October 14, 2007

Advance to St. Charles Place


The Monopoly game was originally played on an oil cloth in 1933 by Charles B. Darrow. In 1935, Parker Brothers bought the rights for the game from Charles B. Darrow. More info at:

http://www.hasbro.com/default.cfm?page=ci_history_monopoly
Update 1/3/10: link expired. Main page below:

http://www.hasbro.com

Before Parker Brothers decided on the Uncle Rich theme, they experimented with game cards illustrations. You'll see a private collection of these cards (one of them is shown above):

http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/mo20.htm

On another note, the interesting thing though, is that I've looked around the web to see how many Monopoly versions are out there. I actually found different answers, that were mostly anywhere above and under 1,000. One of these people, Yehuda Berlinger, did a research and found out that as of October 10, 2007 there are 1298 versions. For further details and specific explanations visit his site:

http://jergames.blogspot.com/2006/02/monopoly-versions.html


*Note: Adena is British book publishing company*

2 comments:

Yehuda Berlinger said...

The game started in 1904 with the patenting of the Landlord's game by Elizabeth Magie.

Hasbro tried to suppress this history until the controversial case of the game Anti-Monopoly came out in the 1970s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Monopoly

Yehuda

P.S. Thanks for the link.

Daphna said...

You are welcome, and thank you, Yehuda, for the Elizabeth Magie's info from the Wikipedia page.