What do you think of this fact?
You buy streets, build hotels and collect rent until everyone else goes broke. That’s Monopoly. Pretty ironic, because the game Monopoly grew out of was meant to criticize exactly that. It was a protest game against monopolies.
A board game as a protest
The inventor was Lizzie Magie. On January 5, 1904, she received US patent no. 748,626 for “The Landlord’s Game.” According to the National Women’s History Museum, she designed it as a protest against the big monopolists of her time, people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
The ideas behind it came from economist Henry George. According to Britannica, the game was meant to illustrate how landlords exploit tenants and the benefits of a single tax on land. So Magie wasn’t trying to teach you the joy of ripping people off. She wanted to teach an economics lesson.
Two rulebooks, one winner
Magie later gave the game two sets of rules. In one, the goal was to create monopolies and force the others out. In the other, everyone was rewarded when wealth was created. According to the British Library, she believed this would show players that the anti-monopoly version was the morally correct choice.
In the end, the first one won. Homemade boards spread from friend group to friend group, and Quakers changed the street names to ones from Atlantic City.
500 dollars and not a cent more
Charles Darrow was taught one of these homemade versions by a friend and sold it to Parker Brothers. On December 31, 1935, he received his own Monopoly patent. According to the British Library, he tried to sell the game as his own.
Because Magie held a patent on her game, Parker Brothers bought it from her in 1935. She got 500 dollars, and no royalties. According to the British Library, Monopoly sold 278,000 units in 1935 and 1,751,000 in 1936. Darrow became the first board game millionaire, and Magie was all but forgotten.
Before she invented games, Magie had already received a patent in 1893 for an improvement to typewriters.
The game designed to warn against greed became the ultimate symbol of greed at the kitchen table. Magie would probably have insisted on the second rulebook.