From Family Feud to Pointless: A Short History of the Survey Game Show

A survey game show asks 100 ordinary people a question before the cameras roll, then makes contestants guess what they said. There are two ways to score it. Family Feud, which began in 1976, pays you for naming the most popular answers. Pointless, which began in 2009, pays you for the least popular ones, ideally an answer that none of the 100 gave at all.

Almost every survey game since is one of those two, or both. If you are looking for a game like Pointless online, the nearest thing on our site is Krillion, which ranks every correct answer by how rare it is. Here is how the format got there.

Family Feud was created by Mark Goodson and premiered in ABC's daytime schedule on 12 July 1976, with Richard Dawson as host until 1985. Two families face each other across a board of hidden answers, each one the response of some share of 100 people surveyed in advance. "Survey says!" became one of television's best known catchphrases, shouted as each answer flipped over with its head count.

The show has been on and off American television ever since. Ray Combs hosted from 1988 to 1994, Dawson returned for a season, and Louie Anderson, Richard Karn and John O'Hurley followed before Steve Harvey took over in 2010. Britain made its own version, Family Fortunes, which launched on ITV on 6 January 1980 with Bob Monkhouse, who nicknamed the electronic answer board "Mr Babbage". The format has since been adapted in more than 50 markets outside the United States.

The skill Family Feud tests is empathy with the crowd. You are not asked what is true, you are asked what most people would say, and the winning move is to switch off your cleverness and say the obvious thing out loud. The show's most famous moments are contestants failing to do exactly that.

Thirty three years later a team at Endemol UK turned the board over. Pointless was devised by six people there, Richard Osman among them, and first went out on BBC Two on 24 August 2009 before moving to BBC One in 2011. Osman was not meant to be on screen: he stood in as co-presenter for the demonstration made for the BBC, and the channel asked him to stay. He sat beside Alexander Armstrong for 27 series before the show moved to guest co-hosts.

The survey changed too. Instead of one answer each, 100 people are given 100 seconds to name as many correct answers to a question as they can. A contestant's correct answer scores the number of people who gave it, so lower is better, and an answer nobody gave scores nothing at all: pointless. A wrong answer scores the maximum, 100. By September 2026 the show was in its 36th series, with more than 2,250 episodes made.

That 100-second rule matters more than it looks. A Family Feud survey captures each person's first thought. A Pointless survey captures everything people can recall under pressure, so an answer scores low only if it is genuinely obscure, not merely second choice. Pointless rewards knowing the long tail of a category: the small country's capital, the forgotten album track, the minor river.

Pointless travelled almost as well as Family Feud. Serbia's version, Toga se niko nije setio, was made for Prva Srpska Televizija and presented by Tamara Grujić. It kept the British format, four teams of two and a survey of 100 people given 100 seconds each, and ran for 12 episodes from 5 April to 11 May 2014. Its title translates as "No one thought of that", which is the whole game in four words.

France had already landed on almost the same title. Personne n'y avait pensé! ("Nobody had thought of that!") ran on France 3 with Cyril Féraud from July 2011 to January 2021, with one twist on the British rules: winning pairs stayed on for the next show. Germany's Null gewinnt ("Zero wins") ran on Das Erste in 2012 and 2013, and Australia's Pointless aired on Network Ten in 2018 and 2019. There have been versions in more than a dozen countries, from Croatia and the Czech Republic to Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Switzerland. An American pilot was made but never aired, which leaves the United States, home of Family Feud, as the one big market that kept the original direction.

They are hard in opposite ways. Family Feud punishes overthinking: the contestant who reaches for a witty or specific answer misses the board, while the one who blurts the first word wins. Pointless punishes underthinking: the first word that comes to you came to dozens of the 100 as well, and the low scores live several steps further into the category.

Our own data shows how large that further region is. Across the roughly 2,500 prompts in Krillion's answer banks, a prompt accepts 137 distinct answers on average, and only 5.3% of all accepted answers are in the commonest tier, while 14.7% are in the rarest. Most correct answers are rare. The crowd just never reaches them, which is why a pointless answer is possible at all and why Family Feud's board only ever needs a handful of slots.

Television has to survey 100 people once per question and keep the result fixed, which leaves room for only one target: the top answer, or a zero. A browser game can score every answer on a scale instead, and that is what the survey game became online.

In Krillion Unlimited each prompt has its own bank of accepted answers, and each answer sits on one of six rungs: Plankton for the answers the crowd gives most (4 points), then Too Clever, Schooler, Rare and Deep Cut, up to One in a Krillion (100 points). Each rung doubles, up to that ceiling. A classic dive is 7 prompts with 25 seconds each, and every point sinks your krill 10 metres, so a perfect dive reaches 7,000 metres. Unlike Pointless, a wrong answer costs nothing but time: it is refused and you type again while the clock runs.

Our sister game Noillirk is the Family Feud direction on the same ladder. Its prompts are survey questions in the Feud style, the more common your answer the more it scores, and only the survey's single number one answer reaches the top rung, Sky High. You get 15 seconds a prompt, and your krill climbs from a forest pond on a bunch of balloons. Playing one straight after the other is the quickest way to feel how differently the two shows ask you to think.

The browser also brings back the studio's best moment. In Krillion's multiplayer rooms, up to 75 players get the same prompt on a shared clock, and when it runs out the reveal shows every answer in the room with its tier, a little like watching the Pointless column count down.

Neither show lets you play along beyond shouting at the screen. The Krillion game does: it is free, runs in your browser with no sign-up and has no daily limit, so you can chase your own pointless answers for as many dives as you like, alone or in a room with friends.

Wikipedia, Pointless.

Wikipedia, Family Feud.

Wikipedia, Toga se niko nije setio.