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Who Are We?/Contact Us

Matt Ottinger

Matt is an Emmy Award winning television producer, educator and host based in Michigan.  He is a lifelong fan of game shows in general and of Bill Cullen in particular.  For twenty-nine years, he was the host of QuizBusters, a high school quiz competition on WKAR-TV in East Lansing, Michgan.  If you like the information on this site, he suggests that you go buy Adam's books. 

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Adam Nedeff

Adam is a lifelong game show fan who has been fortunate enough to work behind the scenes on Wheel of Fortune, Double Dare, Idiotest, and more. In his off-hours, he's chronicled the history of game shows in numerous books, including a comprehensive biography of Bill Cullen, titled Quizmaster. He's deeply appreciative to Matt for his years of generosity, encouragement, and friendship.

Special acknowledgement: Fred Wostbrock

Fred Wostbrock (1961-2016) was Bill Cullen's #1 fan.​  A lifelong fan of game shows and a devoted collector of game show-related photos--he owned well over 25,000--Fred got his collection started as a child by writing fan letters to game show hosts and asking them for pictures. Bill was one of many who responded by mailing back a stack of photos.

As a teenager, Fred attended many of Bill's game show tapings in New York City, and in 1978 he was escorted backstage after a taping of The $20,000 Pyramid featuring Bill as a guest player. The 58-year-old host and his teenage fan hit it off extraordinarily well and eventually came to form a friendship. When Fred moved to California in the 1980s to pursue a career in the game show business, Bill and Ann invited him to their home, with Bill happily turning over mementos and photos for Fred's collection.

Fred became a talent agent specializing largely in game shows--hosts, models, and announcers. In this capacity, he served as the executor of estate when Bill died in 1990. While going through Bill's personal effects, Fred found the fan letter he had written Bill years before that $20,000 Pyramid meeting. He never knew if Bill made the connection that Fred was that fan whose letter he had held onto, but the discovery cemented Fred's dedication to preserving Bill's legacy. He saw to it that Bill's wife Ann was compensated for reruns featuring Bill that aired on Game Show Network, even though Bill's contracts had never included anything about residual payments. He arranged for a PBS special about game show history to include a special tribute to Bill. And he generously shared his collection with Matt and Adam to help them with their book and website projects. Were he still here, he would doubtlessly still be assisting with this site.

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Other contributors

In addition, many dear friends, as well as a few people we don't really know well at all, have been helpful over the years offering information, research and suggestions.  Those people include Kenneth Johannessen (who found most of the Variety reviews scattered among these pages), Marshall Akers, Daniel Benfield, Leah Biel, Mike Burger, Brendan McLaughlin, Tim Lones, Eric Paddon, Chris Tufts, Tracy Platt, David Schwartz, Bob Zager and many more whom we'll add to this list as soon as we remember how stupid we were to leave them off in the first place.

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