THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA Read Online Free PDF

Monopoly sets. Demand quickly reached colossal proportions, and the firm’s Salem, Massachusetts, headquarters was almost buried under sacks of mail. Laundry baskets were hauled to the plant to contain the mountains of paper. A Boston office-machinery company was called in to handle Parker’s increased bookkeeping. The account executive took one look at the laundry baskets crammed with orders and positively refused to take on the job, no matter what the price.
    Naturally the company reconsidered its earlier opinion of Darrow’s game, and in a very short time Monopoly’s creator signed a contract turning over his interest in the game to Parker Brothers on a continuing royalty basis. His very first check was for seven thousand dollars, and soon Darrow could retire for life.
    As for Parker Brothers, twenty thousand Monopoly sets a week were leaving the factory by mid-February of 1935. Three years earlier, the company had been on the verge of bankruptcy; when Monopoly began to climb in 1935, sales reached as much as eight hundred thousand dollars a week. By the next year, sales topped $1 million and the firm was solidly back on its feet.
    The craze has shown little sign of abating since then. For a time, the game began to level off into a steady yearly seller. But as soon as the economy gets the least bit rocky, Monopoly takes a sharp upward swing. Most games tend to sell better during times of economic setback, since games give the consumer more hours of enjoyment than, say, movies or other one-time-only forms of entertainment.
    However, the record year for Monopoly sales was not in the thirties, the period usually associated with the “Monopoly craze,” but in 1971. And that year capped a steady fourteen-year growth pattern.
    Foreign-language and other overseas editions of Monopoly account for part of this growth. In England, the game is called Trafalgar Square, while in Germany, it’s Wienerstrasse. Other versions are sold in fourteen other languages, including Flemish, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and Hebrew.
    Monopoly appeals to all age groups and is often played in flabbergasting collegiate marathons. World records have been set for the longest games played in an elevator, in a tree, and on a gigantic replica board. At De Anza College in Cupertino, California, students played Monopoly for twelve hours while submerged in a swimming pool, using special diving equipment hooked up to a respirator and weighted game pieces supplied by Parker Brothers so the play components would not float up to the surface.
    The longest single Monopoly game yet documented was played from noon on Wednesday, July 21, 1971, to 4 P.M. of Tuesday, August 24—a total of 820 hours—by twenty players in Danville, California. Another impressive Monopoly event is the annual Detroit tournament held in formal evening clothes. Sponsored by the USMA—United States Monopoly Association—the event invites competition for “the Davis Cup of the board-game playing world,” the Stein-Fishbub Trophy.
    Possibly the wackiest “happening” in Monopoly history occurred in Pittsburgh when some college boys played an endurance game that lasted for days. At last it became obvious to the participants that the bank was about to be “broken.” They sent a wire to Parker Brothers explaining that $1 million was desperately needed to ward off another
    Depression. Parker, which prints about $2.4 billion of legally counterfeit bills daily for its games, took speedy action, packing up a million dollars of Monopoly money and sending it by plane to Pittsburgh. Meantime, a wire had been sent from Salem to the Pittsburgh branch of Brink’s. When the airplane landed, an armored car received the money and rushed it to the fraternity house under escort.
    There is only one major country in the world where Monopoly is not a popular game. Predictably, the game is banned in the Soviet Union as “too capitalistic.” Yet even behind the Iron Curtain, it is possible that a few