Go back a generation
By BILL DUNCAN Nothing is sacred to the electronic appetite. Imagine my surprise when I saw an advertisement for Monopoly, an old board game, saying it has now been adapted for the online age. I can’t remember what the board game I have originally cost, but I know for sure it was not the $34.99 price on the electronic version. If you rummage around in the game closet of my home today, you’d find a battered game box called “Monopoly.” It is dog-eared from hours of play going into the third generation. One or two pieces are missing, but if you climbed the giant elm tree in the backyard of my home in Placentia, Calif. you’d probably find them in the crook of a limb outcropping where Ringo, the talking California raven hid them from the neighborhood youngsters playing Monopoly on the patio. Ringo was the neighborhood tease and would fly down, snatch a game piece and fly to the heights of the elm and hide it. The worst part was that after his deed, he would chortle. I just hope this new monopoly electronic version isn’t an omen for more bad times in the current era of bad times. After all, Monopoly was invented in 1934 at the height of the Great Depression. I am told that buyers of the new dot-com version won’t find clunky, bricks-and-mortar railroads and utilities. Instead, there’s Lycos, eBay and Nokia. Gone are the "Chance" and "Community Chest" squares, replaced by "Download" and "E-mail Just In." Land there and read your fate on a card: "Your dot-com company goes public. Collect $150 million dollars," or "Receive e-mail of old and useless jokes. Go back three spaces." Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania showed, what he called the Monopoly game, to the executives at Parker Brothers in 1934. It was rejected. Darrow was unemployed at the time, but gambled and produced the game on his own. He sold the idea to a Philadelphia department store and sold 5,000 of the games. He couldn’t keep up with the demand and went back to Parker Brothers in 1935 , this time with a success story. Monopoly became the best-selling game in America, despite the Depression. In its 74-year history, more than 500 million people have played Monopoly worldwide. It is printed in 37 languages. Over the years, the game has changed little, expect for the names of the properties. During a six-week period this year, Monopoly fans from around the world voted for global cities they would like to see represented on the first-ever World Monopoly game board. More than 5.6 million votes were cast and Taipei and Gdynia earned the brown property spaces on the game board. The new World Edition went on sale in August in more than 50 countries. Interestingly, George Parker issued a company memo in 1936 to halt production of the game because he thought it had reached maximum sales. The demand for the game caused him to reverse his decision. Actually, Monopoly is a treasure of trivia. It has set world records for the longest game ever played at 1,680 hours, or 70 straight days. But that’s not all. Monopoly is the longest game played in a treehouse, 286 hours; the longest game played in a bathtub, 99 hours; the longest game played upside-down, 36 hours. During World War II Monopoly games that contained escape maps and German Marks hidden among the packs of Monopoly money were sent to POW camps in Germany. In Cuba, the game was so popular that Castro seized all known sets and had them destroyed. In the current economy times the new version shuffles hundreds of millions of dollars instead of thousands and players circumnavigate the board with a mouse instead of the old thimble. But the object of the game has not changed — bankrupt your opponent. (Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)
The View From Here