Making games better and getting them into the world seems like the thing to do when your dad passes and you need money. Sounds like Monopoly.
Dave Young:
Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.
[Tapper’s Jewelry Ad]
Dave Young:
Welcome back to The Empire Builders Podcast. I’m Dave Young, and I’m here with Stephen Semple, who’s been researching yet another empire for us to dissect and discuss. And today it’s Parker Brothers, the game mogul. Were these guys on Game Row? Didn’t we talk about it in another episode, the inventor of a game that was like he was over there in the part of town where all the games come from? I’m assuming.
Stephen Semple:
No, this kind of predates that. This sort of predates that. We’re going way back.
Dave Young:
I mean, Parker Brothers, I know the name and I’m trying to even think of a game that’s Parker Brothers. Parker Brothers. Who are these guys?
Stephen Semple:
We’re going way back. The business was started by George Parker when he was 16 years old back in 1883.
Dave Young:
See, I was thinking you were going to go back farther than that.
Stephen Semple:
Really?
Dave Young:
These guys invented the stick. But 1883, that’s okay. 1883 or 18…
Stephen Semple:
1883.
Dave Young:
1883. Okay.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, so we’re going back a little bit here, going back here a little bit. And one of the things that was happening around that time, because we’re talking about the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, and one of the things that was being created was the eight-hour workday, which actually started to build leisure time for people.
Dave Young:
Because before that, the work day was waking hours. Wasn’t it? It was just like…
Stephen Semple:
Basically. Pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. And so board games had started to come out, but most board games at that time were developed with an agenda. They were dealing with the moral decline of America is what a lot of them were. And they weren’t really all that interesting or fun.
And basically, George Parker was the youngest of two older brothers, and his father was a successful merchant, but had passed away and he had to find a way to make money. And what he noticed was at this time, capitalism was really changing. It was becoming actually acceptable. So for example, in 1840, there were 60 millionaires in the United States. By 1880, there were 1,000.
Dave Young:
Wow!
Stephen Semple:
Wealth was exploding, and people were actually able to imagine being wealthy. It was not just the aristocracy. There were actually regular people breaking through. And the first game he creates is a game called Banking.
Dave Young:
Banking. I’m pretty sure he didn’t invent banking.
Stephen Semple:
But he invented a game game called Banking. And it’s rejected by several publishers, but he spends his life savings, prints 500 copies, takes a month off school to go and sell it. He does sell all the sets for a profit of 80 bucks, but it was a lot of work, but gives him kind of a taste of success. And this is in the era of tycoons, and they were being admired. And Parker wanted to create an idea that taps into this.
Dave Young:
The Vanderbilts and all the…
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, the Carnegies and all of that stuff. And he didn’t like business, so he convinced his brother Charles to join, and they formed Parker Brothers. So basically, Charles is going to manage the business, and George is going to create the games. So they start by creating a role playing game with a venture. So one of the first ones they do is a game called Crossing the Ocean, where you took on a role. And it was one of the first role playing games, and it captured the imagination.
And traditionally, ideas were brought from Europe. So somebody would go over to Europe and see an idea and bring it back. Now, we got to pivot here a little bit because there is a large wealth gap going on. And Elizabeth Magie, who’s a writer, a comedian, actress, outspoken feminist, she creates a game called The Landlord’s Game. And basically The Landlord’s Game taught against the evils of monopolies. And it was the first game that didn’t have a start and a finish, like it goes around.
Dave Young:
Okay.
Stephen Semple:
It goes around in a circle. And so she self-publishes the game, modest success, but she needs a major distributor. And around this time, she meets George Parker. And George hates the idea because he feels people want to feel empowered, not depressed. So the 1920s come and there’s a boom in consumer spending, which, of course, then leads to a crash.
Dave Young:
Sure, yeah.
Stephen Semple:
Right? Now, enters another character, Charles Darrow, who’s an unemployed heating repair man. He’s doing odd jobs to make ends meet. And he’s working on an idea of a board game, which is about buying and selling property that he calls Monopoly. And the first version was in a circle.
Dave Young:
But this one’s a square.
Stephen Semple:
Right, right, but first version was in a circle. And he submits the game to another game company and they say, “No, thanks.” Next, he goes to Milton Bradley is who he submits it to. And next, he goes to the Parker Brothers and they reject it. And he takes the risks of printing of his own copies, and he convinces Wanamaker to sell them. Next, he goes to New York and he gets some other buyers. Then he waits. Both stores sell out, and it’s a fantasy people want to live.
And word of mouth spreads. The Parker Brothers find out about it, and they’re struggling. They need a hit. So they want to make a deal. And he sells to Parker Brothers for $7,000 plus a percentage of every game sold. Parker’s adds game pieces and tightens up the rules. That was his skill. His skill was taking games and making them better. It becomes a huge hit. 1.8 million of these are sold in 1936.
Dave Young:
This is Monopoly.
Stephen Semple:
This is Monopoly. 1.8 million in 1936. That’s all they could supply. They could have done more. His creation story makes it a great story. It’s not really true about struggling and creating wealth. Now, here’s the problem.
Dave Young:
Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.
[Empire Builders Ad]
Dave Young:
Let’s pick up our story where we left off. And trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.
Stephen Semple:
Now, here’s the problem. It’s a lot like a little bit Elizabeth Magie’s game, The Landlord’s Game. And she sees it at a party, and Parker Brothers had forgot that they had seen her game.
Dave Young:
Oops!
