How a Fight Over a Board Game Monopolized an Economist's Life
This week, game players and enthusiasts from 40 countries will descend upon Las Vegas to compete in the Monopoly World Championship, held roughly every four years. The winner of the Hasbro Inc.-sponsored tournament will take home $20,580 -- the precise sum stashed in the title's make-believe bank.
But one man who is perhaps the game's most obsessive follower won't be attending.
Ralph Anspach, an 83-year-old economics professor, spent decades locked in a real-life battle with Monopoly and its corporate owners. The campaign dented his finances, sent him on a nationwide trek for intelligence and sparked a legal case that reached the steps of the Supreme Court.
Prof. Anspach's woes began with a real-life trademark fight for the right to sell his own game, called Anti-Monopoly. Along the way, he says he helped to publicize the little-known origins of the classic American game.
The official history of Monopoly, a version of which appears on Hasbro's Web site, describes how Charles B. Darrow developed Monopoly during the Great Depression. Parker Brothers, which was later acquired by Hasbro, bought the impoverished heater salesman's patent in 1935 and registered the Monopoly trademark. Since then, the company says, an estimated 750 million copies of Monopoly have been sold worldwide.
The Monopoly "legend," as Hasbro calls it, "is a corporate fairy tale," says Prof. Anspach, who argues that the company fails to acknowledge key players in the game's genesis.
Prof. Anspach flew across the country more than a dozen times to research the game's origins. His logic: If he could prove that Monopoly was widely played as a folk game decades before the Darrow patent, then he could argue that his game didn't infringe on Parker Brothers' trademark.
The real story, he says, began in 1904 with a patent from a Quaker named Elizabeth Magie. Her invention, "The Landlord's Game," spread as a folk game, designed to show the downsides of capitalism. The Atlantic City Quaker School simplified it, making it more accessible to children. Game historians widely believe that this simpler version was later shown to Mr. Darrow by a friend in the early 1930s...
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But one man who is perhaps the game's most obsessive follower won't be attending.
Ralph Anspach, an 83-year-old economics professor, spent decades locked in a real-life battle with Monopoly and its corporate owners. The campaign dented his finances, sent him on a nationwide trek for intelligence and sparked a legal case that reached the steps of the Supreme Court.
Prof. Anspach's woes began with a real-life trademark fight for the right to sell his own game, called Anti-Monopoly. Along the way, he says he helped to publicize the little-known origins of the classic American game.
The official history of Monopoly, a version of which appears on Hasbro's Web site, describes how Charles B. Darrow developed Monopoly during the Great Depression. Parker Brothers, which was later acquired by Hasbro, bought the impoverished heater salesman's patent in 1935 and registered the Monopoly trademark. Since then, the company says, an estimated 750 million copies of Monopoly have been sold worldwide.
The Monopoly "legend," as Hasbro calls it, "is a corporate fairy tale," says Prof. Anspach, who argues that the company fails to acknowledge key players in the game's genesis.
Prof. Anspach flew across the country more than a dozen times to research the game's origins. His logic: If he could prove that Monopoly was widely played as a folk game decades before the Darrow patent, then he could argue that his game didn't infringe on Parker Brothers' trademark.
The real story, he says, began in 1904 with a patent from a Quaker named Elizabeth Magie. Her invention, "The Landlord's Game," spread as a folk game, designed to show the downsides of capitalism. The Atlantic City Quaker School simplified it, making it more accessible to children. Game historians widely believe that this simpler version was later shown to Mr. Darrow by a friend in the early 1930s...