It was ultimately game design that would take her focus. Magie was looking for an effective way to espouse the virtues of Georgism. This was a time where women were credited with less than 1% of all patents filed. In fact, at the age of just 26, Maggie received a patent for an invention of her own design that eased the process of typewriting, something she was intimately familiar with due to her time as a stenographer in the early 1880s. Magie was somewhat of a jack of all trades, dipping her toes into all sorts of pastimes and professions, from poetry, comedy and theatre to engineering. Magie, who would spend the 1850s accompanying Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates around Illinois, Elizabeth was no stranger to progressive politics from an early age. Born to newspaper publisher and abolitionist James K. To start we’re going to have to go all the way back to 1903 - to when Monopoly was known by an entirely different name.Įlizabeth Magie was an American game designer, writer and inventor born in Illinois in 1866. So why is that? What’s so bad about Monopoly? Why does it harbor so much disdain? Well, it’s a complicated thing to explain. Despite its mainstream appeal, ask most big board game fans if they want to play a game of Monopoly and they’ll likely roll their eyes or grimace at the mere suggestion. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. If you say you’re into board games, it’s not unlikely someone will assume you spend your nights playing Monopoly with your mates. If you want an example of just how omnipresent it is, there’s even a McDonald's Monopoly promotion. And yet, to this day, Monopoly is still one of the largest board games in the world - available in 37 different languages in toy and book shops the world over. We’ve seen massive innovations in play and design across the industry, whole new genres lift their heads from the primordial soup and designs that would literally not have been possible at the time Monopoly was first published.īoard games, and everything related to them, are better now than they have ever been. Phillips eventually discovered what Darrow had done, but her contributions to Monopoly went largely unrecognized for many years.Tabletop games have come a long way since the 1930s when the Parker Brothers first unleashed the game of Monopoly onto the world. In an amazingly shameless move, Darrow repackaged the game as his own creation and sold it to Parker Brothers. The Landlord’s Game wasn’t a wide success by the time that Darrow played it at a friend’s home many years later. Many of the game’s signature elements were present on Phillips’ version of the board. It was originally called The Landlord’s Game in 1903, when Phillips came up with it as a way to educate the public about the tax theories of Henry George and the negative consequences of monopolies. In a recent episode of the YouTube series, Today I Found Out, the real story about Monopoly’s history was examined in great detail. Magie Phillips, who came up with the game three decades before Darrow stole it. The real creator of Monopoly was a woman named Elizabeth J. The game’s success made Darrow an incredibly wealth man, but that mythology was a lie. According to the game’s original lore, it was created by Charles Darrow in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Decades after its release, Monopoly is still one of the most popular games ever, and it’s been constantly updated in recent years. While the game itself is incredibly fun, very few people even think about the origins of Monopoly. There’s rarely been a board game as ubiquitous as Monopoly.
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