The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle

From: xLibris Author: Ralph Anspach List Price: $23 ISBN: 0-7388-3139-5 Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 26, Summer 2001

Everybody loves an underdog. In the game industry, the underdog is anybody who goes up against Hasbro, the corporate protector of the Monopoly brand. When Ralph Anspach created a board game to illustrate the negative effects of corporate monopolies, he decided to market it under the most obvious, descriptive title— Anti-Monopoly. In doing so, he was cast in the role of David to Hasbro’s Goliath in a protracted court battle involving patents, trademarks, and the true history of the most popular board game in the United States. In The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle, Anspach tells the Anti-Monopoly story from the game’s inception through its many legal troubles.

The story begins with the genesis of Anti-Monopoly. Anspach describes the events leading to the game’s creation, then offers an illuminating account of the often mundane and overlooked issues facing a budding game creator— raising money, finding a printer, dealing with stockholders, generating publicity.

It’s a fascinating drama, but one soon overshadowed by the arrival of attorneys from Monopoly’s then-publisher Parker Brothers. Their demand: stop publishing any game using the trademark “Monopoly” in its name. That demand, and the corporate arrogance which rejected reasonable compromises, set Anspach on an investigative odyssey to track down the true history of Monopoly.

What he found was incontrovertible evidence debunking the official corporate line crediting Charles Darrow as the game’s inventor. Darrow, it turned out, made only minor modifications to a folk game popular in the Atlantic City Quaker community at the time. Parker Brothers, Anspach determined, knew of this and fraudulently promoted not only Darrow, but Darrow’s patent on the game— a game which rightly belonged in the public domain. This is the titular billion dollar “swindle.” By forcing competing versions of Monopoly off the market, Anspach claims Parker Brothers (and now Hasbro) has cheated the public out of a billion dollars in the form of higher prices paid for the game. But his logic on this point is flawed. Consumers were no more cheated than someone purchasing an item the day before it goes on sale. At the time he spent his money, the consumer was content with the purchase. Whether or not Monopoly might have been less expensive under different market conditions is irrelevant. A game is not like food, energy, or other necessities of life. Nobody was forced to purchase Monopoly.

This underscores the book’s greatest problem. Anspach is certainly not an impartial party, and this is not an unbiased journalistic account. The man has an obvious axe to grind. Legitimate though it may be, his story would be far more compelling were it told more even-handedly. Instead the reader is left wondering how much of the story is truth and how much is Anspach’s version of the truth.

The situation isn’t improved by Anspach’s writing style, in which conversations presented as fact have clearly been fictionalized. Anspach’s casual, folksy style may help draw in readers at the outset, but it fails him when it comes to dialogue. Real people don’t talk the way Anspach portrays them (and particularly himself), tossing off inappropriate and obviously canned witticisms like Oscar Wilde characters. The net effect is that as a reader I felt manipulated.

The story of Anti-Monopoly is fascinating on its own, and I wish the author exhibited greater confidence in the facts and less reliance on cheap theatrics. Despite these flaws, and Anspach’s ultimate hypocracy in letting Hasbro off the hook in exchange for his own financial survival, The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle offers a rare glimpse at how corporate giants manipulate the marketplace— and the truth— for their own ends.