Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (sometimes informally known as Millionaire, and abbreviated WWTBAM) is an international television game show franchise of British origin, created in 1998 by David Briggs, Mike Whitehill, and Steven Knight. In its format, currently owned and licensed by Sony Pictures Television, large cash prizes are offered for correctly answering a series of multiple-choice questions of increasing (or, in some cases, random) difficulty. The maximum cash prize (in the original British version) was one million pounds. Most international versions offer a top prize of one million units of the local currency; the actual value of the prize obviously varies widely, depending on the value of the currency.
The contestants must first play a preliminary round, called "Fastest Finger First" (or, in the U.S. version, simply "Fastest Finger"), where they are all given a question and four answers from the host and are asked to put those four answers into a particular order; in the first series of the British version and in pre-2003 episodes of the Australian version, the round instead required the contestants to answer one multiple-choice question correctly as quickly as possible. The contestant who does so correctly and in the fastest time goes on to sit in a chair in the center of the set, known as the "Hot Seat," and play for the maximum possible prize (often a million units of the local currency). In the event that two or more contestants are tied for the fastest time, those contestants play another question to break the tie. If no one gets the question right, that question is thrown out and another question is played in the same manner. If any contestants are visually impaired, the host reads the question and four choices all at once, then repeats the choices after the music begins.
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