s median age is 145.” The truth is that as the longest-running syndicated game show in the U.S., Wheel of Fortune has changed quite a bit since its inception. While Pat Sajak has hosted the show since 1983, for example, he wasn’t there in the very beginning.
As recounted by Merv Griffin’s 2003 autobiography Merv: Making the Good Life Last (via Ultimate Classic Rock), Wheel of Fortune was much different in its 1975 pilot. Rather than Sajak, the show was hosted by Chuck Woolery of Love Connection fame. Rather than contestants winning money which they then used to buy prizes from the showroom, they instead bet on specific prizes. In fact Wheel of Fortune wasn’t originally called Wheel of Fortune. When Woolery hosted the pilot in 1975, it was Shopper’s Bazaar.
One thing that’s never changed about Wheel of Fortune, even when it had a different name, is that there’s always been a wheel. The wheel was integral to Griffin’s conception of the game. His idea began with a version of the game Hangman, to which he added the wheels that could be found in popular casino games like Roulette.
