At the depths of a Montreal winter, in December 1979, very widely used board games were created by two Canadian newspapermen.
Senior high school dropout Chris Haney has been the photo editor of The Gazette. He dropped out of school at the age of 17 to have a copy boy job amidst the Canadian Press, the company where his dad worked. After his ultimate Trivial Pursuit fame and riches, he regrets his decision to drop out of school at the age of 17; Haney said he should’ve done it at 12.
The remaking of the board game Trivial Pursuit
In any case, Haney’s buddy, Scott Abbott, had been the sports editor for The Canadian Press. Based on the legend, after realizing that a few tiles out of the Scrabble match they were attempting to play over lunch were missing, the group chose to create a brand new game. Within a few hours, and after becoming further intoxicated, they had outlined the primary areas of Trivial Pursuit.
There is a gap between thinking up of an idea for an item and eventually getting it into promotion. The group attended the Montreal toy fair faking for a reporter and photographer doing a story on board games, to work out just how to fill the gap of ideating to marketing the product. There they interviewed certain people, including game makers to which Haney said was $10,000 worth of information.
Now with the knowledge of getting a game to market and just how to perfect it, they needed money. After becoming attached to some pyramid plot chain correspondence, this was a challenge initially due to the simple fact they were tagged as con artists. Yet they ultimately found thirty-two small investors (including Haney’s brother and another friend who further helped in the match development), raising a total of around $40,000 (approximately $100,000 today) from the procedure. However, he convinced his mother not to invest her money as he thought there is a chance she would lose her money, and the venture would neglect. He only hoped he would earn enough cash from the game to be able to travel to Europe.
Given economies of scale, the initial 1,000 or so copies of the game published after November 1981 cost far more to make ($75 each) than the price to buy ($15). Making things worse, the industry insiders were not overly enthusiastic about the match even after it was delivered to the market. Nevertheless, it gained popularity amongst them who purchased it and was a hit. By 1984, in actuality, only the next full year the match had been out that year, an astounding 20 million copies of this game were sold, and product sales of Pursuit had reached well over a half a billion dollars.
In the years since, the rights to the game have changed hands several times, with the game continuing to be quite well known and making every one of the initial 32 investors wealthy on the yearly royalties. Haney was ready to pay for that trip touring.
In the end
But it wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops for the matchmakers. With huge earnings and earnings, there will be activity. Nothing brings lawsuits such as someone becoming wealthy or creating a thing that’s a hit.
He’d have them dead to rights since he’d purposely inserted a fictitious piece of trivia into his publication for just such a goal. That little bit of trivia was comprised in Trivial Pursuit. Haney freely confessed he had borrowed pieces of info from Worth’s works. Unfortunately for Worth, even though Haney and Abbott had relied on his novel for a number of their questions, they also used other resources. Also, no matter, the facts (even made-up ones) in that book couldn’t be copyrighted, at least as per the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Another lawsuit was raised by a man who claimed that he devised the match explained it to Haney. The trial dragged on for a long time (1994-2007), however eventually, Haney and Abbott prevailed there too.