The legendary family board game, Scrabble, has a legacy to rival a small European nation. At least 150 million sets have been produced in over 120 countries, with a catalogue of some 276,000 words. More than half of the UK's homes have it on their shelves, including the royal family.
Madonna and Keanu Reeves love it as much as Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton. A worldwide favorite among young and old alike, Scrabble is certainly one of the biggest names in the board game world. Why did everyone once think such a game was doomed to fail?
A man of letters
Alfred Bass
is the man responsible for rainy afternoons and otherwise pleasant family gatherings ruined by disagreements over whether "z" counted as a word.The story of Scrabble begins when the 32-year-old architect joined millions who had already lost their jobs in the Great Depression of '29.
Inspired by the success of Monopoly, Bats sat in his apartment in Queens, New York, pondering the board game market. He thought there were three types of games: movement games, number games like bingo, and word games, meaning only anagrams.
Bats[/B] was fond of chess, crosswords, and puzzles - the influence of all three is evident in Scrabble. He was also missing a crucial element: a board. As the game evolved, he added blank tiles and high-scoring squares. Then, he moved the starting point of the game from the edge of the board to the center.
With characteristic care, he recorded all this in a document entitled "Study of Games". The treasure trove includes a front page of the New York Herald, one of the newspapers he used to estimate the frequency with which each letter of the alphabet appears. So he decided how many tiles and how many points each letter would have.
The tipping point
His guinea pig was his wife Nina, who, was his teacher growing up. It was her fault that Bats was so bad at spelling. She always beat him at his own game, with the word "quixotic", scoring nearly 300 points in a single round. Soon, he was gathering friends and neighbors, but the game was briefly just a local hit.
By mid-1934, he had sold just 84 handmade sets at a loss of $20. Every major toy manufacturer rejected it, and his patent application met the same fate. Eventually, the economy recovered and Butch was able to resume his old job at the architectural firm.
The story might have ended there if it weren't for James Bruno. When he retired from his day job in 1948,[/B] he approached Bats offering to build and sell the game.[/B] He also came up with the name Scrabble, filing a successful copyright application that same year.
But success was still four years away. By then Bruno, like Butch before him, was losing money by producing a few dozen sets each week. In 1952, the president of Macy's department store happened to see a Srabble game in progress while vacationing in Florida. The store was soon selling 6,000 sets a week.
Seventy years later, it is still being played by children to professionals in competitions. You can meet it from inside a prison to Buckingham Palace. As for Butch, he received $265,000 in 1972 when Selchow & Righter, which had rejected the game years earlier, bought out Bruno for $1.3 million.
Butch gave away a third of all his royalty income and had enough to buy the farmhouse in upstate New York. He stayed there until the end of his life in 1993, at the age of 93. In his late seventies, he created "Alfred's Other Game."
Source.gr (*Written by Vassilina Ristani)
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