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An icon of an era, Match Game had everything: Stars! Prizes! Orange shag carpeting! The premise was simple: as the host read off a racy fill-in-the-blank statement, two contestants competed to match answers with a panel of six celebrities. But the score was secondary to the banter between the panelists and host. The modern-day equivalent to lunch at the Algonquin Round Table, Match Game has run on American television in six separate incarnations (thus far) beginning on NBC in 1962 and was successfully remade abroad (in Australia and the U.K. the format proved as popular as in the U.S.) . But it was the second U.S. version that proved most popular with American audiences. In this best-known version of Match Game (which ran nine years beginning in 1973) host Gene Rayburn played ringmaster to a circus full of celebrity panelists who tried to match contestants' answers to naughty questions written by a team of comedy writers.