Friday, 6th February: "Dear Landlord..."

Today in 1935....

"Best-selling commercial board game, Monopoly, went on sale for the first time"

That's right: Monopoly, one of the world's most tedious board game experiences, is 74 years old.

But is it? Here's some official promo-flab from Hasbro, who market the game in the UK:

Today, it's the best-selling board game in the world, sold in 103 countries and produced in 37 languages including Croatian. But where did the MONOPOLY game come from? How did this phenomenal pastime get its start? MR. MONOPOLY tells the legend best:

If you want to understand the spirit of Monopoly, look no further than its creator. Charles B. Darrow was one of many unemployed Americans who lived during the Great Depression. Life was bleak, but Darrow had a big idea: a game that would let everyone enjoy a taste of the high life. In 1934, he took his game to Parker Brothers but they rejected it because it didn't meet their standards. Not a man to quit at the first obstacle, Darrow made a deal with a local printer and had 5000 sets made, which he sold to a Philadelphia department store. People loved the game and news of its success soon got back to Parker Brothers. They negotiated a deal and, as a result, both their fortunes were made. Today MONOPOLY is still the world's number 1 board game.

Leaving aside the bizarrely chosen hyperbole (27 languages INCLUDING CROATIAN?!?!?), and ignoring obvious inaccuracies (describing Monopoly as a "phenomenal pastime", claiming that the game "let[s] everyone enjoy a taste of the high life"), this obviously simplified version of events ignores the notion that games similar to Monopoly were fairly widely played at home at the beginning of the twentieth century. A sadly unsourced wikipedia cites the most famous pre-Monopoly game called The Landlord's Game created and patented by Elizaberth Magie, a Quaker:

The Landlord's Game is a board game patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie. It is a realty and taxation game, similar to Monopoly. Though many similar home-made games were played at the beginning of the 20th century and some predate The Landlord's Game, it is the first of its kind to have an attested patent. Magie re-patented a revised edition of the game in 1924. The United States Patent numbers are 748,626 and 1,509,312.

Magie based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.

A patent drawing for The Landlord's Game

Fairly radical, no? There's a lot to love about Quakers. This game was passed around for a while at the beginning of the century, and then... well, then the rags-to-riches story of Charles B Darrow kicks off. A website called The Idea Finder takes the second half of the story up (after, it turns out, providing the text for the above-quoted wikipedia article):

In 1933, Charles B. Darrow played a game on oil cloth on his kitchen table, fell in love with the game's exciting promise of fame and fortune. He played "Monopoly" at home with his family and friends. But others soon heard of the game and ordered sets of their own. Later that year Charles Darrow patented and sold copies of the game as his personal invention. Darrow went to work, making hand-made copies of Monopoly and selling them for $4.00 apiece.

When demand for the game grew beyond his ability to fill orders, he brought the game to Parker Brothers who first rejected it on the basis there were 52 design errors. Undaunted, Darrow continued to produce handmade editions on his own and was highly successful. Parker Brothers caught wind of the success and decided to buy the rights to the game. In 1935, owned by Parker Brothers, the MONOPOLY® game became America's best selling game. Parker Brothers subsequently decided to pay off Magie, and others who had copyrighted commercial variants of the game, in order to have legitimate, undisputed rights to the game, and promoted Darrow as its sole inventor.

But hang on!

"A game surprisingly similar to Darrow's and known as Monopoly was played on homemade boards in the DKE house at Williams College in 1927 et seq. It developed in Reading, Pa., much earlier than that.

"Almost exactly this same game as played at Williams was put on the market in Indianapolis early in 1932 through L. S. Ayres & Co. The name was changed to Finance for trademark reasons. Dan Layman's predecessor Finance. That cost more money: $10,000. But none of it went to Layman. A victim of the Great Depression, broke and desperate for money, he had sold his interest in Finance to a small games manufacturer, David W. Knapp, for $200.

This is getting complicated.

Once Finance was wrapped up, Parker Brothers turned to another Monopoly-like game called "Inflation," manufactured by a Texan named Rudy Copeland. Early in 1936 Parker Brothers sued Copeland for patent infringement. Copeland countersued, charging that Darrow's and therefore Parker Brothers' patent on Monopoly was invalid. If the details forming the basis for that charge had become public knowledge, Parker Brothers might never have gone to reap a fortune from Monopoly. But Parker settled the lawsuit immediately by paying Copeland $10,000 to surrender his rights and keep his mouth shut.

Whoah! And a final word on this ugly little game?

Decades later, when they [Parker Bros] attempted to suppress publication of a game called Anti-Monopoly, designed by Ralph Anspach, the trademark suit went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1983, and the court found in favor of Anspach because Darrow did not actually invent the game.

Whammo! Litigously sordid! Thanks, Idea Finder!!

There's even more depth on the whole story, with rules to preliminary versions of Monopoly, on this site.

I'm with this guy at his blog, Lutheran Surrealism, who decides the following after two of his children refused to continue playing:

"I'm against monopolies, and I realized while playing the game that it taught something evil. The idea is to control all the properties on the board, and squeeze the viability out of your playing partners until you win, by forcing them all out of business. Perhaps my two boys knew something, or sensed something, after all, about the game."

"It's a wicked, wicked game."

Chris Isaac - Wicked Game
Uploaded by carlagedeswc

AND A BLOODY GREAT QUOTE FOR YOUR WEEKEND:

"What matters is being right, not being told you are"

Which is useful, as very few people tell me I am right.