“He had no fear, he felt no shame!
He rolled the dice and called out a name!
He lost all his money; the wretched dice was to blame!
Oh do not worry too much, it is just a game!”
When you were young (er!) you would have played this game and when I was introduced to this, we were hooked! The game had a dice and a board and money! Of course at that time it was just printed paper money but still the joy of having money in the bank and buying properties all over the world was a thrill indeed!
When you get broke, you literally felt the loss of money even if it was fake! When you had to ask loan from the bank you would literally feel the heat! It was fun for the whole family and a good introduction to the big bad world of business!
In India I remember it to be called The Business game while all over the world it was called The Monopoly!
This delightful game of capitalism and money was actually having two twists when it comes to origin!
The official common story of rags to riches may have been something you may have heard, if not here it is!
For generations, the story of Monopoly’s Depression-era origins delighted fans almost as much as the board game itself!
The tale, often repeated and even printed as a story in the game box along with the Community Chest and Chance cards, was that an unemployed man named Charles Darrow dreamed up Monopoly in the 1930s!
He sold it and became a millionaire, his inventiveness saving him — and Parker Brothers, the beloved New England board game maker — from the brink of destruction!
Fans of the game also learned that Hasbro, which has owned the brand since 1991, would tuck real money into a handful of Monopoly sets as part of the game’s 80th “anniversary” celebration!
What an amazingly sweet story! But the story is just an amazing fairy tale! The origin that is; the tucking of real money may still be true!
The real inventor of this game was from a left-wing feminist named Elizabeth Magie!
Magie created and patented an early version of Monopoly, called The Landlord’s Game, in 1903, about three decades before Darrow. Darrow learned about the game from a couple who had played it in Atlantic City (which is where many of the game’s street names come from) and made a few changes: The original game included a wealth tax, public utilities and it had two sets of rules, one that allowed players to create monopolies and crush their opponents, and an anti-monopolist version that rewarded all players when wealth was created. Of course the Monopolist version became more popular and how!
Now for the real story! So one night in late 1932, Charles Todd and his wife, Olive, introduced their friends Charles and Esther Darrow to the Landlord’s game. As the two couples sat around the board, enthusiastically rolling the dice, buying up properties and moving their tokens around, the Todds were pleased to note that the Darrows liked the game. In fact, they were so taken with it that Charles Todd made them a set of their own, and began teaching them some of the more advanced rules!
One day, despite all of his exposure to the game, Darrow – who was unemployed, and desperate for money to support his family – asked Charles Todd for a written copy of the rules.
After he sold a version of the game to Parker Brothers and it became a phenomenal success, eventually making him millions, one journalist after another asked him how he had managed to invent Monopoly out of thin air – a seeming sleight of hand that had brought joy into so many households. “It’s a freak,” Darrow told the Germantown Bulletin, a Philadelphia paper. “Entirely unexpected and illogical.” Of course it was a lie told out of thin air!
Magie though lived a highly unusual life. She supported herself and didn’t marry until the advanced age of 44. In addition to working as a stenographer and a secretary, she wrote poetry and short stories and did comedic routines onstage. She also spent her leisure time creating the board game that was an expression of her strongly held political beliefs!
The second twist in the story is that she actually designed the game as a protest against the big monopolists of her time — people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller! So it was an anti-Monopoly game! So many twists is like the movie Dhrishyam! Of course I am a fan of the original but still Birthday celebrity Ajay Devgn did a decent job!
Life may not be a game but still everyone has to play!
The move now is to sleep!
Shubh ratri!
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