THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (6 page)

Unlike Bingo, Ed Lowe’s second million-dollar baby did not start out promisingly. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the unforced generosity of its originators, Yahtzee might never have gotten off the ground.

Though its roots reach back many centuries, the peculiar play combinations of Yahtzee are highly original. Another gambling game, it employs a set of five dice and a cup. Players have a group of dice combinations printed on cards, and they must try to throw them all in a given number of tosses of the cubes. As each throw is taken, the player must cross off one of the combinations on his score pad, or at least eliminate a low-scoring one if he has not been lucky on the toss. As the game progresses, there are fewer and fewer combinations left to try for.

Initially popular as a men’s game—probably because of the gambling mystique of dice—Yahtzee went on to fascinate women’s clubs. In San Antonio, for instance, a group of women play Yahtzee weekly in a local laundromat. In Chicago, a large body of Yahtzee buffs hold regular matches which culminate in annual playoffs. There is also a vigorous cult of campus Yahtzee-ites.

Lowe contends that, with many international licenses granted, Yahtzee is probably the largest-selling game in the world (a statement that Parker Brothers might well contest). But Lowe’s estimate cannot be too far wrong for more than forty million Yahtzee sets have been sold in fifteen years and the craze is not yet over.

Yahtzee began modestly enough. A wealthy Canadian couple whose name Lowe cannot recall used to tie up their yacht each winter in Bermuda and invite guests aboard for entertainment. The pair thought up a gambling game for their own use and the enjoyment of their guests and called it the Yacht Game, since that was where it was usually played. The score pads and other equipment used in the game were hand-made. But the couple couldn’t seem to make enough of them, because they liked to give Yacht Games to each of their shipboard guests as going-away presents. One day the woman came to the headquarters of E. S. Lowe Co., Inc., and asked the firm to custom-make one thousand of the games for her to use as gifts.

“The request was brought to my attention,” said Lowe, “and I saw that the game looked rather promising. I asked the woman if she would consider permitting my company to make the Yacht Game commercially, and she said, ‘By all means.’ She was delighted.”

It looked as if Lady Luck was grinning again in Ed Lowe’s direction. But he didn’t know how broad the smile was going to be.

Lowe asked her how much money she and her husband wanted to let his firm have the rights to the game. Her answer astounded him: she didn’t want a penny for it. Lowe took her up on the generous offer, and ordered the thousand games printed at no charge to her.

Once the game went into production, Lowe considered the name carefully, and finally replaced “the Yacht Game” with “Yahtzee,” as a more humorous-sounding title.

But if Lowe anticipated another overnight success like Bingo, he was in for a disappointment. Running a big ad with the Los Angeles May Co. department store, Lowe personally supervised the initial promotion of the game. Only two games were sold.

Lowe still believed in Yahtzee and kept it in the catalog for three years. The company spent close to a million dollars producing and promoting it, but nothing happened.

By 1956 Lowe was just about to throw in the towel and forget about the game, when he noticed that a small number of requests were trickling in for additional Yahtzee score pads. It wasn’t very promising, but it made him think that maybe—only maybe—there was a market for Yahtzee that had not yet been tapped. He decided to mount one last promotional effort, this time relying chiefly on word of mouth to drum up interest.

“We sent our salesmen to the top toy and game buyers and asked them to do us a personal favor and hold Yahtzee parties
in their own homes.
It was a little unorthodox, but we said we would pay for the refreshments and supply the games. We also arranged to find a company representative for each party. He would set up four or five bridge tables and organize the evening’s play. The highest winner at each table would get to take home the game.”

Lowe called the process “seeding.” He figured that if just five sets were awarded in Beverly Hills, for instance, then the firm would be assured of a steady acceleration in that area, and eventually in neighboring towns, when friends of friends discovered the game from the original party participants.

Soon after each party was held, area stores began to get calls for Yahtzee sets, and the game began to grow increasingly popular. Yahtzee’s success pattern seems to lend credence to the old saw that everyone is related to everyone else—if not by blood, then by friendship.

