Elizabeth J. Magie (Phillips)
My dearest reader,
I’ve spent the past week easing back into post weekend-getaway life the best way I know how: by playing games. I’ve made a weekly habit of playing some sort of game ever since my dad bought me a knock-off Atari console when I was 5 and got me hooked on pretend duck-hunting. I think what’s comforting about games is that we are in a version of reality that is within our control. Whether we win or lose, there are a pre-defined set of rules that will always apply. Even in games with an element of discovery, the number of choices are limited. And, best of all, if we make a decision and hate the outcome or if we lose the game altogether, we can always go back and try again — a luxury that isn’t always available in everyday life.
I haven’t made up a game since I was 10 and invented a book-food-hunt game where my brother, cousins, and I would panic-search our books for pictures of the most delicious food before we starved on our pretend island; but at some point last year I added “make a board game” to my fun to-do list and briefly took a shot at it. As appealing as the idea of creating a world from nothing and governing it with my own laws sounded, I quickly realized it was more complicated than I anticipated. Unless, of course, I stole someone else’s idea… but I’m not that type of a person.
The same, however, cannot be said of Charles Darrow. At a dinner party in 1933, Charles played a new board game called The Landlord’s Game. It was entirely different than any game he had played before — it was a continuous game with no start and finish and gave the players the ability to buy and sell property with fantasy money and risk going to jail. He went home that night, and immediately started working on his own version of the game. He added a “Go” corner, and color coded the properties and called it Monopoly.
He secured a copyright for the game, and began selling. In 1934, he showed the game to Parker Brothers who secured the rights to mass-produce and sell the game. The following year Charles acquired a patent for the game, which Parker Brothers bought as well. That year, Monopoly became the best selling game in America making Charles Darrow the first millionaire game designer in history.
Um, isn’t this a newsletter about women? I’m glad you asked. Remember that game Charles played at his neighbors house in 1933? This is what it looked like:
Suspiciously similar to Monopoly? In 1903, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie designed The Landlord’s Game to play amongst her friends and patented it by 1904. She was a performer, stenographer, and activist. She created this game as a teaching tool and a representation of her anti-capitalist belief that America’s greed will be its downfall. She wanted everyone to experience first-hand how greedy landlords can be. She added chance and jail to mimic reality and declared the winner to be the player with the most money and property. She presented the game to Parker Brothers, but they passed.
In 1906, she self-published The Landlord’s Game. While the sales were limited, the idea was popular and people began making their own at-home versions of the game using local street names. Ironically, as the game spread throughout the country, owning land and becoming a mega-landlord became glorified — the opposite of Lizzie’s intention. In 1932, one year before Charles Darrow “invented” Monopoly, Lizzie published a second version of The Landlord’s Game which included Prosperity (with the goal of working with your opponents against the landlords) and Monopoly (with the goal of owning the most property and bankrupting everyone else). Yes, that was the version that Charles played with friends.
So did she sue… or? Well, as Monopoly became more popular, and Darrow richer, Lizzie was rightfully pissed. She interviewed with The Washington Post and The Evening Star expressing her fury with the situation. Parker Brothers had purchased her patent rights to The Landlord’s Game in November of 1935 for $500 and no royalties and was promoting Charles Darrow as the sole inventor of Monopoly. It is worth noting though, that they were kind enough to publish two of her other games: King’s Men and Bargain Day. The most heroic show of support from a game manufacturer, no doubt.
It wasn’t until 1973, twenty-five years after Lizzie’s death, that Ralph Anspach, who was being sued by Parker Brothers for his creation of the Anti-Monopoly Game, accidentally discovered Lizzie’s patent while researching his case. Looking to weaken the manufacturer’s claim over Monopoly, during a 10-year case which ended at the Supreme Court, he brought Lizzie’s role as the inventor of the game to light.
And then they had to credit her, right? Weeeeell, until 2015 Hasbro (successor of Parker Brothers) displayed a timeline on their website maintaining that Charles Darrow was the inventor of Monopoly. But, despite my internet sleuthing, that page is nowhere to be found so who’s to say? Maybe they removed the page in yet another heroic show of support for Lizzie, or maybe I’m just bad at researching. Either way, I know that I will recount this story the next time I sit down at a Monopoly board with my cousins preparing to go to war over fake-money, fake-property, and real victory.
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