Can you imagine competing against the best game show contestant in the world? What if you were that person?

On Game Show Network’s (GSN) newest show, “Grand Slam”, 16 former game show winners from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and “Jeopardy!” to “The World Series of Pop Culture” and “The Weakest Link” battle it out to see who is the best and brightest game show contestant in history. Each contestant was chosen based on the total number of dollars they have accumulated during their game show careers.

Included in this ragtag group of smarty pants is Brad Rutter, who won $3.25 million on the “Jeopardy Tournament of Champions,” “Million Dollar Masters,” and “Ultimate Tournament of Champions”; “Jeopardy!” favorite Ken Jennings, who won over $3 million; and Kevin Olmstead, the biggest single show prize winner - $2.18 million – on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

Also on the show comes a blast from the past- Thom McKee, the 1980’s “Tic-Tac-Dough” contestant who won $300,000 after playing the game for 46 straight days, the first player ever to win consecutively for that length of time. He talked about coming back after winning over 25 years ago.

“I think there really wasn't a way to prepare for it,” McKee says about the show. “Frankly, based on my experience, what I thought were going to be my strengths didn't turn out that way, in part because of the difficulty of the questions, part because of the differences in the format and just being unaccustomed to it, but overall I thought that the show itself was just a great format, and an awful lot of fun, not only to participate in but also to watch.”

The questions will be asked by Pat Kiernan, host of “The World Series of Pop Culture,” but the actual hosts of the show, Dennis Miller and Amanda Byram, will be above the action, commenting from a booth as if at a sporting event.

“They're not getting in the middle of the game with banter,” says Executive Producer Michael Davies,” but they are setting up each round and analyzing it, because we regard these 16 players as sort of trivia athletes, as sort of game gods to a large part of the audience who watch these guys being incredible on television. They really are like athletes - they have game cards, they have stats, and this show is quite stat heavy. So it sort of plays out a little bit more like a sporting event.”

Based on a UK version of the show, “Grand Slam” goes beyond other game shows in its choice of questions as well. Instead of focusing on one topic, anything is game, including history to pop culture to mathematics and word skills.

As for Ken Jennings, he prepares by doing daily crossword puzzles. “I'm a nerd both on and off camera pretty much,” he says. “I sort of felt like none of us had seen this format before, except for the clips we'd seen of the UK show. So it's a very interesting situation. If you're going on ‘Jeopardy!’ or ‘Tic-Tac-Dough,’ you can watch tape like a football coach and sort of analyze and figure out your strategy and try to cram for your weak spots. This show is something we had never seen before, something we had never done before.”

Jennings, known for being one of the smartest and toughest to beat game show contestants in the history of “Jeopardy!”, also says he felt like everyone was “gunning” for him. “I was afraid there was going to be some Tonya Harding incident backstage,” he jokes. “And the funny thing to me was I didn't see myself as a favorite at all. I got a lot of media for being on ‘Jeopardy!’ until people got sick of me. Thom McKee is the Ken Jennings of ‘Tic-Tac-Dough,’ and Kevin Olmstead is the Ken Jennings of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ These are all the unstoppable players in their own arena. So I didn't share everyone else's opinion that I should be a top seed. That's for sure.”

McKee adds, “I was Ken Jennings 30 years before there was a Ken Jennings. I would tell you that, when they did the ‘Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions,’ and Ken lost to (Brad) Rutter in the finals, from my perspective, I looked at that and said, Ken took a huge personal risk going into that format because he had really – forget the money – really didn't have anything to win and a lot to lose, and I thought it took a lot of guts for him to do that. So frankly, I had kind of a different view of Ken going into this competition. Certainly, I came into it to win…the money wasn't that big a deal. It was purely the competition.”

The winner of “Grand Slam” will walk away with $100,000 (measly compared to previous winnings) and a crystal trophy. But what really made these winners push for victory was, of course, bragging rights.

“Most of them had already made so much money, it wasn't the prize,” Davies says. “They really, really want to win, and it wasn't the trophy either. They really want to beat each other, and they really want to be the champion.”

“Grand Slam” appears every Saturday and Sunday in August at 7 p.m. (ET/PT) on GSN, with the series concluding on Sunday, August 26. For more information, visit www.gsn.com.