“I believe in games as cementers of family and neighborly ties,” Lowe stated. “Years ago, adults rarely played a game unless it was bridge or chess or checkers. But nowadays, games seem to be important in almost every home. Some say that TV contributed to the decline of social amenities in America, but I don’t see it that way. In the early days, when the medium was a real novelty, people would drop in on people they knew fortunate enough to own a set. They’d watch anything, even the test patterns. People began to spruce up their homes for visiting neighbors and friends. When the novelty began to wear thin, conversation started to replace some of the shows that weren’t watched. And inevitably, games grew tremendously important as modes of giving cohesion to social evenings and also as a way of including the younger people.” Today, according to Lowe, the game market is broader than it ever was, and is popular with all ages, sexes, and classes.

Not all game makers agree with Lowe’s position. “Certainly,” a competitor remarked, “games are bigger than they ever were, but that doesn’t mean that everyone plays or owns games. Games have always been more popular among a relatively narrow class of fairly sophisticated consumers. A wide spectrum of games simply does not sell well in lower-income areas. Also, many people do not like games because they cannot tolerate losing.”

In this context, it is easy to see why a game like Bingo or Yahtzee might have a unique advantage. There is comparatively little disappointment involved in losing a game of pure chance, and there’s always the possibility that luck may turn on the next round.

Though there is some skill involved in playing Yahtzee, nothing governs the outcome of Bingo but blind chance. The number caller’s indifferent voice, favoring no one, weaves a hypnotic spell over players, who do not battle one another, but rather court the favors of Lady Luck, that fickle dame whom Edwin Lowe charmed twice.

More than 90 percent of all the suggestions for new toys and games received each year by American manufacturers are submitted by amateurs—housewives, retired mechanics, insurance brokers, teachers, musicians, mailmen, bartenders, bakers, sometimes even children. But 95 percent of the new playthings actually made are created by professional designers.

One of the reasons behind this statistic is that most amateurs simply don’t know the market they are trying to enter. A Parker Brothers booklet states, “People are always reinventing games that have been standard for decades, or even for centuries. They are perfectly sincere, of course, convinced that they have found something new and wonderful, but all too often their ‘creation’ turns out to be another basic game of which . . . [we have] already published a half a dozen variations.”

Amateurs are up against some pretty stiff competition. Staff R & D—research and development—personnel are the creative backbone of the larger companies; Mattel alone boasts over four hundred designers. In addition to these full-time idea men, there are professional freelancers who, though few in number, are extremely important to toymakers of every type and size.

Independent inventors often work up their own toys from scratch, but more frequently operate in close liaison with their principal accounts, contracting for, say, “a new kind of plastic toy” in much the same way that a building contractor draws up original plans for an undefined new edifice.

How does the professional freelancer differ from the amateur? It’s mostly a matter of inspiration. Amateurs wait for it, but professionals chase it.

“Inventors are traditionally shown waiting for a light bulb to go on above their heads,” said a West Coast toy designer. “But if a freelancer sat around waiting for his muse to inspire him, he’d probably die of starvation!”

In order to sit down to dinner regularly, professional toy inventors conduct “brainstorming” sessions, keeping as many projects in the air as their time and talent will allow. The busiest idea men even cross industry boundaries and try their notions out in other commercial fields.

A. Eddy Goldfarb, for instance, has created myriads of toys, among them an early classic, the Busy Biddee Chicken, a famous action toy that laid eggs (i.e., marbles). A few years ago, when a TV network decided to broadcast a comedy about the toy business, Goldfarb was enlisted as technical adviser. As part of the job, he created several playthings expressly for the show.

Another designer, Reuben Klamer, was commissioned to create all the hardware (weaponry, gadgets, etc.) used in the
Man from U.N.C.L.E.
TV series.

Independent designers are an interesting, sometimes flamboyant breed. Working from apartments, lofts, professional suites—whatever quarters they can afford—they provide a steady flow of day-to-day inspiration for toymakers throughout the country.

