On November 5, 1935, the firm of Parker Brothers began to sell Monopoly in the United States, after buying the rights from a man in Philadelphia who had brought a version of the game to the company, and it became the best selling commercial board game of the century. The first run sold out within weeks. The rules were simple. The game was a set of streets and railways and utilities that players bought and rented to one another, and the aim was to drive the others into debt and out of the game.
The idea behind it was older and was not meant for amusement. Elizabeth Magie, a reformer who followed the teaching of Henry George, had designed a game in 1904 to show that a system in which land is owned by a few lets those few collect the value that others create, and she hoped that players would see the injustice in it. The point was clear. A second set of rules in her game let players work together for a common gain, but that version was not the one that spread.
The game travelled among friends and families in the eastern states for thirty years, and players wrote their own versions with the names of their own streets, and by the early 1930s one of those versions reached Charles Darrow in Pennsylvania, who sold it as his own to Parker Brothers. The company later bought the rights from Magie as well. The timing helped. The game about making money and losing everything appeared in the middle of the Depression, and it sold in enormous numbers, and more than a billion copies have since been printed.
The game has been sold in more than a hundred countries and in dozens of languages, and the names of the streets change from place to place, and the tokens and the rules have been altered many times. The credit for it took decades to settle. Magie's name was left out of the story for a long time, and the company and the public gave it to Darrow, and her part in the design is now written into the record. The credit was late.