﻿Even if you’re not the biggest fan of board games, odds are that you’ve heard about the
popular real-estate board game, Monopoly. The game, which could go on for hours at a stretch,
is well-loved by families and friends in the United States and
all over the world. Monopoly is the best-selling privately patented board game in history,
and while you may be familiar with the name Monopoly and you may have even had
your fair share of one of those seemingly endless episodes of Monopoly gameplay,
one thing you most likely aren't aware of is the remarkable history that this board game has.
According to most popular backstories, the success story of Monopoly begins sometime in the 1930’s.
But, that isn’t the complete story. In reality, the origin of the board game
goes back decades before that. This is the surprising story
behind the game Monopoly. Welcome to Planet Biz.
The Landlord’s Game The idea for the game came
to a woman named Elizabeth “Lizzie” Maggie who worked as a stenographer by day and at night,
taught classes about her Georgist political beliefs. It was early in the 20th Century and this
progressive and intensely political woman believed that she could have an impact on the world
by enlightening people on the massive problem of income inequalities and the dangers of monopolies.
A monopoly is a market structure characterized by a single seller, selling a unique product in the
market without facing any serious competition. To raise awareness, she taught in the evenings,
but there was one problem – her classes were too small, she needed to find a way to reach
more people. As a single woman in the early 20th century, such a feat would be considerably
difficult for Lizzie Maggie to achieve, but she had an idea that was bound to work.
Trying to reach more people with her progressive political views, Lizzie Maggie decided that the
best way to go about that would be to use an interactive and creative medium. The perfect
solution must have been strikingly obvious – board games. Back then board games were becoming more
and more popular especially in middle-class homes. Lizzie began to work on her idea,
giving her ideologies the physical form of a board game in a bid to educate more people.
Talking about her game board idea in a political magazine, Lizzie said, “It might well have been
called the ‘Game of Life’, as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world,
and the object is the same as the human race seems to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth.”
She began to work on her idea each night after she got back from work at the office.
At her home in Prince George’s county, Washington DC, Lizzie would spend hours drawing and redrawing
the game board. Eventually, she created a prototype that she found satisfactory
and named it the “Landlord’s game”. The Landlord’s game featured game money, properties that could be
bought and sold, a bank from which players could pay for property, get paid, or borrow money,
taxes, title deeds, etc. Players could follow a continuous path around the board instead of
a “linear path” which was more common at the time. The board featured various rectangles representing
pieces of land that could be bought when a player lands on it, “Absolute Necessity” rectangles
that offered things like food, and shelter, “Franchise spaces” for light and water, a jail,
and the “Mother Earth Space” where players would get paid wages of $100 whenever they
passed because they “performed so much labor upon Mother Earth” during the course of the game.
In 1903, Lizzie applied for a patent for the board game she had invented,
and in 1904, she received it. Even with the patent in hand, it wasn’t until 1906 that the
game was officially published for sale to the public by the Economic Game Company of New York
which Lizzie Maggie herself established in partnership with two other people.
The game quickly grew popular among particular groups of people such as Quakers, Georgists,
college students, and leftwing intellectuals. People began to make varying homemade versions,
customizing the game to reflect neighborhoods that they were familiar with.
The game had achieved its fair share of popularity, but Lizzie knew it could do
better and reach a wider audience. So, around 1910, she went to the game board company,
Parker Brothers. Unfortunately, they turned her down, rejecting it as “too complicated”.
In 1913, she got the Landlord’s Game published by the Newbie Game Company
under the name “Brer Fox an’ Brer Rabbit”. In 1924, Maggie, now married, made a few tweaks
to her game, wanting to regain control of the widespread handmade versions. She re-patented
the game under her married name, Elizabeth Maggie Phillips. Once again, she approached Parker
Brothers with her new game, and yet again, George Parker, the company’s founder, turned her down.
This time because the game was “too political”. But despite the rejections, Maggie’s dream of
her game becoming more popular would finally be achieved. Unfortunately, this would have
nothing to do with her. While her game became increasingly well-known, the progressive,
strong-willed woman with the incredible work ethic would fade into obscurity.
