TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/83/83capliv.1

Text File | 1990-10-09 | 5KB | 94 lines

October 24, 1983

Let's Get Trivial

The hottest board game in America has all the answers


Question:  When is the pursuit of trivia not trivial?  Answer:  When a
gang of three Canadians converts this curious hankering after the
piffling and the piddling into the hottest game in town.  The game in
question is called Trivial Pursuit, and for more and more people
across the U.S. and Canada the game offers not just the pursuit of
happiness but happiness achieved.

Retail sales in the U.S. and Canada, where the game was invented and
launched in 1982, may reach $70 million by the end of this year.  Says
Hudson Dobson, who distributed the game out of Dallas for U.S.
manufacturer Selchow & Righter:  "I have been in this business 30
years, and Trivial Pursuit is the biggest individual game I have ever
had.  It defies everything we've had before."  F.A.O. Schwartz Manager
Walter Reid predicts that the game will be "a long-term fad, not like
Rubik's Cube, which wore off after nine months."

T.P. doesn't beep, bleep, buzz or zap.  It is played on a simple 20 in
by 20 in multicolored board with a wheel-shaped pattern.  Any number
from two to 24 players ask each other questions drawn from 1,000
cards; a correct answer allows the player to move.  Hardly Dragons
Lair but with a price tag as high as $46 in the U.S., it is
indisputably a Boardwalk of board games.

As in all trivia contests, the questions make the game.  There are
6,000 of them, witty, whimsical, wry and, sometimes, off the wall.
Sample:  Who played for the New York Rangers, the Brooklyn Dodgers and
the New York Knicks in a single season?  (Organist Gladys Gooding.)
Who was Bram Stoker's most infamous character?  (Dracula.)  What's the
only country crossed by both the equator and the tropic of Capricorn?
(Brazil.)  What's a newly hatched swan called?  (A cygnet.)  Who
portrayed Tonto on TV? (Jay Silverheels.)

The questions com from six categories:  geography, history , art and
literature, science and nature, entertainment, sports and leisure.  In
addition to the original game, there is now a Silver Screen edition of
movie lore.  Two versions now available in Canada, a Sports edition
and one full of the esoterica beloved by the baby-boom generation will
soon be released in the U.S.

The game took shape on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Montreal in 1979
when two Canadian journalists, Chris Haney and Scott Abbott challenged
each of the other to a game of scrabble.  Then, Haney recalls a light
bulb went on over his head:  "Why don't we invent a game?"  Less than
an hour later they had designed the basic structure.  Devising the
questions, however, took much obsessive poring over almanacs,
encyclopedias and old newspapers.  After nearly two years of research,
the group which included Haney's brother John a retired hockey player,
settled on 6,000 queries.

How to get backing was the hardest question of all.  After scrounging
a tidy bankroll for manufacture, the partners test-marketed 1,100
units in 1981.  All were sold within a few weeks.  Another loan from a
bank manager who got hooked on the game enabled the entrepreneurs to
produce 20,000 more.  Word of mouth did the rest.  The game acquired a
cult following in Canada, and in 1982 Selchchow & Righter, the
venerable U.S. game company (Parcheesi), began manufacturing it in the
U.S.  British and Australia versions are imminent, and next year
French, German, Dutch, and children's renditions will follow.

The game appeal is far less obscure than most of the questions.  It
derives from the pleasure of playing against people armed not with joy
sticks but with arsenals of minutiae.  Notes John Nason, vice
president of marketing at Selchow & Righter:  "The pendulum's swinging
back from the video games.  With a video game you sit alone in a
corner.  Playing a board game there is interaction--moaning, groaning,
laughter."

No region of the country seems immune from that interaction.  In North
Miami, Ira and Ruth Gordon coax their friends to shuffle through their
memories.  Says Ruth Gordon:  "Every couple we've ever invited over to
play the game has bought it the next day."  Nancy Spencer a devotee of
the game from Clifton, Va., claims, "It's better than charades, and
that's hard to beat."  She adds, "It's only frustrating when the kids
know more than you do."  In Hollywood, where game playing is sometimes
the most exigent art form, Trivial Pursuit and its cousin Silver
Screen are monster hits.  During the filming of The Big Chill, the
entire cast became addicted to the game, playing it night and day.
Says Footloose Producer Craig Zadan, "There's not a person in the
entertainment business who hasn't heard of the game, played it or been
hooked by it."

Question:  What Chinese parlor game swept America in the 1920s?
Answer: Mah-Jongg.  Question:  Will Trivial Pursuit sweep America in
the 1980s?  The correct answer has not yet been written by the public.
But the early returns are encouraging.  For the final answer buy the
1990 version.  By then the game will have become an American classic--
or just a trivial footnote.