The story behind the board games...

In 1974, Ralph Anspach, a San Francisco State University economics professor, invented Anti-Monopoly®, a game in which players break up big business monopolies. After having his game turned down by all the established game companies, Anspach set up a family-size company, published the game on his own, and it became an instant best seller.

Now it so happened that Parker Brothers, which owns Monopoly®, had been swallowed up by General Mills, the 57th biggest corporation in the nation. The king of breakfast foods almost lost its Wheaties® when it observed the success of Anti-Monopoly.  It informed Anti-Monopoly that it had exclusive rights to the dictionary word monopoly and any title remotely close to it, including its opposite, the dictionary word "anti-monopoly." General Mills went on rather bluntly that if we didn't take our game off the market at once, it would crush us. And they were serious. For example, they had already stopped Catholic laymen from marketing a game called Theopoly and a famous black comedian, Geoffrey Chambers, from marketing Black Monopoly.

But Anti-Monopoly did not cave in. A bitter legal war ensued which lasted for a decade. Anti-Monopoly's resolve hardened when Anspach discovered that the people who were accusing Anti-Monopoly of a far-fetched infringement of their rights were themselves profiting from the theft of the Monopoly game from its inventors and the public domain.. Nevertheless, a federal district judge, Spencer Williams, ruled for Monopoly twice and banned Anti-Monopoly from the market for six of those ten years. He also authorized General Mills to bury 40,000 Anti-Monopoly games in a Minnesota garbage dump.

But Anti-Monopoly won two appeals, and ultimately beat Monopoly at the United States Supreme Court level. The courts also validated Anspach's position on the history of Monopoly. They dumped the official corporate story that Darrow had invented Monopoly in 1932 which meant that the Monopoly business empire had been based on a fraudulent invention patent. They accepted Anspach's detective work which revealed that Monopoly had been played for many years as a folk game named monopoly,

and that its Atlantic City version had simply been copied by the impostor inventor. Anspach calculated that this scam has already cost the consumer more than a billion dollars.

Liberated by the courts, Anti-Monopoly re-entered the market successfully in 1984 with an entirely new game, also called Anti-Monopoly. It was a new patented invention by Anspach, an upgrade of Monopoly with an anti-monopolistic theme. But then, another business giant Hasbro, bought out most of the competition, including the game of Monopoly. Not surprisingly, the sales of ANTI-MONOPOLY plummeted -- though it is being reproduced and due on the shelves soon.

After finding out from an industry insider that the sales meltdown was largely due to Hasbro's monopoly power, Anti-Monopoly filed that doomed antitrust suit against Hasbro. The judge threw out the case for supposed lack of sufficient evidence to persuade a hypothetical jury to rule against Hasbro. (Click on Jury Deprivation.)

Ironically, this happened a few weeks before the Federal Trade Commission nailed Toys 'R Us for illegal monopolistic conduct. The judgment cited a corporate policy under which Toys 'R US protected Hasbro from competition from manufacturers while Hasbro protected Toys 'R US from competition in the retail sector. Economists call this "dual oligopoly" but it comes down to I scratch your back and you scratch mine. To top it off, the Federal Trade Commission had based its ruling on a fraction of the evidence we had presented in court. So Anti-Monopoly was forced to fight back once again.

This time we are building on the knowledge about the history of Monopoly we had gained in the law suit in which we had prevailed. We are opening up a second front right in the heart of the commercial Monopoly empire with our The Original monopoly game. But how does a monopoly game fit into our anti-monopoly approach? Perfectly. It turns out that the monopoly game was invented by anti-monopolists as a light-hearted roast of the greedy conduct of monopolists..... a game in which the bad guys win.

- - Dr. Ralph Anspach, 1999