‘Jeopardy!’ Researcher Explains Category Color Coding System
Jeopardy! has been a well-oiled gameshow machine since its debut in 1984. There’s a process to filling out each category, which includes backup questions. A former head researcher explained that they also use a color coding process to make the board up of categories.
Suzanne Stone retired from Jeopardy! in 2021, but shared her experience on the show on the Hollywood & Levine podcast on June 29, 2022. Here’s how color coding helps Jeopardy! create a game board for every show.
‘Jeopardy!’ categories each have their own color
Jeopardy! covers a myriad of categories. The show wants to ensure that each game has a healthy variety, so they assign each genre of clues a color. Then they make sure the board has one of each color.
“So History, U.S. Presidents, that’s like a blue, the academics,” Stone said on Hollywood & Levine. “Wordplay would be yellow so that’s something that’s always usually at the end of the board, the six categories, Quotations, something on wordplay, Before and After, or Begins with S, things like that. So there’s the greens which would be more lifestyle and then orange for people, people’s names, things like that.”
‘Jeopardy!’ games are designed for everybody to play alone
Jeopardy! wants to challenge the contestants, but they also want the viewers at home to play along. That’s why they developed the system to ensure a variety of categories.
“So you’re going to have a spectrum of topics,” Stone said. “And that, we thought, and I think it’s played out, it’s fair. It gives variety to the home audience as well as the contestants.”
Stone added that after each episode of Jeopardy!, they discuss the game with the contestants. Even the winners share that they struggled with some of the categories on the board.
“We know from interviewing the contestants, the champs after they win, they’ll talk about what categories they had no idea how their strengths would be in certain categories until they had to play them,” Stone said. “They were forced, it’s the last category on the board where people had to go. Over the years we figured it’s better to be fair and have variety.”
The one difference with color coding now
Jeopardy! has been on the air so long that technology has caught up with it. The show still uses the same color coding, but now computers can assign each category the appropriate color.
“It still continues today now that things are printed out through a computer printer, but we’d have color coded the various categories,” Stone said.
