#TRIVIAL PURSUIT BOARD GAME LICENSE#

Electronic Arts' attempt to bring the hugely popular board game to the home console definitely captures the essence of the original game, packing in a ton of head-scratching questions that will leave savants and scholars alike gasping at their unexpected ignorance.

There is something inherently satisfying about dropping knowledge bombs on a variety of arcane subjects, and Trivial Pursuit has long been the arbiter in matters of trivia superiority. The judge’s reasoning: You can’t steal trivia.It's hard to deny the joy in proving that you are the king of trivia. Haney had taken questions from his books, something Mr. He won another suit against an author who claimed that Mr. Haney fought and won a 13-year legal battle against a man who said he had given him the idea for Trivial Pursuit when Mr. He is survived by his second wife, Hiam Haney his sons, John and Thomas his daughter, Shelagh and a brother and a sister. Haney’s marriage to his first wife, Sarah, ended in divorce. Ownership then bounced from company to company, including Parker Brothers, until Hasbro bought the rights in 2008.

#TRIVIAL PURSUIT BOARD GAME LICENSE#

An estimated one in five American households bought the game, with Selchow & Righter, the makers of Parcheesi and Scrabble, owning the American license at the height of the game’s popularity in the mid-’80s. Then the game took off, racking up nearly $800 million in sales in 1984. Haney began to have panic attacks, he told The Globe and Mail.īut after a manufacturer was found and the game was released in Canada, word-of-mouth support began to build. But things did not immediately work out: buyers at toy fairs in Montreal and New York were cool to the concept. An unemployed artist helped with the design. Haney worked 16-hour days writing questions, by his account, provoking some investors to suggest that they were paying for his vacation. Haney’s mother was not among them, however: he had talked her out of investing for fear she would lose her money. They nonetheless succeeded in raising $40,000 from 32 investors. One problem, according to The Globe and Mail of Canada, was that people had heard they were “con artists.” As an example, the newspaper pointed to a chain letter the men had started that proved profitable for the originators but not to those down the line. But they needed more investors and turned to friends in their newsrooms. Haney’s brother John, who in turn brought in a friend, a fellow hockey enthusiast. Haney called “$10,000 worth of information.” They peppered game experts with questions and came away with what Mr. Their next step was to go to a Montreal toy fair and present themselves as a reporter-photographer team. Haney was opening the refrigerator to fetch their second beers, they were already mentally designing the board. Haney suggested a game based on trivia, they told The Hamilton Spectator in 1993. Haney’s home in Montreal and on their first beers when Mr.

Haney wondered aloud whether the two of them could invent a game as good.Ĭontrary to legend, they were neither in a tavern nor on their 18th round of beers. Abbott, who was then a sportswriter for The Canadian Press, were playing Scrabble. He later took over its photo desks in Ottawa and Montreal, then moved to The Montreal Gazette as a picture editor. His father worked for a news agency, The Canadian Press, and got him a job there as a copy boy. (The exact date is uncertain, but references agree on his age, 59.) He dropped out of high school at 17 and later said that he regretted it that he should have dropped out at 12. The Canadian Press, via Associated PressĬhristopher Haney was born in Welland, Ontario.

Trivial pursuit board game