ON SECOND THOUGHT

By Carol Ferguson



If you grew up in the 1930s or ‘40s — before games required batteries or computers to operate — you’re almost certain to know the answer.

It’s Monopoly, the game that lets players buy, rent and trade properties, using play money and taking turns moving around the board at the roll of the dice.

I hadn’t thought about the game in ages until I wandered through a book/entertainment store a few weeks ago. There, to my surprise, were several shelves of Monopoly games, and not just the standard, conventional model.

Game fans today can buy Monopoly games with themes like The Simpsons, Spider-Man, Shrek, Family Guy, the Red Sox, the U.S. Marines and the film “A Christmas Story.”

The method of playing all these new versions is apparently the same, but the names on the board spaces are not the ones we were accustomed to, such as Illinois Avenue, Park Place and Baltic Avenue, all named after locations in Atlantic City, N.J.

Player tokens to move around the board in the original game were metal figures such as a dog, horse, shoe, iron and race car, but not in the theme games. The version based on “A Christmas Story,” for example, includes tokens of Ralphie’s broken glasses, his pink bunny suit and the infamous leg lamp which his father put in the front window.

Facts surrounding the origin of the Monopoly game are controversial. In one version, the game was brought to Parker Brothers in 1935 by Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pa., who had invented it. The game company was not interested at first, and so Darrow proceeded on his own. When reports of the game’s success got back to Parker, the company officials changed their minds and purchased the rights. Darrow eventually became a millionaire through royalties.

In another version of the story, Lizzie J. Magie, a Quaker woman from Virginia, invented and patented a strikingly similar game which she called “The Landlord’s Game.” The big difference was that in Magie’s game, the properties were rented, while in Monopoly, they are bought and sold.

It soon became evident to Parker Brothers, that their game was a classic, and, on discovering the existence of Magie’s and other Monopoly-like games, the company secured the patents and copyrights.

Those who supported Magie’s claim of origin, insist that Darrow was first influenced by her brainstorm to invent his own game. This story of corporate intrigue has even been documented in several books. After lengthy court battles and appeals, the legal status of Parker Brothers’ trademarks on the game was settled in the mid-1980s, according to an Internet story. Parker Brothers, incidentally, is now a subsidiary of Hasbro.

When I was a child, my parents bought my brother and me Big Business, another Monopoly-like game, which the four of us often played on winter evenings.

Not until I was married, with children of my own, did I actually play the real Monopoly game. During the summer months while the kids were home from school, we often set up the Monopoly board in the middle of the living room floor and played for hours until someone went broke or fell asleep or I decided it was time to fix dinner.

Monopoly is still popular with adults, and I have it on good authority that one of the area’s most skillful players is attorney Holly Gotcher.

In researching this column, I learned that the longest playing Monopoly game on record was 1,680 hours — 70 straight days.

Some other interesting tidbits:

Monopoly is published in 26 languages. One of the most recent, the Thai edition, was introduced at Toys R Us in Bangkok in December 2005.

• The game was very popular in Cuba until Fidel Castro took power and all known sets were destroyed.

• The total amount of money in a standard Monopoly game is $15,140.

• Escape maps, compasses and files were inserted into Monopoly game boards smuggled into POW camps inside Germany during World War II. Real money for escapees was slipped into the packs of play money.

• In the 1970s, a Braille edition was brought out for the blind.

• In the 1978 Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog, a full-size chocolate version of the game was offered at $600.

• The students at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa., once turned part of their campus into a giant Monopoly board, with huge foam cubes used as dice and bicycle-messengers with walkie-talkies keeping players informed of the moves.

• In 1972, the Atlantic City Commissioner of Public Works threatened to change the names of the real Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues, but public outcry killed the bill.

• The game so impressed one young man that he later named his cat Marvin Gardens after one of the properties on the board..

Actually, you won’t find the latter bit of information on any Web site. The player was one of our sons.

It could have been worse though. Imagine a cat named Free Parking or B&O; Railroad.



Ferguson is a feature writer for the Herald-Banner.