Parker, believing that strategy and amusement games could be enjoyed by adults as well as children, developed the classic games Monopoly, Flinch, Pit, Rook, Boggle, Risk, and Sorry. In , at the age of sixteen, George founded the George S. Parker Company to market his first game, Banking , a finance game that he had modified from a morality card game called Everlasting.
Most of his early games were designed to educate and entertain. His goal was to keep people informed about their times as they were entertained. Ives, one of the oldest manufacturers of games at the time.
By he had obtained the rights to the full Ives line. During this time he also launched his own game, Chivalry , which was later renamed Camelot. George was joined by his brother Charles in to create Parker Brothers, based in their hometown of Salem, Massachusetts.
Ten years later their older brother Edward would join the company as well. Parker Brothers would remain a family owned and managed business for another 80 years until In the s, Parker Brothers was one of the first American game companies to advertise in magazines. They also produced a catalog of their family parlor games in This catalog included a reissue of an Ives board game, the Mansion of Happiness , which was promoted as the first American board game.
The company continued to grow throughout the next several decades, producing such lasting games as Clue, Risk, and Sorry!. Even after George Parker's death, the company remained family-owned until , when General Mills purchased the company.
After this, Parker Brothers produced the first Nerf ball, and Nerf products soon became another major national hit. In the UK during the s, Parker Bros. The company began to produce electronic versions of their popular board games in the late s and early s. During the s, General Mills sold the company to Kenner, which was acquired by Tonka.
In , Parker Brothers was later bought by Hasbro. Monopoly Wiki Explore. Wiki Content. Variations The. Explore Wikis Community Central.
The Great Depression took its toll on the Salem-based company, and only the introduction of a real-estate selling game kept the company solvent. George Parker had first rejected this game as too complicated.
He quickly realized his error in judgment and introduced Monopoly to a game-loving American public. Purchased by Hasbro in , Parker Brothers continues to be an internationally recognized leader in games. A trio of bored teenage boys with nothing to do on a rainy summer afternoon hardly seemed likely to start a game empire, yet that is just what happened in the Parker family. Nineteenth-century board games were generally moralistic. America's first popular board game, The Mansion of Happiness , published in , was typical.
This virtue-versus-vice game had players race past spaces labeled "humility," "charity," and "generosity," hoping to avoid "cruelty," "whipping post," and "prison," to be the first to reach "heaven," in the center of the board. By the late s, changing definitions of personal success had begun to reflect the mores of the marketplace. Games were no longer won by the most pious players but by those who accumulated the most money or goods, as in The Game of Playing Department Store In the summer of , year-old George S.
Parker, the youngest of three brothers, modified an old card game to create Banking , a game in which players sought to amass the most wealth by winning "speculations. This first foray into the game business demonstrated several strengths that would ensure George's success as a game maker. He had a knack for writing clear, well-organized instructions. He boasted that his rules needed no editing 35 years after they were first written, and he was right.
George Parker was also a natural salesman; as he traveled throughout eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, he quickly sold out his initial inventory of games. Lastly, Parker had a knack for predicting trends and translating them into games.
In the spring of , year-old George Parker convinced his brother Charles to join him in a partnership. Charles added much-needed business sense to the company. The Parker brothers slowly expanded their offerings, publishing games presented to them by others.
In , Parker Brothers was the first game maker to advertise in newspapers, a practice that would make them a household name. Within three years, Parker Brothers reached two more milestones: they won a gold medal at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, and they established import-export agreements with several British game makers, becoming the the first American game company to enter the trans-Atlantic trade. When it was incorporated in , Parker Brothers was the second biggest game company in the United States.
Its first national hit came shortly thereafter with the British import, Ping-Pong. To play the indoor ball-bouncing game, players used small wooden paddles to hit hollow balls made out of the world's first plastic resin, a highly flammable substance, across a net stretched over a table. For "naughty fun," one could strike a match and hold it to the ball and watch the ball disappear in a flash.
During the first three decades of the twentieth century, Parker Brothers produced war games War in Cuba, Battle of Manila , travel games Touring , and jigsaw puzzles Pastime Puzzles.
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