Monopoly, according to it's manufacturer, has been played by over 500 million people. Translated into 26 languages, as well as Braille, it's sold 200 million copies as of 1999 (the latest figures the maker has announced). Over 5 billion of these green houses have been stamped, and each year countless dead trees are turned into 500 billion dollars of rainbow-hued money.
In other words, it's a popular game. The most successful board game ever.
The official story is that a toy tinkerer named Charles Darrow from Germantown, Pennsylvania, created this billion-dollar game out of whole cloth in 1934. However, the official story is what's made from whole cloth.
When economics professor Ralph Anspach cooked up a parody game called Anti-Monopoly, the goal is to bust trusts, not build them-Parker Brothers, not surprisingly, took him to court. While researching the game's history for the lawsuit, Anspach stumbled upon the hidden truth. Using dogged detective work, he assembled the suppressed history of Monopoly.
Greatly simplified, it goes like this. The roots stretch back to the Landlord's Game, a Monopolyesque game patented in 1904 by a cross-dressing Bohemian and game-inventor named Lizzie Magie. This game mutated into a folk-game called "monopoly." As charmingly quant as it may seem, people used to spend hour after hour playing board games with each other; they would even handmake their own copies of a game's board, cards, and pieces. From 1910 to the early 1930s, this is what happened with monopoly, mainly in the Northeastern US.
While visiting her hometown of Indianapolis, in 1929, a Quaker teacher named Ruth Hoskins was introduced to the game by a childhood friend. She made a copy, which she took back to Atlantic City, New Jersey. Her friends and colleagues, themselves Quakers, soon decided to redo the game using places from their neck of the woods-Pacific Avenue, Park Place, the Boardwalk, etc. They also added the little hotels in addition to houses. In a crucial rule change, they removed the property auctions and gave each piece of pretend real estate a fixed value, making the game so simple that even little kids could play.
Eventually, a Quaker couple invited another couple to play the game. That's how Charles Darrow was introduced to monopoly. He showed great interest, pressing his hosts to explain all the fine points of the game. When he asked them to type up the rules and make board for him, they thought he was a demanding bastard, but they complied. Next thing you know, Darrow is selling it as a game he "created." He had lifted the Quakers' Atlantic City version wholesale, making only some superficial changes to the game board (such as putting a colored stripe across the top of the squares instead of the original triangles in the bottom left corner).
He then sold it to Parker Brothers, still pretending to have invented it. The company soon discovered the ruse but went along with it, omitting and suppressing evidence of the game's true origins when they patented it under Darrow's name.
In it's ruling against Parker Brothers' effort to torpedo Anti-Monopoly, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals officially agreed with the facts Anspach unearthed, declaring the "reference to Darrow as the inventor or creator of the game is clearly erroneous." The Supreme Court upheld the decision.
Even today, Hasbro-which assimilated Parker Brothers-won't acknowledge the origins of their cash cow. They have, however, craftily modified their so-called history of Monopoly. The game's website now coyly refers to the "legend" of the game's birth, which commences when Darrow "showed" the game to the suits at Parker Brothers. They don't say that he created it, although that's the impression you'd get if you didn't know the real story.
