In the mid-1970’s Chris Haney was a photo editor with the Montreal Gazette newspaper. Scott Abbott was a sports journalist working for the Canadian press. The two met during the 1976 summer Olympics in Montreal.
Fast forward to 1979 and the two friends are sitting in a Montreal kitchen drinking beer and playing scrabble, a very popular word-based board game.
The story goes there were a few letters missing from the game, so they began to think of an alternative, and quickly came up with the basic idea for a new game based on historical events, and popular culture.
The date was December 15, 1979.
Attending a toy fair in Montreal, they gained further insight into development of their game of trivia.
After a few proposed names, they came up with Trivial Pursuit and trademarked the game in late 1981.
The two financed the game by selling shares at $1000 ea.
The first 1,100 games cost 75$ to make and sold for 15$, mostly by mail order, and a toy fair in New York they were stuck in the corner and they had few visitors.
A savvy PR campaigner however, gave the game to celebrities who later said they loved it. Free public games were also staged in parks and bars, and sales began to climb through word of mouth.
A manufacturer licenced the rights in 1988, and by 1984 estimated sales were 20 million copies.
Also that year, Time magazine declared Trivial Pursuit to be “the biggest phenomenon in game history.”
Haney later recalled: “We didn’t know we were successful until we saw a copy of Time and found ourselves on the cover. That’s when we knew we were in the big league.”
Major toy maker Hasbro bought the rights for $80 million in 2008.
Chris Haney twice had to defend the game against lawsuits. In one case a Nova Scotia hitchhiker claimed he had told Haney about his idea during a car trip and that Haney had stolen it, while in another case the author of triva books claimed Haney and Scott lifted their triva questions from his book. In both cases, the courts denied the claims.
Haney died in 2010 at age 59 after a long illness, and by then sales were at 100 million copies in 26 countries and 17 languages, with sales at about $1 billion since the game’s creation.
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