by Bruce Whitehill
An editorial published May 2007 in Knucklebones games magazine
There are many mysteries surrounding games, their history and even their popularity. We’re still not sure when games first came into being (5000+ years ago?), or what the earliest game was (a mancala variant?). We don’t know the inventors of many of the world’s classic games (who invented tic-tac-toe, for example?) or even some of the more modern ones. We wonder why some supposedly genuinely good games had such limited distribution and popularity, and why some apparently awful games seem to have permeated so many societies.
How did the game of Othello win an award in the 1970s as the best new game when it was nearly the same game as Reversi, published 90 years earlier? The only difference between the original strategy game—one of the world’s best—and its Japanese import nearly a century later, is in the placement of the initial starting pieces. Othello is still popular in the U.S. (where Reversi is all but unknown), while Reversi is still played throughout Europe.
Why did the game of Halma, invented in the U.S. by a Harvard professor in the 1880s, disappear in America, while it is still played in Europe? Perhaps its European popularity is what made many game historians attribute the game to British origins. Halma is such a classic in Europe that the game is found in almost all compendiums sold on the continent. In the U.S., this jumping game in which the jumped pieces are not removed from the board, was replaced by Chinese Checkers. And why did Chinese Checkers suddenly sweep the nation in the 1920s when J. Pressman Company (now Pressman Toy) released the game, and where did they get it from?
How did Mah Jongg become a game craze in the 1920s after its importation from China, where it had been played for hundreds of years? A long and unusual game, it uses up to 144 tiles as cards. The game took America by storm at a time when interest was peaked in all things oriental following the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. But why such initial enthusiasm for this game which by the 1950s had become a more casual leisure pursuit of suburban housewives?
How come few people know the name Selchow & Righter, even though the company was in business for 119 years and produced such classics from Parcheesi in the 1870s to Scrabble in the 1950s? At one point, Selchow & Righter (S&R) was perhaps one of the five top game companies in the U.S. Why did Fred Selchow work for a competitor, Chafee & Selchow, a company that produced a knock off of Parcheesi in the 1880s, when he and Elisha Selchow of Selchow & Righter lived together at the same address in New York City in 1897 and 1898? By the way, after Hasbro acquired the S&R name in the late 1980s, it was retired forever.
Speaking of Scrabble, how do you explain Pressman company’s Wordy, from 1938, which was almost the same as Scrabble except that the value of the letter tiles was determined not by a number but by the color of the tile? Lynn Pressman, who ran the company after her husband Jack’s death in 1959, said in an informal interview that Pressman “probably knocked off” the Scrabble game—but how do you knock off a game nine years before it appears on the market?
What made Monopoly become such a rage in the 1930s, in spite of being long and governed much by the luck of the dice, along with many other problems? The suggestion is that the public enjoyed controlling lots of money, buying property, charging rents, building houses and hotels, and wheeling and dealing in the middle of a major depression. Even so, how did a flawed folk game go on to become one of the most popular games in the world for another seventy years?
How did two different Uncle Wiggily games wind up on the market the same time? Milton Bradley first issued the game, based on the Uncle Wiggily Bedtime Stories of Howard Garis, in 1916, and continued publishing it until Parker Brothers obtained the rights in 1967, six years after Garis’ death. In 1989, Bradley listed the game in its catalog as “new,” having obtained the rights from Howard Garis’ daughter-in-law, M.R. (Mabel) Garis. Parker claimed “exclusive licensee under the rights of the late Howard Garis.” One of the interesting points is that the Parker game more closely resembled Bradley’s original Uncle Wiggily than the new Bradley version. The object of the original and the new Parker version was to “lead the rabbit gentleman through the forest to Dr. Possum’s office,” which was both Dr. Possum’s address, number 151, and the last of that number of spaces on the board. The new Bradley version had only 100 spaces and didn’t even mention Dr. Possum. Why did Bradley change the game, and how did it lose the rights to its rival Parker Brothers? Eventually it became a moot point, when Hasbro, after buying Bradley in 1984, acquired Parker in 1991, and they all became one big family; Uncle Wiggily is now sold by Winning Moves.
Another Wiggily mystery is why the 1952 edition was listed as “for little folks 4 to 10 years of age,” whereas the age range shown in 1954 was 4 to 8 years of age; in 1962, 5 to 9; and in 1989, 4 to 7. Meanwhile, the 1989 Parker version was listed for ages 5 to 11. Maybe that was because of the additional 51 spaces. The current Winning Moves version is for ages 4 to 8.
While we’re on the subject of lost games, what was the basis for the decision to remove Acquire, one of America’s classic games, from the market? Sid Sackson’s great game of acquisition, first published in 1962, finally got the author the attention he deserved when Hasbro released a version in 1999 in which one of the properties was renamed “Sackson.” So where is the game now?
What made Trivial Pursuit the game that changed an industry? After all, question and answer games and trivia were very popular in the 1950s and back in the 1930s and ’40s as well. Just as a store’s success depends on “location, location, location,” perhaps a game’s fame can be sometimes linked to “timing, timing, timing.” But Trivial Pursuit did more than feed box-loads of questions to a populace thirsting for answers and hungering for nostalgia, it doubled the amount of money that the game companies thought the public was willing to pay for a game. And it reminded the decision-makers that word-of-mouth was still more important than any form of print or TV advertising.
Finally, one considerable question is why good-playing strategy games are so popular throughout Europe—mostly Germany—and so unknown by the general population in the U.S.? Germany didn’t even have a thriving adult games market after the war until the American-based 3M company started promoting its line of adult strategy games outside the U.S. in 1966. Now the U.S. imports most of the challenging, more strategic board games from Germany or re-issues licensed English-language versions through such companies as Mayfair and Rio Grande. What most serious American players would call the best games even have their own category: “Euro games” or “German Games.” Why is the rest of America still stuck on Monopoly?
