“Is that your final answer?” was being packaged for home computers and consoles less than two years after it reached ITV. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? first aired in September 1998, and in 2000 Eidos Interactive announced a PC, PlayStation and Dreamcast version, developed by Hothouse Creations in Bristol, with audio clips of Chris Tarrant “uttering the famous line”.
The announcement ended with a line that explains how almost every game show reaches a shelf or a screen: “(c) Copyright Celador International Limited 2000. Published under license by Eidos Interactive Limited.” The broadcaster screens the programme, but the format belongs to whoever devised or bought it, and game makers pay to use its name, look, music and catchphrases.
Those names now turn up in adult gambling lobbies too. In October 2026 the Megaways guide at Fortune Games, an over-18s online casino, ranked Deal or No Deal Golden Box Megaways among the ten most-played games with Megaways in their name, and noted that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Megaways is called simply “Millionaire” in its lobby.
Sold, not just licensed
Millionaire was devised by David Briggs with Steven Knight and Mike Whitehill for the production company Celador. By 2006 the format had been licensed to 105 countries, and Celador’s parent company then put the worldwide rights on the market. “It is thought to be the first time that TV show format rights have been put up for sale,” the law firm Pinsent Masons reported. That December, the Dutch company 2waytraffic agreed to pay £106m for Millionaire and the rest of Celador International’s format library. In 2008, Sony Pictures Entertainment bought 2waytraffic.
Millionaire has been a Sony Pictures Television format since. When the developer Volley bought exclusive licensing rights to Sony Pictures Television’s voice games for Amazon and Google smart devices in 2022, Millionaire was on the list, alongside Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.
Endemol’s boxes, Banijay’s brand
Deal or No Deal was created by Endemol in the Netherlands and reached Channel 4 in 2005, where Noel Edmonds and his 22 red boxes stayed until 2016. In 2008 Endemol signed EA Mobile to develop, market and publish Deal or No Deal mobile games for the UK. Jurian van der Meer, Endemol Digital Media’s head of products and brand exploitation, said the company wanted “to focus on our core strength, that of creating incredibly popular IP for a mass broadcast audience”, leaving partners to take its shows to new platforms.
The owner has changed since. Endemol merged with Shine to form Endemol Shine Group in 2014, and Banijay completed its takeover of that group in July 2020. Banijay now lists Deal or No Deal among its Banijay Entertainment formats, and the ITV revival that began in 2023, with Stephen Mulhern as host, comes from Remarkable Entertainment, a Banijay UK company.
ITV’s own The Chase has stayed in-house. It was created by Potato, part of ITV Studios, which also sells it abroad. Its 2023 phone game, The Chase: World Tour, was developed by Barnstorm Games “in association with Potato”, and launched free to download on iOS and Android, with in-app purchases.
Borrowed from abroad
Some of the most familiar British quizzes started life elsewhere. Countdown came from France’s Des chiffres et des lettres, which began in the 1960s. When the Channel 4 show turned 40 in 2022, the channel credited Lifted Entertainment, part of ITV Studios, as its producer. The French format has travelled under licence too: Australia’s SBS announced its own version in 2010 “after licensing the format from France TV”.
Family Fortunes began in 1980 as Britain’s take on America’s Family Feud, with Bob Monkhouse as its first host. Fremantle, which owns the Family Feud format, said in 2021 that it had been picked up in more than 70 international markets, and Fremantle’s TalkbackThames label lists Family Fortunes among the ITV formats it is known for.
Wheel of Fortune shows how far a licence can reach. Sony Pictures says it “owns, controls, produces, and finances” the American show, whose trade marks are registered to Califon Productions. That company’s name also sits in the small print of a Wheel of Fortune page run by IGT, the slot maker, which is celebrating 30 years of Wheel of Fortune machines in 2026.
What a licence covers
The Intellectual Property Office describes a licence as permission to do something that would otherwise infringe the owner’s rights, and says owners can license out “in return for a fee”. The owner earns from it “but does not take the risk of manufacturing, promoting and selling those products”. The office also tells trade mark owners to consider “whether the quality of your brand will be affected by the goods it is applied to”.
The Eidos game shows what a licence like that covers: the name, “all the TV show’s music and sound effects”, Tarrant’s voice and a screen that “visually recreates exactly what the actual TV contestants see when they are in the Hotseat”. Celador kept the copyright; Eidos held the licence.
So whether it is a box on a shelf, an app or a title in an online lobby, the name on it is rented, and the owner is often not the channel that made it famous. Treat what you spend on any of them as the cost of entertainment. If any of it goes on a gambling site, set a budget before you start, and stop when it’s gone. Over-18s only; free support on 0808 8020 133.