Stephen Semple:
And not only that, when they created Monopoly, they didn’t patent it right away. And when they went to patent it, oops, hers was patented first. What ends up happening though is she cuts a deal with them that they have to make both games. Because again, remember, she was about trying to make the world a better place, so they had to publish both Monopoly and The Landlord’s Game all at the same time. So Parker Brothers really gets off light on that one.
Dave Young:
Yeah, they do.
Stephen Semple:
And they publish both. And of course, Monopoly is hugely successful and The Landlord’s Game doesn’t do all that well.
Dave Young:
And I remember, was it another episode where we talked a little bit about Monopoly once, and it was designed to be a game that illustrated the evils of being a landlord. And it ended up being, “Oh, I won.”
Stephen Semple:
Its history comes from The Landlord’s Game, which was about the evils. They recreated the idea of the game.
Dave Young:
Yeah, okay, that makes sense.
Stephen Semple:
What I found that was really interesting about this whole idea is, again, it’s this tapping into what’s going on in the world. So this whole idea of capitalism is catching on and people are aspiring to be that. And tycoons are actually okay and all this other stuff in this escape that people want to go on, that a game should be an escape. And I liked sort of that, because really when you think about all of these things going on, the game tapped into a feeling at the time.
Dave Young:
Yeah, no, that makes sense.
Stephen Semple:
And it’s that observation of people and their behaviors and things along that lines that I think really made it successful.
Dave Young:
So Monopoly was the breakout.
Stephen Semple:
Monopoly was the breakout one.
Dave Young:
So what else did Parker Brothers do then?
Stephen Semple:
Clue. Remember they were the publisher of Clue in North America. We’ve talked about it before.
Dave Young:
Oh, sure.
Stephen Semple:
Which was, of course, originally Cluedo. Sorry, risk. They ended up doing a deal with Trivial Pursuit. So this is also where we’ve talked about them in the past. Those would be the big games that Parker Brothers are known for. But of course, many of those would be well after the time that the original founder, George, was long gone by the time those other games came along.
Dave Young:
Gotcha. There’s a weird… And it’s not really a direct tie to the making of the game Monopoly. So people that listen to The Empire Builders Podcast probably realize that we are part of an organization called Wizard of Ads. And our founder, Roy Williams, started a little publishing company 20 years ago called Wizard Academy Press.
Stephen Semple:
Right. Yeah.
Dave Young:
They were mostly these little audiobooks with almost a fat pamphlet sized booklet that came along with it. And one of the books that they published, a guy named Armand Aronson wrote one called How to Win at Monopoly.
Stephen Semple:
Oh, is that right?
Dave Young:
Yeah, yeah, I remember that. I don’t even know if I have a copy of it, but I just remember that… It was How to Win at Monopoly, and there’s some strategies in there.
Stephen Semple:
That’s cool.
Dave Young:
I doubt anybody could find one of those, but there’s other books out there on How to Win at Monopoly.
Stephen Semple:
Really? Okay. I had no idea there was people who took winning Monopoly that seriously.
Dave Young:
There are. Wizard Academy Press was a fun little business while it was going. And recently, all of the assets of Wizard Academy Press and, I guess if there is such a company, was given to Wizard Academy. We have a big storage containers, the big metal storage containers, that’s full of books.
Stephen Semple:
We got to start selling those books.
Dave Young:
Maybe we do an episode in there next time you’re in Austin.
Stephen Semple:
There you go, and dig through and see if we find some interesting book to promote and sell.
Dave Young:
Yeah, there’s a bunch of Roy’s books and a bunch of others. I don’t know if there’s any of the Monopoly books in there.
Stephen Semple:
We’ll have to look. We’ll have to see if there’s any of the Monopoly books.
Dave Young:
It’s not organized.
Stephen Semple:
But coming back to Monopoly, it is this whole thing of it’s amazing when the world goes through a change. And this is one of the things I really wanted to talk about is when the world goes through a change like the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and unexpected things happen, like the creating of an eight-hour workday, where all of a sudden there’s the invention of leisure time, and the invention of leisure time opens up all of these other opportunities.
We’ve talked about this before with things like AI, any technology that comes along that changes how society works. It builds opportunities that we cannot imagine. If you were in the 1700s or even the early 1800s and you said, “Boy, there’s going to be this leisure time and people are going to want to play games,” you would never imagine it. It develops complete industries.
And so what ends up happening is when these changes occur, I think it really behooves us to step back and take a look at it and go, “Well, what are the new opportunities that are presenting itself today that were not in existence before?”
Dave Young:
That’s a great point.
Stephen Semple:
And that’s what George Parker tapped into, not only in terms of leisure time where people want games, but also this suddenly society was looking at these things differently and wanted to imagine these things and how do you tap into that?
Dave Young:
Yeah. Well, interesting. And Parker Brothers, they’re still around. Has it been sold? Is it still a family enterprise?
Stephen Semple:
Oh no. I believe they’re now part of Hasbro Games.
Dave Young:
They sold out to big game.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, exactly.
Dave Young:
Wait, that’s a whole different thing. Big game. Well, thank you for bringing that story, Stephen. I’ll wander us into the woods if you let me.
Stephen Semple:
All right. Maybe we’ll just end it there. We don’t need a game, Dave wandering in the woods.
Dave Young:
No, no. I’ll be back after I ground myself. Thanks for listening to The Empire Builders Podcast.
Stephen Semple:
All right. Thanks, David.
Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute Empire Building Session, you can do it at EmpireBuildingProgram.com.
