Do you enjoy board games? Before you pass Go or pay your rent make a note that Charles Darrow was born August 10 in 1889, and is the person who brought the game Monopoly to the market.
Darrow didn’t start out as a game designer. He was born in Philadelphia, in the US, and was a salesman there (selling heaters) when the Great Depression arrived in late 1929. He lost his job, and having plenty of time on his hands, started playing a board game enjoyed by some of his friends and neighbors. It’s not clear exactly which game he played; there were several variations being sold at the time, created by Elizabeth Magie, Jesse Raiford, Ruth Hoskins, the Thun brothers, Daniel Layman, and even more.
The original game was probably The Landlord’s Game, created by Magie. It was somewhere between a game and a teaching tool, and was popular among university professors and students. Another version, The Fascinating Game of Finance, was published in 1932. Whichever variant he played, Darrow was introduced to it by his friend Charles Todd, who had played it in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where all the streets and properties in the game had been renamed for real ones in that town.
Darrow saw how popular the game was, and thought he’d try to make his own version to sell. He started by drawing the “board” on pieces of oilcloth, and he and his family made the game cards and deeds by hand. His original games included some of the iconography that’s still used in Monopoly: the large red arrow on the GO space, the design of the locomotives on the railroad spaces, and so on. Darrow didn’t create those; he hired a graphic designer to produce them.
He copyrighted the game in 1933, and the next year switched from hand-painted oilcloth playing surfaces to printed cardboard — and managed to convince Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia to stock the games. By 1935, Darrow had also patented the game.
There were two national game companies in the US at the timeL Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers. Darrow showed both of them the game, and Parker Brothers bought the rights to it, and before long were producing 20,000 sets per week. It was the most popular game in the US, and Darrow became the first game designer to earn over a million dollars. Which which he could buy plenty of properties, of course.
Parker Brothers promoted Darrow as the “sole inventor” of the game, although his contribution was really just graphic design and packaging. His additions to the game were closely examined in the 1970s as part of a lawsuit — somebody had created a game called “Anti-Monopoly,” and Parker Brothers sued. The suit lasted ten years, and finally revealed that Darrow just copied nearly everything about the game, including a typo. In the game, one of the streets is called “Marvin Gardens”, but in Atlantic City the real street is “Marven Gardens.”
Darrow didn’t live to see the results (or even the beginning) of the trial; passed Go for the last time in 1967, when he was 78. Still, it shows that huge success might be just a roll of the dice away, even for an out-of-work heater salesman.
