Enjoying a monopoly of the games market

It’s been 80 years since Monopoly, the game that gave us the ‘Get out of jail card’, hit our shelves and players are showing no signs of getting bored with it, writes Jonathan deBurca Butler

Last week WSBTV in Atlanta, Georgia reported that 69-year-old John Litton turned up at the 7th annual Stone County Monopoly Tournament in Branson West, only to discover organisers had barred him due to inappropriate behaviour at the same event last year. On hearing of the organiser’s decision to give him the boot (or not to give him the boot) Litton turned nasty and a brawl ensued. At the end of it all Litton, if you haven’t already guessed it, had to ‘go to jail’.

The timing of Litton’s outburst could scarcely have been better. This week marks 80 years since Monopoly first appeared on our retail shelves and gradually etched itself into our global subconscious. Monopoly is the McDonald’s or Coca-Cola of board games. It has given us terms such as the ‘get out of jail card’ and ‘...didn’t even get past go’. It has divided and brought families together and who knows it may have even had an influence on global housing markets by perpetuating myths about desirable and undesirable neighbourhoods. During the Second World War, Monopoly boards and the game’s money were used to smuggle files and real cash into PoW camps, it was the first board game in space and when in 1972, the mayor of Atlantic City, the town the original game is based on, proposed changes to the name of some streets that appear on the board his voters told him where to go...and let’s just say it wasn’t jail.