Monopoly Despite being turned down for
publication by Parker Brothers more than once, the game continued to grow in popularity. Apart from
the commercial sales, news of the game spread by word of mouth and the handmade versions got more
and more widespread. It wasn’t sold in a box and its original name wasn’t known by most people who
played the game. Eventually, the real-estate board game became known by all as ‘the monopoly game’.
In Philadelphia, a businessman named Charles Todd and his wife Olive Todd
were some of the fans of the monopoly game who were helping to spread the game’s popularity
by introducing it to their friends. One night in late 1932, Charles and his wife were entertaining
their friends – Charles Darrow and his wife Esther Darrow – with the monopoly game. The Darrow couple
loved the game immediately. Charles was pleased with the fact that his friends liked it, so he
taught the couple some more advanced rules of the game and even made them their own Monopoly set.
It was the height of the Great Depression and Charles Darrow was an unemployed man without
any means to take care of his family. One day, he asked Charles Todd for a written copy of the
rules of the monopoly game. This must have been a strange request because, not only was Darrow
already familiar with the game, but to the best of Charles Todd’s knowledge, there were no written
rules in existence. Most people who had learned the game had done so through word of mouth.
But Charles Todd complied, and wrote down the rules for his friend.
Darrow, armed with the board game set and the rules, decided to start selling
the game under the name Monopoly. He never spoke to Charles Todd again.
At the onset, Darrow made the game sets with the help of his wife and his first son William Darrow.
Charles Darrow would draw the board designs on round pieces of oilcloth
using a drafting pen and his son and wife would color in the spaces and make the title
deeds and the Community Chest and Chance cards. Demand for the game increased and Darrow hired a
printing company which made the board game on square carton sheets. Darrow’s design of the
game board included design elements that are now fixtures on Monopoly boards everywhere including
the car on the “free parking” square and the black locomotive on the railroad spaces.
In 1933, Darrow received a copyright on his version of the game and he met with the Milton
Bradley Company, a board game manufacturer, attempting to sell the game as his personal
invention. His offer was rejected in a letter dated May, 1934. Afterwards, Darrow sent the
game to Parker Brothers later that same year. The company once again rejected the game, calling it
“too complicated, too technical,” according to them, it also “took too long to play.”
Success After receiving rejections from the two different
board game manufacturers, Darrow continued to sell his board game privately. During the Christmas
season of 1934, Darrow had such a successful sales period that Parker Brothers heard about it.
Early in 1935, Robert Barton, president of Parker Brothers at the time, called in Darrow
for a meeting in New York City. On the 18th of March, the company bought Darrow’s game
and helped him to take out a patent on it. They also bought his entire inventory. The next month,
they discovered that he was not the sole inventor of the game, but to protect their right to the
game, they got Darrow to sign a legal document saying that he was the game’s sole creator.
The Parker Brothers marketed the game on a large scale, and its popularity grew and grew.
Darrow became popular as the brains behind this game that brought so much joy
to friends and family that played it. When asked by a Philadelphia news publication named
the Germantown Bulletin how he came up with the game idea out of thin air, Darrow replied, “It’s
a freak, entirely unexpected and illogical.” Darrow’s Monopoly went on to sell hundreds of
millions of copies, making him the first millionaire game designer in history.
His story became a symbol of the American dream, how a man went from abject poverty
to immense wealth during an economic crisis. He received royalties throughout his life,
meanwhile, Lizzy Maggie faded into obscurity. The only recognition she got was in the mid-1930s when
Parkers Brothers paid her $500 – with no royalties – for the patent to the original Landlord’s game
as well as two other of her game ideas. When Lizzie discovered the true motives for
the Parkers Brothers purchase of her games, she became angry. She gave interviews to the
Washington Post and the Washington Evening Star. Still, she wasn’t publicly acknowledged and Darrow
remained the face of the popular board game. Today, Monopoly has gone global. The board
game is in 114 countries and has been translated to 47 different languages.
Also, it is estimated that over one billion people have played the game around the world.
Monopoly has even become a sport of sorts with the highly competitive US Monopoly championship
and even world championships being held. For more inspiring business stories, don’t
forget to give this video a thumbs-up. This is Planet Biz.