George S. Parker and Parker Brothers
by Bruce Whitehill
George S. Parker was a game player interested in strategy games and games of amusement which could be enjoyed by adults as well as children. With a passion for inventing games, he started his own company in 1883. Two years later he was selling games manufactured by the country’s oldest “mass producer” of games, W. & S.B. Ives, and by 1887 obtained the rights to the entire Ives line. He invented a few games under his “Geo. S. Parker” name, including, in 1888, CHIVALRY, his favorite game, which was later changed to CAMELOT.
In 1888 his brother Charles joined the firm, creating Parker Brothers; in 1898 brother Edward came on board.
Many of the games produced during the 1890s were exceptional—some consisted of a one-piece board on a solid wood frame, with a patented sliding drawer in which the implements were kept.
Parker Bros. ad, ca. 1896 - Pillow Dex, brought from the UK, was extremely popular
At the turn-of-the-century, Parker Brothers imported PING-PONG from England and cut back on the development of new board games, to focus more on card games. They introduced two now-classic games: FLINCH (1902) and PIT, one of the earliest trading games (1904). ROOK, invented by George Parker in 1906 and sold under a separate company name, the Rook Card Co., became the largest selling card game in the world. Parker Brothers also began manufacturing a line of wood jigsaw puzzles that were of superb quality, and in 1909, the company devoted its production entirely to jigsaw puzzles, which during the teens and ’20s created quite a craze.
Parker’s family legacy came to an end in 1968 when the company was purchased by General Mills. Over the next two decades it was a part of Kenner Toys, and then Tonka, and finally fell under the span of Hasbro in 1991; Hasbro closed the Parker factory in Salem and moved manufacturing to Bradley’s Springfield plant.
Parker and Bradley both produced family games, but what Milton Bradley was to children’s games, Parker was to the adult market. Classic Parker Brothers games include Boggle, Flinch, The Mad Magazine Game, Masterpiece, Mille Bornes (based on the game of Touring acquired by Parker), Ouija (an 1890s fortune-telling device acquired in 1966), Payday, Risk, and Sorry, a Parcheesi-variant acquired from England.
Another Parker classic, Pente, a five-in-a-row game, was a variant of alignment games like Go, Ninuki-Renju, and Go-Moku (called Spoils Five in England). Go-Bang, another name by which PENTE was known in the U.S., was introduced into Europe around 1885 and listed in the 1887 McLoughlin catalog. Pente was revived in 1977 and purchased by Parker in 1984.