Judy Shackelford of Alton, Illinois, started designing toys in her early twenties. Finding herself dissatisfied with her job as an art teacher in Queens, New York, she teamed up with another art teacher named Nancy Cherry to open a toy-making workshop in a Manhattan brownstone.

“Those early days were pretty rough,” Miss Shackelford recalls. “We used to tell our dates not to send flowers, but to give us groceries instead.”

The first important toy sold by the team was Secret Sue, a doll with accessories and a tie-in clothing line. Other commissions came later, and the firm got onto more solid footing. Eventually, Nancy Cherry got married and Judy Shackelford took over the business, taking in another partner, Phyllis Gates. Creating a variety of toys and games over the next few years, the pair branched out into the housewares field with a subsidiary, Inflat-A Industries, which produces shower curtains with pockets and plastic forms for keeping boots standing up in closets.

The fact that Judy Shackelford and both her partners are extremely attractive has not hurt the business in the least. When Cherry & Shackelford Creations Inc. was first formed, several magazine articles documented its progress, and Johnny Carson even invited the pair to talk about toy inventing on his show.

But looks go just so far in the business world, and ultimately it was the team’s no-nonsense approach to design and production ideas that ensured success. “I have to know just what materials and production methods can and can’t accomplish,” Miss Shackelford says. “I must be familiar with tariff schedules and shipping costs. And when I send an idea out to an account, I have to follow through and push it along to get a decision soon. Otherwise I don’t eat.”

But, to their chagrin, the blond designer and her partner find they are most in demand in the area of girls’ toys, although they firmly believe that toys should not cater to sexual stereotypes. “There is a real discrimination against little girls in the toy industry. Women’s libbers are right on target when they say that girls’ toys force the child into stringent role-playing. But I’d say we need men’s lib just as badly. It’s a great crime the way our culture says little boys can’t cuddle dolls.”

In the future. Miss Shackelford hopes to design toys that will help break down some of the artificial barriers imposed upon American children. But whether the industry will be willing to support such products remains to be seen. Like all freelancers, Judy Shackelford is aware that the first order of business is often just to do business.

Sid Sackson is equally aware of the need to be practical. For several years a civil engineer moonlighting as a game creator, he retired a few seasons back to devote all of his time to the invention of games. “It hasn’t been easy on the family,” he said. “When an interest changes from a hobby to a necessity, a little of the fun goes out of it. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to my old career. This is what I want to do.”

Sackson is a game fanatic. The last time he and his wife, Bernice, traveled overseas, Sid embarked on an orgy of game buying. Everywhere they went, Sid found a new game and bought it. Finally he couldn’t fit them all in his suitcases, so he discarded the individual boxes, lumped the components into neat packets, and kept the instructions.

When U.S. Customs opened up his luggage and found all those dice, cards, spinners, and counters, they were sure he was up to something. “I guess they thought I was smuggling contraband into the country,” Sackson remarked. “It took us a long time to get clearance to reenter.”

Sackson’s house is a veritable museum of historic games. Along the walls are piled boxes and boxes of American and foreign games, as well as books of game data in eight different languages from every period of history. Where space will not permit keeping a game intact, Sackson simply maintains a record of the necessary pieces and stacks boards on a lower shelf. He believes his collection is the largest private game library in the world.

“I started collecting about thirty years ago as a hobby, but now the pastime has turned into full-time freelancing and my game library serves as my market research. I own more than a thousand games in some kind of original form, and keep the rules and file-card descriptions of tens of thousands of others in my file cabinet.”

Sackson began his love affair with games as a youngster during the Depression. Living a kind of gypsy existence as his father traveled from state to state seeking work, the lonely boy developed an early interest in solitaire games. “I remember in first grade, the teacher used to hand us the pages of a magazine, and we were supposed to draw circles around the words that we recognized,” he says. “I was far more interested in joining up the circles in such a way that they could form a chain from one side of the page to the other.”