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By W. Eric Martin

This article originally appeared in the November 2005 issue of Knucklebones.

For more than half a century, one board game has risen above all others as the epitome of gaming. It’s the game you played for hours as a child and the game you buy for your children to teach them a thing or two about money. Its pieces and slogans have become common in cultures around the world. It inspires cheers and groans and triumphant pumps of the fist and heart-rending cries of “Never again!”

The game, of course, is Monopoly, and it’s the most popular brand-name game in the world. According to Hasbro, which purchased Monopoly publisher Parker Brothers in 1991, more than 200 million copies of the game have been sold worldwide and 500 million people—one-thirteenth of the world’s population—have built trusts and gone bust.

To celebrate that first Parker Brothers release back in 1935, Hasbro has released a special 70th anniversary edition of the game, complete with Art Deco graphics, unique hotels, and four styles of houses.

But that’s hardly the only edition of the game for sale. Hasbro also offers a Deluxe edition, an America edition, a Lord of the Rings edition, and both a Star Wars Saga edition and a Star Wars Original Trilogy edition. Walt Disney rates an edition of the regular game as well as a special Disney Princess edition of Monopoly Junior, which shares shelf space with Shrek 2 and Toy Story editions. And that’s still just a fraction of the Monopoly-style games on the market:

• Versions of Monopoly, either authorized by Parker Brothers or produced on the black market, have appeared in more than 80 countries, including Russia, Vietnam, China, and Iraq.
• Late for the Sky Production Company, founded in 1984, publishes more than 20 versions that focus on a particular city (such as Atlanta-in-a-Box), 50-plus college-oriented editions (such as Auburnopoly and Irishopoly), and two dozen specialty versions (Wineopoly and Cat-in-the-Hat-opoly).
• Not to be outdone, USAopoly puts out nearly 20 licensed Monopoly games, including the John Deere Collector’s Edition, the United States Army edition, and the Night Sky edition, which invites you to “buy, sell and trade the wonders of the universe, including Halley’s comet, Mars, and the Milky Way Galaxy.”
• Opoly Enterprises has cornered the religious slice of the capitalist crowd with Jewishopoly, Christianopoly, Islamopoly, Latinopoly, and Armenianopoly.
• Pride Distributors of Farmington Hills, Michigan and Help on Board, of Ontario, Canada help towns raise money by selling advertising space to local merchants on customized “Your Town"-opoly games.
• Ghettopoly, in which “playas” buy stolen properties and build crack houses, debuted in 2003 to outraged headlines in newspapers and magazines across the U.S.

How can hundreds of nearly identical games all find a place on the shelves? Doesn’t Parker Brothers have a, well, monopoly on Monopoly?

The 70-Year-Old Game That Isn’t
In fact, Parker Brothers was a relative latecomer to the Monopoly scene. Hasbro’s history of the game is relatively succinct—“It was 1934, the height of the Depression, when Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, showed what he called the MONOPOLY game to the executives at Parker Brothers”—but that’s really the tail end of the story.

To get the scoop on how Monopoly came about, you have to go back more than 100 years, to 1904 when Elizabeth Magie patented “The Landlord’s Game,” an educational game designed around the principles of economist Henry George.

George felt that nothing should be taxed except real estate. Inventors and workers should receive the full profit from their creations and labor, he said, but real estate barons make money by selling a natural resource that they didn’t make, so they shouldn’t profit unfairly just because they planted a flag in the soil before anyone else.

While George’s name is unknown today outside universities, Magie worked hard to bring his beliefs to the masses. Her creation was remarkably similar to today’s Monopoly game, featuring a continuous path of forty spaces with jail in one corner, “go to jail” in another, and a public park on a third. Twenty-eight properties were available for purchase, including water and electric utilities and a railroad centered on each side of the board.

Where Magie failed with her creation was that the game proved to be no fun. It didn’t find a manufacturer until 1910, so Magie had to self-publish the game for six years. What’s worse, at least from Magie’s point of view, the Georgist message of taxing real estate was lost in the actual game play. The player who had the most money won, so they were encouraged to be greedy land owners.

The game spread throughout economic departments in East Coast colleges and Quaker communities as players made up their own versions of the game, drawing boards and labeling properties with streets and roads in their hometown. At some point, properties became color-coded, and anyone who owned all the properties of one color could charge a higher rent. Buildings could be added to properties to make them even more valuable.

In 1924, Magie came out with a revised and newly patented edition of “The Landlord’s Game” that incorporated many of these popular changes, while also beefing up the Georgist message. Properties now boasted snooty names like “Soakum Lighting System” and “Lord Blueblood’s Estate”—but the goal of the game was still to get the most money, so the message was again lost.

Still, enough of the message got through that George Parker, founder of Parker Brothers, turned down the game in 1924 after Elizabeth Magie Phillips (who was now married) approached him with the game.

Everything Falls Into Place
Throughout the 1920s, the popularity of Magie’s game grew, and players tagged it with the generic name “monopoly” since that characteristic defined game play. College student Dan Layman learned monopoly from friends in Pennsylvania and in 1932 sold a version of the game (under the name “Finance") to Knapp Electric in Indiana.

