Steal, hustle and lie: the Monopoly story

Is there a better way to lose friends and alienate family members than through a spirited game of Monopoly? You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the game that always upsets at least one player has controversy baked into its DNA.

A movie based on the classic board game Monopoly is finally getting ready to roll the dice, and Margot Robbie’s production company is taking the lead. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Monopoly film has been in development for more than a decade, facing more twists and turns than an actual game of Monopoly along the way. The latest is that Robbie’s production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, will be producing the film.

And they’re not doing it alone. Hasbro Entertainment, the entertainment wing of the famous American toy and board game company, is also on board as a producer. See what I did there?

While no details have been shared yet on how exactly the film will portray the famous game pieces (can we expect Sir Patrick Stewart to voice the top hat? I hope so!) or how writers will create a story around those Community Chest and Chance cards, I can tell you that a far juicer subject for a film would actually be the history of the game itself.

The Landlord’s Game

Back in 1903, Elizabeth Magie, known to all as Lizzie, faced a world brimming with big issues. Income inequality in the US was sky-high and monopolies ruled the roost. A stenographer by trade, Lizzie was a smart, progressive woman and a staunch feminist who dreamed of making a dent in society’s problems. But instead of writing pamphlets or giving lectures, Lizzie chose a different avenue with which to educate the masses about the inequality that surrounded them. She created a board game.

Night after night, Lizzie would hunker down at home, sketching, brainstorming and tweaking. She was a woman on a mission to infuse her board game with her progressive political beliefs. This wasn’t as outlandish an idea as it sounds, if you consider that board games were all the rage in middle-class households as the 20th century dawned, and inventors were realising they could be more than just a diversion – they could be a form of expression. So clever Lizzie got cracking.

Soon enough, she began spreading the word about her brainchild, the Landlord’s Game. “It’s a hands-on lesson in land-grabbing and its consequences,” she wrote in a political magazine. “You could call it the ‘Game of Life,’ mirroring the pursuit of wealth that seems to drive us all.” In Lizzie’s game, players dealt in play money, deeds and properties, navigating loans, taxes and a circular board layout that defied the linear paths of other games. Poverty, parks and prisons dotted the landscape, alongside a nod to her idol, economist Henry George. His ideas about taxing wealthy landowners fueled Lizzie’s game, with one corner of the board proudly proclaiming his motto: “Labour upon Mother Earth Produces Wages”.

From the get-go, the Landlord’s Game tapped into humanity’s competitive streak. Incredibly, Lizzie crafted the game with two rule sets: one anti-monopoly, where wealth creation benefitted all, and one pro-monopoly, encouraging players to crush the competition and gather as many resources for themselves as they could. It was a smart study in contradictions between opposing ideologies which Lizzie hoped would open the eyes of players to the benefits of an anti-monopoly utopia. Little did she know then that it would be her set of pro-monopoly rules that would capture the interest of players, while the anti-monopoly set would all but be erased from history.

This is how you really play monopoly

Magie’s creation really took off on college campuses and soon became public domain, as students across the country made their own versions of the board. The game eventually landed in the hands of a Quaker community in Atlantic City, who added their local street names – like Oriental Avenue, Marvin Gardens, and, of course, Park Place and Boardwalk – to their boards.

Years later, during the Great Depression, a Quaker couple invited their friends, Charles Darrow and his wife, to play the game. For Darrow, who was unemployed, this was a lightbulb moment. Seeing a potential escape from his financial troubles, he asked his hosts for a replica of the board and a typed copy of the rules. Armed with these, Darrow began producing and marketing the game himself. In 1935, he sold his “invention” to the struggling Parker Brothers.

As Monopoly’s popularity skyrocketed, Parker Brothers scrambled to cover up the fact that their bestselling game was actually in the public domain. Somehow, the US Patent Office granted Darrow a patent on his version, even though the Landlord’s Game was its clear predecessor and had been patented by Lizzie Magie in 1904.

Determined to monopolise Monopoly itself, Parker Brothers set out to buy and destroy old folk versions of the game, which had sprung up all over the country. Their efforts paid off, and they managed to keep the true origins of the game under wraps for decades, amassing hundreds of millions of dollars in profits along the way.

For the patent to the Landlord’s Game and two other game ideas, Lizzie Magie reportedly received $500 from Parker Brothers, and no further royalties. Initially she was happy about this, thinking that her role in creating the game would stay connected to its lore. But she soon realised that this was not the case.

Go to jail court

The true story behind Monopoly might have stayed hidden forever if not for the dogged determination of Ralph Anspach, an economics professor and passionate anti-monopolist. For readers who enjoy spotting a pattern repeat itself, this part of the story will be particularly satisfying. Frustrated by the OPEC oil cartels and gas shortages of the 1970s, Anspach created a game called “Anti-Monopoly.” His game kept the fun of the original but flipped the script, making monopolists the bad guys. Sounds a bit like Lizzie’s long-forgotten second set of rules, doesn’t it?

Unsurprisingly, General Mills, which owned Parker Brothers at the time, was not thrilled by Anspach’s invention. They sued Anspach, demanding he stop selling his game. In response, Anspach decided to challenge the Monopoly trademark’s legitimacy. To do this, he dug into the game’s early history, long before Parker Brothers got their hands on it. What he found was a story of corporate manoeuvring and forgotten pioneers, which he managed to trace all the way back to Lizzie Magie.

The legal battle with General Mills took over a decade of Anspach’s life, taking him to the brink of bankruptcy and eventually all the way to the US Supreme Court. In the end he was vindicated, and his relentless pursuit uncovered the real origins of America’s favourite board game in the process.

And yet, the history remains nothing more than a bit of trivia, known only by a few. By the time that Hasbro absorbed Parker Brothers in 1991 as part of its acquisition of Tonka Corp, Lizzie Magie’s name had all but been erased from the history books once more. In the game’s official instructions, the historical timeline of Monopoly begins in 1935, the year Charles Darrow is falsely credited with inventing the game.

This corporate narrative is carefully crafted, with its most revealing aspects being the details it leaves out: the contributions of Lizzie Magie, the existence of a second set of rules, the involvement of Quaker communities and the participation of the numerous early players who were integral to the game’s development.

About the author: Dominique Olivier

Dominique Olivier is the founder of human.writer, where she uses her love of storytelling and ideation to help brands solve problems.

She is a weekly columnist in Ghost Mail and collaborates with The Finance Ghost on Ghost Mail Weekender, a Sunday publication designed to help you be more interesting.

Dominique can be reached on LinkedIn here.