by Bruce Whitehill
Cardinal Industries, Inc., a company that manufactured its first game product, a plastic dominoes set, in 1945, is now one of the oldest family game companies in the U.S. Starting out with large, wooden carnival wheels for midways and church bazaars, Cardinal started to mass market staples like chess, checkers and backgammon; the image of Omar Sharif bedecks the cover of one early backgammon game, and chess champion Victor Korchnai is pictured on a chess set from around 1980. The company also produced dice, Mah Jongg, Pachisi, Labyrinth, and Rummy-O. A few years after its move from Brooklyn to Long Island City in 1976, Cardinal began acquiring licenses, and manufactured such games as The$25,000 Pyramid, General Hospital, and The Simpsons Mystery of Life game. Cardinal has made Nickelodeon’s Figure It Out Game; World Wrestling Federation Trivia Game; Sports Illustrated Trivia; MTV, The Game (also trivia); The Yo-Yo Game; and Chicken Soup for the Soul, in various editions, based on the best-selling book. Check them out at the website for Cardinal Industries.
In 2000, Cardinal re-issued a game “with a fresh look”….a rolling marble starts a series of actions that turns into an elaborate way for the character (who will now be called “Sam”) to be awakened. The game wasg sold in Toys R Us under it’s original name…–anywhere else, the game was sold as WAKE UP SAM!” The original? Crazy Clock, the second in a series of three Rube Goldberg-style action games from Ideal, produced during the 1960s. Mouse Trap, from 1963, was probably the first modern skill-and-action game to become a classic, followed by Crazy Clock in 1964. The less popular game, Fish Bait, came out in 1965. All three games (which, by the way, showed the titles in all lower case letters) came from the famous inventor/design studio of Marvin Glass.
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