The board game Monopoly has its origin in the early 20th century. The earliest known version, known as The Landlord's Game, was designed by Elizabeth Magie and first patented in 1904, but existed as early as 1902.Sawyer, Keith. "Monopoly: Invention Through Collaboration." (April 15, 2024)The Science of Creativity.A US patent was granted in 1904 but in the autumn of 1902 an article describing the game was published in The Single Tax Review. See THE LANDLORDS' GAME Magie, a follower of Henry George, originally intended The Landlord's Game to illustrate the economic consequences of Ricardo's Law of economic rent and the Georgist concepts of economic privilege and land value taxation. A series of board games was developed from 1906 through the 1930s that involved the buying and selling of land and the development of that land. By 1933, a board game already existed much like the modern version of Monopoly that has been sold by Parker Brothers and related companies through the rest of the 20th century, and into the 21st. Several people, mostly in the midwestern United States and near the East Coast of the United States, contributed to its design and evolution.
By the 1970s, the false idea that the game had been created by Charles Darrow had become widely believed; it was printed in the game's instructions for many years,Monopoly Instructions from a 1999 edition, at hasbro.com in a 1974 book devoted to Monopoly, and was cited in a general book about toys as recently as 2007. Even a guide to family games published for Reader's Digest in 2003 gave credit only to Darrow and none to Elizabeth Magie or any other contributors, erroneously stating that Magie's original game was created in the 19th century and not acknowledging any of the game's development between Magie's creation of the game and the eventual publication by Parker Brothers.
Also in the 1970s, Professor Ralph Anspach, who had himself published a board game intended to illustrate the principles of both monopolies and trust busting, fought Parker Brothers and its then parent company, General Mills, over the copyright and trademarks of the Monopoly board game. Through the research of Anspach and others, much of the early history of the game was "rediscovered" and entered into official United States court records. Because of the lengthy court process, including appeals, the legal status of Parker Brothers' copyright and trademarks on the game was not settled until 1985. The game's name remains a registered trademark of Parker Brothers, as do its specific design elements; other elements of the game are still protected under copyright law. At the conclusion of the court case, the game's logo and graphic design elements became part of a larger Monopoly brand, licensed by Parker Brothers' parent companies onto a variety of items through the present day. Despite the "rediscovery" of the board game's early history in the 1970s and 1980s, and several books and journal articles on the subject, Hasbro (which became Parker Brothers' parent company) did not acknowledge any of the game's history prior to Charles Darrow's involvement on its official Monopoly website as recently as June 2012, nor did they acknowledge anyone other than Darrow in materials published or sponsored by them, at least as recently as 2009.
International tournaments, first held in the early 1970s, continue to the present, although no national tournaments or world championships have been held since 2015. Starting in 1985, a new generation of spin-off board games and card games appeared on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1989, the first of many video game and computer game editions was published. Since 1994, many official variants of the game, based on locations other than Atlantic City, New Jersey (the official setting for the North American version) or London, have been published by Hasbro or its licensees. In 2008, Hasbro permanently changed the color scheme and some of the gameplay of the standard US Edition of the game to match the UK Edition, although the US standard edition maintains the Atlantic City property names. Hasbro also modified the official logo to give the "Mr. Monopoly" character a 3-D computer-generated look, which has since been adopted by licensees USAopoly (The OP), Winning Moves and Winning Solutions. And Hasbro has also been including the Speed Die, introduced in 2006's Monopoly: The Mega Edition by Winning Moves Games, in versions produced directly by Hasbro (such as the 2009 Championship Edition)."Speed Die Edition" page at about.comMonopoly Standard Edition page at amazon.com
Game development 1903–1934
In 1903, Georgist Lizzie Magie applied for a patent on a game called The Landlord's Game with the object of showing that rents enriched property owners and caused tenants to be impoverished. She knew that some people would find it hard to understand the logic behind the idea and she thought that if the rent problem and the Georgist solution to it were put into the concrete form of a game, it might be easier to demonstrate. She was granted the patent for the game in January 1904. The Landlord's Game became one of the first board games to use a "continuous path", without clearly defined start and end spaces on its board. Another innovation in gameplay attributed to Magie is the concept of "ownership" of a place on a game board, such that something would happen to the second (or later) player to land on the same space, without the first player's piece still being present. A copy of Magie's game that she had left at the Georgist community of Arden, Delaware, and dating from 1903 to 1904, was presented for the PBS series History Detectives.Transcript of "Episode 2 2004 – Board Games, Arden, Delaware" . History Detectives. This copy featured property groups, organized by letters, later a major feature of Monopoly as published by Parker Brothers.Landlord's Game 1903 Arden Rules Analysis, by Thomas Forsyth
Although The Landlord's Game was patented, and some hand-made boards were made, it was not actually manufactured and published until 1906. Magie and two other Georgists established the Economic Game Company of New York, which began publishing her game. Magie submitted an edition published by the Economic Game Company to Parker Brothers around 1910, which George Parker declined to publish. In the UK, it was published in 1913 by the Newbie Game Company under the title Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit.Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit photographs on tt.tf via the Internet Archive. Shortly after the game's formal publication, Scott Nearing, a professor in what was then known as the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania, began using the game as a teaching tool in his classes. His students made their own boards, and taught the game to others. After Nearing was dismissed from the Wharton School, he began teaching at the University of Toledo. A former student of Nearing, Rexford Guy Tugwell, also taught The Landlord's Game at Wharton, and took it with him to Columbia University. Apart from commercial distribution, it spread by word of mouth and was played in slightly variant homemade versions over the years by Quakers, Georgists, university students (including students at Smith College, Princeton, and MIT), and others who became aware of it.
