Shopping centres are hot, Kimmage is not. At least that seems to be the evaluation of Monopoly's new Dublin edition, writes Shane Hegarty
Nobody has a monopoly on Monopoly. In 1933, an unemployed fellow by the name of Charles Darrow joined a couple of Quakers in a round of the "Landlord's Game". He enjoyed himself so much that he decided to steal the idea. Fifty years later, its manufacturers went to the US Supreme Court to stop the release of a game called Anti-Monopoly and lost. Because Darrow hadn't invented it, toy manufacturers Parker Bros hadn't actually bought an original idea. The game was up. Although they didn't have to go straight to jail.
Now you can get all sorts of variations on Monopoly, some licensed, most parodies and bootlegs. Fancy a game of Dogopoly or Catopoly? Or there's Spaceopoly, Medical Monopoly, Motownopoly, Birdopoly, Ghetto-opoly, Lighthouseopoly, Wine-opoly or Brewopoly ("A game for people who like to drink beer!").
Homonopolis is a version of the game that features gay bars in the streets of Amsterdam. There was, for a time, Clintonolopy ("The Great American Sell-Off!"). Meanwhile, Bibleopoly is one of the most popular Christian board games of all time. You can't win by destroying your opponents, but by helping other players - which is a little like playing Cluedo without having to solve a murder. According to the publicity: "It's all fun and games until someone is ordered to 'Go Meditate!'." They play nothing else in heaven.
Of course, there is always the original, classic Monopoly. Thirty-two houses. Twelve hotels. Twenty-two streets. Four railways. Two utilities. The aim is to buy up property and bankrupt your opponents. It is estimated that 500 million people have played the game, in 26 languages across 80 countries. The longest ever game lasted 1,680 hours. The longest played in a bathtub? Some 99 hours.
And yet, the classic game is no longer enough. Who cares that British toy retailers named it Game of the Century? That was last century. Modern kids take an askance glance at the cardboard, plastic and pewter of the set before settling back to a game of Death Car Sniper Chase on their Playstations.
So Monopoly now ticks along with a plethora of special editions. There has been Premier League Monopoly, in which, instead of Go To Jail cards, players had to "travel to Southampton for a relegation battle". There has been Batman Monopoly, Star Trek Monopoly, The Simpsons Monopoly, Thunderbirds Monopoly, Coronation Street Monopoly and the rather shameless Coca-Cola Monopoly. And this week, to mark the 70th anniversary of Monopoly, current owners Hasbro released a modern version for Dublin.
The Here and Now limited edition includes Luas and the Dart. It has replaced houses with apartments. Kimmage is gone, but Raheny and Clontarf now represent the northside. Jervis, Liffey Valley and Dundrum shopping centres are there, proving that this board game has an ability to represent the changes in both cityscapes and shopping habits.
In future versions, one fears, Irish editions will only contain shopping centres of various values. Go straight to Boots. Do not pass Starbucks.
In 2000, an "Ireland edition" did attempt to move away from the monopoly the capital had on Monopoly. It featured the Rock of Cashel and Aran Islands alongside less obvious tourist landmarks such as the Spar on Greenhills Road, Dublin.
THE GAME, THOUGH, inspired derivatives almost from inception. Its origins go back to 1904, when political activist and Quaker Lizzie Magie drew up The Landlord's Game as a way of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and disadvantage tenants. By the time the game reached the UK in 1913 - for some curious reason renamed Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit - the socio-economic ideals were already being lost to the competitive urge to ruin the opponent.
Having come across the game in Atlantic City, Charles Darrow brought the concept to Parker Bros, who turned it down after citing 52 "design errors" with the game, most notably that it had no obvious end. Unbowed, Darrow made and sold 5,000 copies himself; two years later Parker Bros realised the error of its ways and picked up on it. The company would later have to come to a financial settlement with Lizzie Magie as well as some of those who had devised local versions of the game, just as Darrow's opportunism would come back to haunt it in that 1983 court case.
THERE ARE A few stories behind the peculiar playing pieces of a boot, Scottie dog, racing car, battleship, top hat and flat iron. Company lore says they came from a charm bracelet worn by Darrow's sweetheart. It has also been suggested that they represent symbols of both wealth and poverty. In the original game, though, the battleship and cannon were there because Parker Bros had launched an unsuccessful war game that had left it with a lot of unwanted pieces.
Darrow became so rich he could afford to retire at only 46, and more than five billion green houses have been built since 1935. Some 300,000 games were sold in Britain in 1940, suggesting that long hours in air-raid shelters were filled with tussles over the ownership of King's Cross. Maps and compasses were even smuggled in through Monopoly games sent to second World War POW camps.
It proved less popular in communist states. Cuba, Hungary and the Soviet Union were among those that banned a game that might have started life as a cutting parody of capitalism but that eventually thrived because it rewarded greed.
Some economists have wondered if the socialist states weren't being a little precious; after all, as one put it, "Monopoly better illustrates how an economy works when it is based on intervention, central banking, and government privilege". Which only makes it sound more fun. The same writer griped that the game "seriously misrepresents how an actual market economy works". In Monopoly, property owners can demand rents from anyone who lands on their space. The fundamental notion of consumer choice is absent.
Mathematicians have studied the game in an attempt to explain why it is that you keep landing on one square more often than others. Elsewhere, a computer once calculated that orange squares were the most financially productive. Although it can't make that much of a difference if it took a computer to figure it out.
Meanwhile, Magie would be aghast at how her original notion has become so twisted in the century since. This game about money has occasionally been adapted in the most garish of fashions. A 1992 edition featured gold-plated hotels and silver-plated houses. The famous New York toyshop FAO Schwartz stocked a $100,000 "one-of-a-kind" Monopoly in which street names came embossed in gold leaf and rubies winked in the headlights of the car on the Free Parking space. And the money was real US currency.
THE MAKERS REDUCED the emphasis on filthy lucre a little when they recently renamed the game's moustachioed, top hat mascot. For six decades he was known as Rich Uncle Pennybags, but now goes by the moniker of Mr Monopoly. For Hasbro, however, the bottom line will prove increasingly important. It may make 1.5 million games a year at its Co Waterford plant but the company recently posted an unexpected quarterly loss, and lower board game and puzzle sales will pose a challenge in the future.
Nevertheless, there are some for whom Monopoly will always represent a high point in the art of the board game. Antonio Zafra Fernandez, a 36-year-old from Madrid, is the reigning world Monopoly champion. Last September he won a final against three players, including Irishman Anthony Redmond.
Held in Tokyo, there was some unhappiness with the interpreters employed to help opponents communicate. "It was hard to know who you were talking to," said Redmond. "Some interpreters thought they were playing." Anyway, Fernandez went for the orange squares first and eventually won $15,140 (€12,440). Maybe they paid him inMonopoly money.