Of all the cultural legacies that the 1990s have left us, one of the most dubious is the trend of offering contests and sweepstakes that either have no prize or were made to never be won. When the story surrounding the McMillions scandal broke in 2018, many a '90s kid was both nostalgic and insulted to discover that the Monopoly peel-and-win game presented by McDonald's restaurants had been a cleverly rigged scam. The story was potent enough to draw some attention from Hollywood, and while a proposed film version from Ben Affleck and Matt Damon has yet to materialize, the scandal was covered in an HBO docuseries, "McMillion$" in 2020.

Never mind board games; some of the most notorious no-prize contests came from the world of video games and cinema. A fair number of these weren't rigged scams like the Monopoly scandal, but rather victims of abandoned projects or bankrupt corporations.