A shortened version of Magie's game, which eliminated the second round of play that used a Georgist concept of a single land value tax, had become common during the 1910s, and this variation on the game became known as Auction Monopoly.Ideafinder.com page on the history of Monopoly The auctioning part of the game came through a rule that auctioned any unowned property to all game players when it was first landed on."From Berks to Boardwalk" originally published in the Winter 1978 Historical Review of Berks County. This rule was later dropped by the Quakers, and in the current game of Monopoly an auction takes place only when an unowned property is not purchased outright by the player that first lands on it.Monopoly Instructions and Rules from 2007 (including the Speed Die) from Hasbro.com That same decade, the game became popular around the community of Reading, Pennsylvania. Another former student of Scott Nearing, Thomas Wilson, taught the game to his cousin, Charles Muhlenberg, around 1915–1916. The original patent on The Landlord's Game expired in 1921. By this time, the hand-made games became known simply as Monopoly. Charles Muhlenberg and his wife, Wilma, taught the game to Wilma's brothers, Louis and Ferdinand "Fred" Thun, in the early 1920s.
By 1906, Magie had moved back to Illinois, and married Albert W. Phillips in 1910. She moved to the Washington, D.C., area with her husband by 1923, and re-patented a revised version of The Landlord's Game in 1924 (under her married name, Elizabeth Magie Phillips). This version, unlike her first patent drawing, included named streets as part of the patent application (the games published in 1910 based on her first patent did have named streets, but they had not been mentioned in the 1903 application). Magie sought to regain control over the plethora of hand-made games. For her 1924 edition, a couple of streets on the board were named after Chicago streets and locations, notably "The Loop" and "Lake Shore Drive". This revision also included a special "monopoly" rule and card that allowed higher rents to be charged when all three railroads and utilities were owned, and included "chips" to indicate improvements on properties. Magie again approached Parker Brothers about her game, and George Parker again declined, calling the game "too political". Parker is, however, credited with urging Magie to take out her 1924 patent.
After the Thuns learned the game, they began teaching its rules to their fraternity brothers at Williams College around 1926. Daniel W. Layman, in turn, learned the game from the Thun brothers (who later tried to sell copies of the game commercially, but were advised by an attorney that they could not patent it, as they were not its inventors)."Louis & Fred Thun" , by Burton H. Wolfe, on adena.com Layman later returned to his hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, and began playing the game with friends there, ultimately producing hand-made versions of the board based on streets of that city. Layman then commercially produced and sold the game, starting in 1932, with a friend in Indianapolis, who owned a company called Electronic Laboratories. This game was sold under the name The Fascinating Game of Finance (later shortened to Finance). Layman soon sold his rights to the game, which was then licensed, produced and marketed by Knapp Electric. The published board featured four railroads (one per side), Chance and Community Chest cards and spaces, and properties grouped by symbol, rather than color.Passing Go: Early Monopoly, 1933–1937 by "Clarence B. Darwin" (pseudonym for David Sadowski), Folkopoly Press, River Forest, Illinois. Photograph on p. 197.First Edition of Finance, by Electronic Laboratories, Inc.Second Edition of Finance, by Knapp Electric, Inc. Also in 1932, one edition of The Landlord's Game was published by the Adgame Company with a new set of rules called Prosperity, also by Magie.Landlord's Game and Prosperity page.