Chris Haney Lost Money on Every One of the First 1,100 Boxes. So Why Did Hasbro Pay $80 Million?

The first eleven hundred boxes of Trivial Pursuit lost money on every single copy. Each one cost about seventy-five dollars to manufacture and the trade would pay about fifteen, and the four men who owned the game had raised the money to make them by selling shares to thirty-two private investors, one cheque at a time. Three years later, in nineteen eighty-four, about twenty million copies were sold in a single year. Here is the ground we are going to cover, because the interesting part is not the game, it is what the four of them actually owned. How two journalists in Montreal came to be in that position in the first place. What a board game is as a financial object, which is a question with a surprisingly exact answer and a hundred years of case law behind it. Why they licensed the thing instead of selling it, and what the difference was worth. The two lawsuits, both of which turned on the question of whether anybody can own a fact. There is a new piece of Canadian financial history on this channel every day, and subscribing means the next one finds you. And then the number at the end, which is that in two thousand and eight the Hasbro corporation paid a reported eighty million United States dollars to buy the brand outright from a private Canadian company that had never built a factory, never run a warehouse, never employed a sales force and never, at any point, manufactured a game. That is the whole subject in one sentence. The four of them owned a format and a name, and nothing else, and the format and the name were the valuable part. Start with the afternoon, because the origin story is unusually well attested and unusually short. On the fifteenth of December, nineteen seventy-nine, in Montreal, two men sat down to play Scrabble and found that pieces were missing from the set. One of them was Chris Haney, a photo editor at the Montreal Gazette. The other was Scott Abbott, a sports writer for the Canadian Press. Rather than go and buy another Scrabble set, they decided to invent a game of their own, and by most accounts they had the design of it that same afternoon. The design is the thing to look at, because it is a piece of engineering rather than an inspiration. A circular track. Six coloured categories. A wedge awarded for a correct answer at six spokes on the wheel, and you cannot win until you hold all six. That structure does two things at once. It forces every player to answer questions in subjects they are bad at, which keeps the game competitive, and it makes the game last a predictable length of time. Both of those are commercial properties, not creative ones. Here is the payoff to hold on to, because everything in this episode runs through it. The pair did not get rich by making games. They got rich by owning the right to decide who made games, and taking a cut of every one that was made. That is a different business with a different balance sheet and a completely different set of risks, and it is the reason the ownership of the idea was litigated twice. This channel is in a race with our British, American and Australian sister channels to reach a thousand subscribers first. If you want Canada to win it, subscribe. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 Eleven Hundred Boxes 4:19 What a Classic Was Worth 6:54 Horn Abbot Limited 9:16 A Loss on Every Box 11:03 Licence, Not Sale 14:48 Unlimited Sequels 17:20 Everybody Copies It 20:26 What a Royalty Holder Does 22:48 Nobody Owns a Fact 27:41 The Hitchhiker 29:59 Eighty Million Dollars 32:25 The One Time Canada Kept It 🔎 IN THIS VIDEO NEW YORK ❓ QUICK ANSWERS • Eleven Hundred Boxes — The first eleven hundred boxes of Trivial Pursuit lost money on every single copy. • Horn Abbot Limited — What they did instead was form a company. • A Loss on Every Box — The figures that have come down, and that the founders themselves told afterwards, are that it cost something around seventy-five dollars… • Licence, Not Sale — This is the fork in the road, and the decision they took is the reason this episode exists. • Unlimited Sequels — The content was separable from the structure. The rules do not care what the questions are. • Everybody Copies It — The nineteen eighty-four boom did not go unnoticed by the rest of the toy trade, and because the game mechanism was not patentable in any… Canadian Wealth Architect tells the stories behind Canada’s money — the booms, the frauds and the fortunes that built the country. Subscribe:    / @thecanadianwealtharchitect   ▶ WATCH NEXT: Paul Reichmann Built Canary Wharf With Canadian Money. Why Did It Bankrupt Him? —    • Paul Reichmann Built Canary Wharf With Can...   🔗 MORE FROM US British Wealth Architect:    / @thebritishwealtharchitect   American Wealth Architect:    / @theamericanwealtharchitect   Australian Wealth Architect:    / @theaustralianwealtharchitect   🖼 Original illustration, including AI-assisted artwork. #History #Finance #Economics