Parker Brothers

• 1. Introduction

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  Parker Brothers published more than 1,800 games under its name between 1883 and 2009, a run that touched nearly every living room in America. The company gave the world Monopoly, Risk, Clue, Sorry!, Trivial Pursuit, and the Ouija board. Its founder, George Swinnerton Parker, was sixteen years old when he invented his first game. What drove a teenager in Salem, Massachusetts to stake $40 on a card game about banking? And how did that single stubborn bet eventually grow into one of the most recognizable names in the history of play?

• 2. A Teenager's Gamble

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  George S. Parker created Banking in 1883 at the age of sixteen, and the premise was simple: players borrow money from the bank and try to generate wealth by predicting how well they could do. The game includes 160 cards that foretell either failure or success. Family and friends took to it immediately, and his brother Charles urged him to put it into print.

  George approached two Boston publishers with the idea, but neither would take it on. Undeterred, he spent $40 of his own money to print 500 sets. He sold all but twelve copies and walked away with a $100 profit.

  That same year, he founded his company in Salem under the name the George S. Parker Company. His design philosophy set him apart from the standard thinking of the era: he believed games existed for enjoyment and had no obligation to teach morals or reinforce values. That break from the moralistic tradition of Victorian-era board games would shape everything Parker Brothers published for the next century.

  Charles joined the business in 1888, and the company took on the name Parker Brothers. A third brother, Edward H. Parker, joined in 1898. For many years George designed most of the games himself and personally wrote all the rules.

• 3. Games for the Moment

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  George Parker drew on the news of the day to inspire his titles. Klondike was built around the Klondike Gold Rush. War in Cuba arrived alongside the impending Spanish-American War. The company treated current events as raw material, and the practice gave its catalog a vitality that competitors could not easily copy.

  By 1906, Parker Brothers published Rook, and it became the best-selling game in the country. The company's reputation and its revenues kept growing through the early decades of the twentieth century.

  The Depression years tested every American business, but they also handed Parker Brothers its most consequential product. The company had rejected Monopoly in 1934. The following year, the company reversed that decision and published it anyway. Demand was so fierce that the company struggled to keep pace with orders. Risk and Sorry! followed in the decades after, each adding another title to a library that listeners might already have on a shelf at home.

• 4. Family No More

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  Parker Brothers remained a family-owned operation for decades after George Parker's death. That changed in 1968 when General Mills purchased the company.

  Under General Mills, Parker Brothers produced the first Nerf ball, moving the brand beyond cardboard and cardstock into the toy aisle. In the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the company sold rights to some of its games to Palitoy, also a General Mills company, which released titles including Escape from Colditz. In 1977, the company built its headquarters in Beverly, Massachusetts.

  In early 1983, Parker Brothers invested $15 million to establish a book publishing branch. The first titles featured American Greetings franchises: Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake. By February 1984, the branch had published twelve titles with combined sales of 3.5 million units. The company also operated a record label around the same period. One release, Cabbage Patch Dreams, was tied to Coleco's Cabbage Patch Kids and involved Tom and Stephen Chapin; it was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America in July 1984.

  In 1985, General Mills merged Parker Brothers with its subsidiary Kenner to form Kenner Parker Toys Inc. Tonka acquired that company in 1987, and in 1988 Parker Brothers reached a deal with Martindale/Gilden Productions to develop television game shows, including one based on Boggle.

• 5. Circuits and Cartridges

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  Parker Brothers released Merlin in 1978, an electronic handheld game that sold 700,000 units before Christmas of that year and reached $100 million in total sales in 1979. The numbers signaled that the company had a future in electronics as well as cardboard.

  The company also ventured into action figures. In 1979, it launched Rom the Space Knight, an electronic toy. The toy itself was a commercial failure, but the licensed comic book that Marvel Comics published based on the character ran for years after the toy was discontinued.

• 6. Puzzles and the Pastime Line

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  Parker Brothers entered the puzzle market in 1887 when it marketed its first jigsaw puzzle. The company's most celebrated puzzle line was Pastime, which produced hand-cut wooden puzzles from 1908 all the way through 1958. Parker also sold children's puzzles and maintained several other lines: Climax, Jig-A-Jig, Jig Wood, Jig-Saw Picture Puzzle, and Paramount.

  According to Anne D. Williams's book Jigsaw Puzzles: An Illustrated History and Price Guide, Parker Brothers closed the Pastime line in 1958. The company's die-cut puzzles were phased out entirely in the late 1970s, leaving the wooden hand-cut tradition behind just as the video game era was beginning.

• 7. The Hasbro Absorption

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  Tonka, along with Parker Brothers, was acquired by Hasbro in 1991 for roughly $516 million. Hasbro also owned the Milton Bradley Company at that point, which meant that two of the most storied names in American games now sat under the same corporate roof.

  After the deal closed, Parker Brothers kept its corporate offices in Beverly, but production of the games moved to Milton Bradley's headquarters in East Longmeadow. In 1998, Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley were consolidated at a new Hasbro Games campus built at the former address of Parker Brothers' Beverly headquarters.

  Both Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers continued as separate brands inside Hasbro for another decade. In 2009, Hasbro retired both names in favor of its own brand, replacing them with the Hasbro Gaming label. The Parker Brothers logo still appears on Monopoly boxes, a quiet trace of the company George Parker started with $40 and a card game about banking.