Fruit Machine Chat

Over the last year or so, when I've had a bit of free time, I've been putting together a database of questions that I originally intended to utilise in a game of my own - I've moved on somewhat now however, but still have the bank sitting around doing nothing.

All in all, there are 2,500 questions, each with the correct answer provided and 3 incorrect answers - getting 'sensible' incorrect answers is actually a lot more difficult than you might think! It's also broken up into 2 sets - medium and difficult - the difficulty has been based on the obscurity of the question and the ahem, spoilerificity (!) of the answers on offer. The questions are also categorised into 8 different sets:

Entertainment
Food And Drink
General Knowledge
Geography
History
Music
Science And Nature
Sport

The way the questions are stored however, the categories can be ignored and the full set can be used as one big 'pot'.

I'm intending to add more to the list over time - as for some strange reason, it's quite therapeutic!

Any suggestions with what I might be able to do with them? I did locate a site that claims it sells question banks to SWP developers - they sell 2,500 for £625! Click here to take a look.

Just wondering if there might be a few pennies to be made from having put these together?

Edit: Forgot to mention that the database is available in a variety of formats (.mdb / .xls / .txt / .xml etc).

The only sensible suggestion I can come up with is to write to the main games/machine companies and see what they say. I can see two caveats straight away:

(i) they may have their own 'in house' question writers

(ii) 2500 questions on their own aren't remotely enough to form the question bank for a commercially-released game

but who knows? - they may like your work and offer to take you on as a freelancer.

The other vaguely sensible suggestion is that the TV quiz show production companies are often looking for questions for new shows but the issue here is that they tend to be quite specific in terms of requirements re subjects, type of answers, length of questions, target audience etc, and so all your hard work up to this point may not have produced anything that they can use. Still, no harm in asking!

Hi 'Nil',

Thanks for your reply. I'm still considering making my own game - I just struggle to finish anything (I wish I could stick to a project!) of which I'd use this set as part of it.

Good idea though - a few letters can't do any harm.