A capitalist idea
The longest Monopoly game ever played went on for 70 straight days — far longer than the longest game played in a bathtub, which lasted a pruny four days, or the longest game played upside down, which hung on for a dizzying day and a half. Monopoly has been played on a fire truck, a train and a nuclear submarine, in a cave, a treehouse, and a moving elevator.
It’s probably been played in your house too.
The game turns 70 this year — it’s older than commercial television. By all rights, this Depression-era amusement should have vanished from the marketplace long ago, done in by the ravenous capitalist economy it celebrates and the restless American desire for what’s next.
Instead it continues to sell millions of copies each year.
Moreover, in an age when computer games grant the power to create entire virtual worlds — and, equally entertaining, to destroy them at a keystroke — kids and grown-ups say there’s still something enticing about Monopoly. Still something engaging about the game’s play-money rewards and go-to-jail risks.
In Monopoly, you don’t get to pretend you’re a secret agent or an Army commando. You can be a thimble, Scottie dog, or maybe a top hat. There are no flashy graphics or sound effects. You don’t get to shoot anybody. Nothing explodes. There’s not even a finish line.
The game can go on for hours. Heck, it can take an hour before it gets interesting. The rules are simple in general but in certain circumstances can turn maddeningly complex.
“The only way to win is to grind people into dust, and sometimes that’s a painful thing,” gripes Dallas computer programmer Derk Solko, who runs BoardGameGeek.com.
To which Debby Krim might reply:
Lighten up.
Krim, a founder of the Association of Game and Puzzle Collectors, an international group of players and researchers, says the fun of Monopoly lies in its small dramas: the thrill of buying Boardwalk, the boredom of Baltic Avenue, the prayer-to-heaven hope that someone will land on Ventnor Avenue after you’ve spent your last dollar to build a hotel there.
Monopoly is familiar — the big brother of in-every-closet games such as Scrabble, Clue and Life. The game involves enough strategy to reward good players, enough luck to even the playing field, and enough emotion — ambition, dread, longing — to make it relevant to children raised on reality TV.
“Why don’t millions of people play Acquire, but millions of people play Monopoly?” Krim asks. “Part of the reason is it got carried on from generation to generation: Our grandparents taught our parents, our parents taught us, we taught our children.”
Wherever and whenever it’s played, the aim is the same: Build an empire, amass a fortune, vanquish your competitors — the American dream, writ in rainbow-colored dollars and two-inch cardboard deeds.
Toy analyst Chris Byrne, widely known for his TV appearances as “The Toy Guy,” says the idea of building a business conglomerate — even one composed of plastic hotels — is ingrained in the American psyche. “The whole concept of becoming rich and putting people out of business is very Donald Trump,” Byrne says. “I don’t think Monopoly is going to go anywhere anytime soon.”
You’ve probably heard how Monopoly was invented in Philadelphia, the 1930s creation of an out-of-work heating engineer, Charles Darrow.
He supposedly cut the playing board from a piece of linoleum, borrowed the famous metal tokens from his wife’s charm bracelet, chose the Atlantic City street names to conjure images of carefree summer days.
In 1934, Darrow took the game to the reigning board-game giant, Parker Bros. — which turned him down. Undaunted, Darrow began a home production line, eventually selling 5,000 sets to the John Wanamaker department store. Customers snapped them up, and Parker Bros. reconsidered, acquiring the rights to Monopoly in early 1935.
By that Christmas, it was the top-selling game in the country.
It’s a lovely story. Some of it is even true.
It’s also true that in 1904, decades before Darrow approached Parker Bros., a woman named Elizabeth Magie of Washington, D.C., patented The Landlord’s Game. It featured a square playing board with edges marked for properties, utilities, and even a “Go to Jail” space. Magie intended her game to be a sort of civics lesson, an economic treatise on how rentals help landlords and hurt tenants. It appeared on the market six years later, produced by the Economic Game Co. of New York.
The rules and strategies of Magie’s game spread by word of mouth, and homemade versions began to pop up, played by Eastern college students and by Quakers. By the 1920s its fans generally referred to the game by a single name: Monopoly.
The game reached Atlantic City in 1931 or so, and a year or two later a player taught Charles Darrow the rules and gave him a handmade board. “He sold it to Parker Brothers in 1935, claiming it was his own invention,” the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in a 1982 decision involving a Monopoly competitor.
Darrow died in 1967, a millionaire living on a Bucks County, Pa., estate. In recent years, his reputation as the “inventor” of Monopoly has suffered.
Still, as Bill Hartson wrote in the London Independent, it’s wrong for people to dismiss Darrow’s role in the game’s development. He possessed a singular genius — he understood the potential for Monopoly. No one else saw that.
Today, Monopoly has sold about 250 million copies worldwide, and according to Hasbro, which now owns Parker Bros., it’s been played by about 750 million people. That’s roughly one out of every eight people on Earth.
The game has been spun off into scores of specialty versions, featuring personalities from Elvis to Garfield the cat and institutions from Star Trek to the National Park system.
This year, Parker Bros. is bringing out a 70th anniversary luxury set, celebrating the art deco elegance of the 1930s.
Once printed only in English and sold in the United States, Monopoly is now produced in 26 different languages, including Arabic. You can even play it on the Internet.
“Maybe,” says Krim, the game-association founder, “at the end of the day, what it says is, ‘Capitalism rules.’ “