I knew there had to be a point to Monopoly. The game itself is tedium made cardboard, the strongest known antidote to the will to the live. There is a 12 per cent chance that any given game of Monopoly will go on for ever (the other 88 per cent just feel like that). In fact I’m still not convinced that the name isn’t a spelling mistake. The story of Monopoly, on the other hand — now there’s a thing. Specifically, the story of how it was invented.
For decades the accepted version had down-on-his-luck Charles Darrow creating the game in the 1930s, as entertainment for his impoverished family and a reminder of happier times when they’d holidayed in Atlantic City. Then Parker Brothers snapped it up and conquered the world, making themselves and Darrow a pretty penny or several billion in the process. But even as they peddled the tale, the company knew it wasn’t quite true. Several other versions of the game had existed before Darrow’s, and Parker Bros knew this because they went around buying them up. The makers of Easy Money, Finance and Inflation all sold their rights, helping Parker Bros obtain a monopoly on Monopoly.
But one woman would not go gentle into that good compensation arrangement: Lizzie Magie, inventor of The Landlord’s Game, the original version on which all the others were based. Hers was the Ur-Monopoly (yes, she’s the one to blame). Magie had the idea in the early 1900s, the board game acting as an educational tool to promote the ‘single tax’ theory of the 19th-century economist Henry George (he believed the only thing that should be taxed was land). Magie’s social campaigning included advertising herself as a slave to the highest bidder, and writing a paper called ‘A Graphic Description of Hell by One Who Is Actually in It’.
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