Charles Darrow

It was first called The Landlord's Game and was meant to be a teaching tool about the evils of monopolies and unchecked greed.

In the 1930s, an unemployed heating engineer named Charles Darrow copied Lizzie's game, stripped the rules of all of its life lessons, and sold it to Parker Brothers as his own original creation.

Darrow became a multimillionaire, and even after the truth was discovered, Lizzie received a $500 payout and no royalties.

The irony escapes no one.

Hilton, for the stay.

And this man here is Charles Darrow.

He is the person who is today primarily credited with Monopoly.

You can see him proudly sitting over the Monopoly board here in this photo.

So it kind of like was a bit of a cult following I think and was quite popular but didn't really make her much money and didn't really go anywhere.

Then almost 30 years later in 1935 – Parker Brothers bought a very similar game called Monopoly from the then unemployed Charles Darrow, who had played a homemade version of Lizzie's game at a friend's house.

So he basically copied it and palmed it off as his own and created what we now know as Monopoly.

dog i know yeah and as far as i understand lizzie did try and fight it but i don't think she really got anywhere and it wasn't until like decades later that people now recognize her as the true inventor of monopoly

They take the Atlantic City copy to Philadelphia, where they live, and they keep playing the Atlantic City themed one.

They teach that to a man named Charles Todd, who then teaches it to a woman named Esther Darrow and her husband, Charles Darrow.

Now, all of that gets us to Charles Darrow.

We're about to lock in on this man.

Yeah.

Okay.

So,

Charles Darrow is a heater salesman living in Philadelphia, and he loses his sales job after the stock market crash of 1929.

Now tell me, we're going to talk about who really invented monopoly.

So if you go, if you go look at like the official official account from, from, you know, the company that owns it and stuff, they will say, and many others will say it was, uh, one Charles Darrow who invented monopoly and, uh, around 1933, the height of the great depression, he was basically broke and had no way of supporting his family.

He invents this game.

Within, I think it was like two years, it's selling like a couple million copies.

This is beginning to sound a lot like Monopoly.

Yeah, it is.

So now we're going to come back to Charles Darrow.

So we're fast forwarding to 1932.

They were indeed real people.

So specifically, the Parker brothers were George, Charles and Edward Parker.

They were born in Salem, Massachusetts, and it was George, the youngest, who was into games.

This was in 1883.

Players competed to see who could make the most money, which was a little different than all other games that lectured you about morals.

Anyway, George's family loved the game.

And after two publishers rejected it, his older brother, Charles, convinced George to just publish it himself.

And he did exactly that, spending $40 to make 500 copies.