The Milton Bradley company created some of the most famous board games ever.
But one very notable and famous board game escaped them. On November 2 1972, Milton Bradley company President James J. Shea gave a speech about the company's history. Here’s what he said about that event:
“Not that we’ve been infallible in picking winners all along the way. Back in the 1930’s an inventor brought us a real estate game that our executives turned down because it was too involved and difficult. Not only that, it took too long to play and it dealt with money which in the Depression years were a subject to be taken seriously indeed.
Well, after we turned it down, our chief competitor and friend Parker Brothers of Salem, Massachusetts, took it on and it became and still is the largest selling game in the world – “Monopoly.”
The full title of the patent was "Board Game Apparatus" Patent #2026082.
In 1966, the Milton Bradley company decided to market a more physically active game than a board game. Two game designers, Charles Foley and Neil Rabens, had an idea for a game that used human bodies as the playing pieces. It consisted simply of a large plastic mat with colored dots, and a spinner that selected a specific hand or foot. The inventors had been calling it “Pretzel”. It was changed to “Twister”. It was patented as Patent #3,454,279, Apparatus For Playing A Game Wherein The Players Constitute The Game Pieces.
Before its release, the MB executives reportedly said Twister would either be a huge hit or a failure so spectacular that the Milton Bradley company would be ridiculed for decades. They had the brilliant idea of having a product launch in Fort Lauderdale during Spring Break and had Twister Contests, which got television coverage. It was, as we know, a gigantic hit still popular today!
In 1960, The Milton Bradley Company announced that they would release a new version of “The Checkered Game of Life” to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first version, which helped launch the Milton Bradley Company.
The new version, called “The Game of Life,” was very successful but also heavily criticized. The original version, designed and patented by Milton Bradley himself, involved choosing paths determined by character traits and strategic choices to reach happy old age. The new version was more dependent on chance and was centered around the accumulation of wealth and property.
