High school dropout and best pal create biggest phenomenon in board game history
Wind up as multi-millionaires and generate a whopping $1 billion in sales
Christopher Haney was born in Welland, Ontario, which is located near the beautiful region of Niagara Falls.
It only takes about an hour’s drive to get to the Falls.
Welland is also home to major water sporting events, hosting more than 20 every year including kayaking, canoe sprints, swim competitions and triathlons.
The area is also known for its education system, with 18 secondary schools and 79 elementary schools. In fact it boasts the largest school board in Canada and one of the largest in all of North America.
Unfortunately school is something Christopher Haney hated. He dropped out of high school at the age of 17. When I tell you that he hated school, I mean it too. He once confessed an in interview that he should have dropped out earlier … at the age of 12 instead.
Fortunately his father worked for a news agency, The Canadian Press, and got Christopher a job as a copy boy.
Working in the press is something he took a liking to because Christopher eventually worked his way up the ladder to head of the photo desk. Then in 1975, Christopher was assigned to the paper’s Montreal bureau to organize coverage of the 1976 Olympics.
When Christopher wasn’t in the newsroom, you’d find him hanging out with his best pal, Scott Abbott.
The two actually met while working for The Canadian Press. Scott was the bureau’s sports journalist.
Scott was born in Montreal and grew up in the suburb of Hudson Heights, Quebec. Like any good Canadian, Scott loved hockey and figured out a way to be a part of it by becoming a journalist.
In fact his first job was writing for the Sherbrooke Record, a small newspaper a hundred miles east of Montreal. And it’s here he covered the Sherbrooke Beavers of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. By 1971, Abbott had become the paper’s managing editor.
Now if there’s one thing Christopher and Scott liked to do whenever they got together was playing a really good game of Scrabble.
Mr. Butts Makes a Board
You can trace the origins of Scrabble back to the Great Depression. That’s when the game’s inventor, Alfred Moser Butts decided it was time to create a board game that was a combination of chance and skill.
Back then board games were popular. And they usually fell into three categories: (1) number games, such as dice and bingo, (2) move games, such as chess and checkers, and (3) word games, such as anagrams.
Now this was Mr. Butts first time developing a game. He was by trade an architect. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in architecture in 1924. And he worked for an architecture firm until 1930 when his position was eliminated.
He was one of many people that lost their jobs during the Great Depression. In fact according to Bureau of Labor Statistics roughly 12,830,000 people were out of work during that period.
With lots of time on his hands, Mr. Butts turned his attention to board games. He figured there were many people like him, who had time on their hands too. But also, he realized that the country might welcome something that was fun to do.
Initially Alfred named his game Lexiko, but then later changed it to Criss Cross Words. The game makers he originally contacted rejected his idea. His game might not have ever gained notoriety if had he not been persistent. Mr. Butts eventually found a buyer for his game …a Mr. James Brunot.
Mr. Brunot was a retired social worker who was looking for some kind of small business he could run in his free time. He also just happened to love board games.
So buying Mr. Butts’ game was just the right thing to do. However Mr. Brunot didn’t like Lexiko or Criss Cross Words as a name for the game. Nope, not at all.
In fact he made a few minor adjustments to the design and renamed the game Scrabble.
It was a huge success. In fact 150 million sets have been sold worldwide since the game hit the market in 1931. So it’s more than fair to say just about every person you know has played Scrabble.
But it’s also fair to say that if you play it all the time, you might get a little bored. And you might start thinking “Isn’t there something else we can do?”
And that’s exactly what Christopher and Scott were asking one another as they were getting ready to play a game of Scrabble.
Beer All The Details
It was on the evening of Dec. 15, 1979, Christopher and Scott decided to have a best-of-seven series to determine the best Scrabble player of all time. But they couldn’t find their Scrabble board, so they had to buy a new one.
It seems as if this was something that happened to them often because the two complained about how much money they’d spent on Scrabble games over the years.
And that’s when Christopher and Scott wondered aloud whether the two of them could invent a game as good as Scrabble … or one that was even better.
The two were at Christopher’s home in Montreal and on their first round of the game as well as their first beer.
Both men were tossing out a few ideas to one another, when Christopher suggested they make a quiz type of game based on odd facts and little known details.
In fact why not make the entire game be all about trivia. And then why not call the game Trivia Pursuit.
Well by the time Christopher was opening the refrigerator to fetch their second round of beers, the two had already mentally mapped out how the game would be played and its design.
The board itself would be based on a ship’s wheel with spokes leading to the center. There are six categories of trivia questions, each designated by a colored segment – arts and literature (brown), science and nature (green), entertainment (pink), geography (blue), history (yellow) and sports and leisure (orange).
Game participants would win a pie-shaped wedge that matched the color of that particular category when they got the correct answer. Whoever collects all six wedges is declared the winner.
Now since neither Christopher nor Scott knew anything about the board game industry, they decided it would be best to test out their concept at a toy fair.