Finance included Community Chest and Chance cards, a $75 Luxury tax, Pennsylvania Railroad, and many other familiar elements, but the properties cost different amounts and the street names ran from the well-known (Wall Street, Broadway) to the “never heard of it” (Wayback, Ye Olde Manor).

The final three elements that made monopoly into Monopoly all came from Quakers in Atlantic City, who learned the game from Ruth Hoskins; Hoskins, in turn, had learned the game from friends in Indianapolis, who were also friends of Finance creator Dan Layman. First, the Atlantic City Quakers disliked the mix of New York, Chicago, and Massachusetts street names on their monopoly boards, so they renamed the properties after streets in Atlantic City, many of which were names of states and therefore familiar to everyone who would play.

Second, the Quakers objected to a property being auctioned once someone landed on it. From the Quaker point of view, auctions are dishonest because you name prices lower than what you’re actually willing to pay, so you are effectively trying to cheat the property owner. Jesse Raiford, who was familiar with Atlantic City real estate, worked out fixed prices, and these were added to later boards, thus giving one player the sole chance to buy a property before the banker opened it for auction.

Finally, since the Quakers were rather frugal, they used household items like thimbles and keys to serve as playing pieces instead of spending money on uniform-looking pieces. The game of monopoly was essentially complete…

Darrow Steps In
In 1932, Jesse Raiford’s brother Eugene and sister-in-law Ruth visited Atlantic City and played monopoly for the first time. As was the custom, they created their own board on oil cloth and introduced it to friends back in Philadelphia, including one Charles B. Darrow.

According to Ralph Anspach’s The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle—from which much of the above history is taken—Darrow pestered the Raifords and their friends, the Todds, constantly, asking to play the game again and again and begging them for copies of the board and rules. Since Darrow’s wife was an old friend, the Todds helped him out. Within months, Darrow had hired a graphic designer to dress up the game board and was marketing handmade versions of the game with his name on the box as creator.

Darrow submitted the game to Parker Brothers, but the company rejected it as too long and complex. (The rejection letter mentioned “52 fundamental design errors,” a number apparently chosen at random to discourage Darrow from reapproaching the company.) Despite the rejection, Darrow kept selling copies of Monopoly on his own, and once word of his brisk sales reached the Parker Brothers office, the president of the company, Robert Barton, wrote to Darrow and offered him a deal.

Before Parker Brothers would publish the game, Darrow had to sign a statement stating that he had created Monopoly; PB executives had heard rumors of the monopoly folk game, so they wanted Darrow to take full responsibility. They also insisted Darrow patent the game in his name, but when he did so, Magie Phillips’ 1924 patent for a remarkably similar game came into the limelight, threatening to send Monopoly’s future directly to jail without passing go and without collecting far more than $200.

To solve any patent issues, George Parker offered to publish Magie Phillips’ most recent version of The Landlord Game if she would sign over her patent. She did, and before too long, she had been airbrushed out of Monopoly history as Parker Brothers promoted Darrow as the sole creator of the game.

“Parker Brothers gives lip service to Magie’s contribution because it conned Magie into cooperating with their scheme, but its most important distortion of history lies in its failure to credit the Atlantic City Quakers for their invention of the commercial Monopoly,” says Anspach. The company’s history of the game “is deception by not telling the whole truth.”

The Truth Comes Out
How did Magie Phillips regain her place in history? Thanks to bullying tactics of Parker Brothers itself. In the early 1970s, upset over the monopolistic tactics of OPEC, Ralph Anspach created a game called Anti-Monopoly. The game took off in the West Coast press, and all the attention soon had Parker Brothers knocking on Anspach’s door, claiming that he was violating the company’s trademarks.

During Anspach’s efforts to fight for the right to sell his game, he learned of rumors that Parker Brothers had stolen Monopoly, the very game he was now accused of mooching off of. Over the next ten years, Anspach crisscrossed the United States, interviewing elderly game-players whose collective memories brought out the true history of the game. In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court found in favor of Anspach because Darrow hadn’t invented the game; teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, though, Anspach had to settle with Parker Brothers out of court, which let the company hold on to the Monopoly trademark.

But while the name and the specific design of the tokens, the game board, and other elements are still trademarked, the rules to monopoly itself are in the public domain. When Darrow first published his homemade copies in 1933, he placed no copyright notice on the rules he included—which means that anyone is free to publish a version of monopoly with the same rules as long as he or she stays away anything that resembles the Parker Brothers product.

These trademarks allow “Hasbro to sue people regardless whether the suit is meritorious or not,” says Anspach. Someone in this situation “may eventually win the suit, but it may take ten years as with me and lots of money—and I don’t mean Monopoly money.” In 2004, for example, thousands of copies of Ghettopoly were seized after Parker Brothers accused the publisher of violating its trademarks. (You can still buy Ghettopoly through the publisher’s website, so draw your own conclusion.)

Despite Parker Brothers’ attempt to erase Magie Phillips from the history of Monopoly, the game itself has clearly stood the test of time. Her Georgist message about the value of real estate might have been lost in the shuffle, but we can still learn a thing or two about property management thanks to a simple game she created more than 100 years ago. Roll the dice, and start moving!

October 22, 2006 | Permalink