One day in the midst of the great depression, an out-of-work salesman named Charles Darrow, having no money, no prospects, but a wife and children to take care of, took out a piece of oilcloth and began drawing a game board. card with streets and houses of Atlantic city. Darrow decided to try and market his game and sent it to Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley, but both giants refused. Darrow did not give up and in the meantime Parker, which had entered a crisis, took up the proposal and bought the "monopoly game". It was a real success.
In every Monopoly box sold since the mid-XNUMXs, a leaflet told this touching story. There's only one problem: it's not true!. “The true story,” reads in Monopoly stories di Mary Pilon (Egea 2015; 240 pages; 21 euro; 11,99 epub), “is a little different and begins more than thirty years earlier”.
At the origins of Monopoly there is in fact a woman: Elizabeth Magie Phillips known as Lizzie and her Landlord's game, designed as a teaching tool to educate people about the dangers of monopolies. Lizzie wanted the game to reflect her progressive political ideas, centered around the economic theories of Henry George, one of the champions of the land value tax, also known as the single tax. The principle was that individuals should be XNUMX% owners of what they produce, while what is found in nature, especially the earth, should belong to everyone.
The real difference between Lizzie's game and Darrow's was the spirit: progressive the first, capitalist the other. However, Parker bought the rights to Landlord's game from Lizzie, deceiving the author of a large-scale distribution of the game and therefore of her political message, but she didn't quite go that way. In the 30s Lizzie herself was shocked to find a version of her Landlord's game on the market which was called Monopoly and which was advertised as a game invented by Charles Darrow. Despite the similarities between the two games, Lizzie's name did not appear anywhere on the Monopoly box. There was no trace of her contribution.
Mary Pilon has the merit of retracing the history of this game from 1904 to today. A story that has many protagonists, which has involved giants of distribution and which has marked its destiny with years of legal events and that of those who have somehow come into contact with it. Legal courses and appeals, strategies that engaged the parties for decades and as revelations about the game's controversial origins spread in the courts and in the newspapers, Parker began to modify the history of Monopoly.
To understand the history of Monopoly and its success, one cannot ignore the one that runs parallel to another game: in 1938 Ralph Anspach, professor of economics at San Francisco University State, created the Anti-Monopoly.
“The most popular game of the period,” writes Pilon, “rewarded something that undermined real life: making money was not a crime, but monopolizing a product or an industry by eliminating all competitors was. In Ralph's Anti-Monopoly every player was an antitrust enforcer. Points were earned by breaking up monopolies and by doing other good deeds. Whoever reached the highest score won.
The success of Anti-Monopoly came at the time of Watergate. From February 1974 the disputes, the legal fights between Monopoly and Anti-Monopoly, between Parker Brothers and Ralph Anspach began. For Ralph it wasn't just about money, he wanted to win the court and get the right to produce his Anti-Monopoly and tell the world the true story of Monopoly. And so it was.
Parker Brothers is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Hasbro Inc. Monopoly continues to be one of the best-selling board games of all time and lives on in its classic cardboard version. Even the Anti-Monopoly. In the last two pages of the book, Pilon summarizes the protagonists of the story: who is no longer there, who is still there and deals with other things, who, like Ralph, enjoys his retirement and continues to produce and distribute by University Game , its Anti-Monopoly.
Mary Pilon is a reporter for the New York Times. She previously worked for the Wall Street Journal, Gawker and USA Today
