If you were a kid in the late 1980s through the early 1990s and had Nickelodeon, or knew someone that did, you were familiar with Double-Dare. I’m talking about the original show instead of the later, and not nearly so fun spinoffs. The show where two teams competed in trivia contests and (often messy) physical challenges in effort to win a sum of prize money and some ridiculous prizes. For those of you not familiar with the formula of the show, it goes something like this: One of two teams of two kids is asked a question, they can either answer it or ‘Dare’ the other team to answer it for ‘double the dollars’, the other team could either answer it or ‘Double Dare’ the first team to answer it, doubling the value yet again. The first team had to either attempt to answer the question or take a ‘physical challenge’ instead. The physical challenges were the real hook for the show, they let the kids do bizarro stunts and get extremely messy in the process.
For the most part, the game was pretty close to the actual show, you answered ridiculously easy trivia questions (with the occasional abnormally difficult one thrown in to almost guarantee a physical challenge). The problems come up when you actually try to play the physical challenges. Running around trying to catch a series of pies in your comically large clown pants just isn’t as fun with a controller as it is with actual pies and pants, and some of the invented challenges, like being shot out of a cannon through some holes in a giant wooden picture of spaghetti would have never made it on television.
Whichever team comes out of the first round with the most money gets to go to the Obstacle Course, which is a series of eight specialized physical challenges in a row that the team gets one minute to complete. Again, not as fun as actually doing the events in person. Also, the events were mostly of the ‘mash one or two buttons repeatedly’ or ‘wiggle the controller/joystick repeatedly’ to complete. One obstacle in particular was something that looked like a giant mound of marshmallow cream that you had to scale, and I could never figure out what combination of buttons and control pad directions that I had to press and wiggle to complete the obstacle. I have never managed to complete the virtual obstacle course to win the virtual crappy prize at the end.