Luckily Montreal was hosting a toy fair that same year. So both Christopher and Scott went to the show as a reporter-photographer team. They asked every game expert they met questions about marketing and selling board games.
By the time they left the show, the duo knew the steps involved in getting their game out into the market. In an interview, Christopher said that experience was like getting “$10,000 worth of information.”
All For One, One For All
Before they could actually make their game … that is manufacture a prototype game board, all the pieces, and print the cards, they needed the one thing most entrepreneurs want … money.
So they turned to family and friends, asking them to become investors in their new business. First, they brought in Christopher’s brother John, who in turn brought in a friend, who was a fellow hockey enthusiast.
Then they asked co-workers in their newsroom to join in.
In total, Christopher and Scott succeeded in raising over $40,000 from 32 different investors.
Now that they had secured financing, and before the board could be printed, it had to be designed. So the two turned to 18-year-old Michael Wurstlin and asked him to create the artwork for the board.
At the time Michael was unemployed and his benefits were about to run out. So he said yes with little hesitation.
Michael too became an investor in the new game business, buying five shares of the stock (what he could afford at the time).
Next up on the list of “to do’s,” was no doubt the hardest part … writing out all the questions. And it was Christopher who volunteered for this job. He worked several months in a row, working 16-hour days writing out one question after question.
But he loved every minute of it. He particularly enjoyed coming up with quirky questions such as: “What’s the largest diamond in the world?” Answer: “A baseball diamond.”
Created just for you Dear Reader, here’s a trivia question: How many questions did Christopher write?
The answer: He wrote 6,000 questions.
With everything now completed, including the printed boards and cards, and the wedges it was time to release their new game to the public, which they did in 1981.
First, they took it around to mom and pop shops and a few small chain stores. However only one chain store agreed to sell the game … Bowring’s in Toronto. But that was good enough for Christopher and Scott.
It was a start. So for the upcoming Christmas holiday, the duo put together 1,200 games. They sold out in three weeks.
With that success in their pockets, the two then traveled to a trade show in New York, where they met a wholesaler from Chicago who put in an order for 50,000 games.
But sadly it was a fast-lived success. By the time Christopher and Scott got back to Canada, the buyer had backed out of the deal.
While that was a blow to the entire team who was all in on for a big win, they didn’t give up. With a few more stores signing on, by May 1982, 20,000 games were sold. And they had managed to pick up a total of six accounts from places like Sacramento, Austin, Greensboro, and Florida.
A really cool thing happens when people who like playing the game you made start talking about it to others … word-of-mouth takes over and the next you know, you start selling more games.
It’s kind of like the 1980’s Faberge Organics Shampoo commercial, with model Heather Locklear saying how fast word-of-mouth was spreading about the shampoo, adding the line “and they told two people, then they told two people, and so on, and so on.”
And so it was with Trivia Pursuit. In 1983 the game took off. Their company was making a handsome profit. All the friends and family that had put money into the business were now getting a return.
And the success didn’t stop there either. In 1984 … just one year later they had racked up nearly $800 million in sales.
The Hall of Fame for Games
By the end of the 1980’s, Trivia Pursuit was outselling Monopoly, which had always made it on the list of best-selling games.
To say the game they created became a nation-wide craze is an understatement. The truth is, Christopher and Scott had unknowingly unleashed the biggest phenomenon in board game history.
Nothing like it existed. The game dominated the best-selling charts for board games throughout the 1980’s.
It sold over 150 million copies of the game in 26 countries, in 17 different languages, with sales topping out at $1 billion.
In December 1993, Trivial Pursuit was named to the "Games Hall of Fame" by Games magazine.
Of course it’s not enough to have one version of the game. You need lots of them. There are fifty special editions of Trivial Pursuit including:
Star Wars Classic Trilogy Collector’s Edition
Lord of the Rings Movie Trilogy Edition
The Rolling Stones Edition
Power Rangers 20th Anniversary Edition
Baby Boomer Edition
Trivial Pursuit Mini Pack: Hollywood Flicks
Trivial Pursuit: Country Music
You can even buy a luxurious edition of the game if you want to shell out anywhere from $6,000 up to $10,000. And for that price you get an inlaid calfskin board with luxuriously scalloped hand-inlaid plinth, embossed with silver or gold.
When asked about their unparalleled success, Chris said, “It’s like we became rock stars. People would shake in their boots when they meet us.”
Christopher had once said that he hoped to sell enough Trivia Pursuit games so that he could hop on a cruise ship and travel to Europe. He had a fear of flying.
He died on May 31, 2010, at the young age of 59.
With the money he made from Trivia Pursuit, Scott Abbott took his love for hockey to the next level … he bought the North Bay Battalion hockey team of the Ontario Hockey League. He was also inducted into the Brampton Sports Hall of Fame in 2005.
Awesome Quotes by Awesome People
“Always think outside the box and embrace opportunities that appear, wherever they might be.”— Lakshmi Mittal