WHAT’S THE STORY?

IT was 40 years ago tomorrow on Saturday, December 15, 1979, that two young Canadian men got very annoyed when they discovered during a game of Scrabble that they were missing some tiles.

Chris Haney and Scott Abbott reasoned they would have to buy a whole new Scrabble game just to replace the missing tiles, and they discussed how board game manufacturers just had to be rich because like them, people would have to buy a new Scrabble set every time they lost a few letters.

Except they didn’t buy a new Scrabble set. Instead they decided to invent their own board game, based on the quizzes they loved, and thus Trivial Pursuit was born.

WHO WERE THEY?

HANEY was born in Welland, Ontario, on August 9, 1950, and became the original high school dropout kid at the age of 17. His father was a journalist and he helped Haney get a job in the picture department of The Canadian Press news agency. Haney did well and was hired by the Montreal Gazette as a picture editor in 1975 to work on the Montreal Olympics the following year.

It was in the Quebec city that he met and became friends with Montreal-born Abbott, a graduate of the University of Tennessee’s renowned journalism course. By 1979, Abbott was working as a sportswriter, and sharing a house with Haney and his wife and children.

HOW DID THEY DEVELOP THE GAME?

HANEY asked Abbott what their board game should be about, and he said “trivia”. Over a few beers they quickly knocked up what became the basis of the game – the board, the six subjects, those annoying little wedges that are always getting lost ...

It was originally to be called Trivia Pursuit, but Haney’s then wife Sarah suggested they add an “l” to Trivia, and a phenomenon was born.

Things didn’t go smoothly at first. They managed to persuade Haney’s brother John and a lawyer friend Ed Werner to help them raise cash while an 18-year-old art student Michael Wurstlin designed the board in exchange for some shares in the company they formed – Horn Abbott, Horn being the nickname of John Haney.

Haney took on the job of composing the questions and they trademarked Trivial Pursuit in November, 1981. They raised enough cash to produce 1200 sets of the game – they sold out in three weeks and every one made a loss because it was costing three times as much to make each set as they were selling them for.

HOW DID IT TAKE OFF?

ABBOTT told many years later about their lucky break. They knew they were onto something, proven by orders coming in from the US, but they also knew they needed a partner in the games industry.

The daughter of the Canadian distributor for Scrabble went away for a weekend in a country cabin and someone brought along Trivial Pursuit. Her group spent the whole weekend playing it and she raved to her dad. Trivial Pursuit was promptly licensed to Selchow and Righter, the New York-based publisher of Scrabble.

With their marketing might, Trivial Pursuit took off and by 1984 its sales were rocketing in North America with Time magazine calling it the “the biggest phenomenon in game history.”

Worldwide interest developed, and in 1988 Parker Brothers bought the licensing rights, with Hasbro later buying them for

$80 million. Since then there have been dozens of versions of Trivial Pursuit as well as video game versions, television shows and an online version. It is estimated that its various owners have earned a cumulative total of more than $1 billion.

DIDN’T THEY STEAL THE IDEA?

THE duo faced two long-running court cases and won both. One was by an author of a book of trivia who claimed they had plagiarised his work, the court ruling there was no copyright on facts, while the other failed suit was by a man who said he had been hitchhiking and had been given a lift by Haney during which he told them his idea for a trivia board game – problem was the man could not prove he had ever met Haney.

IT’S PART OF GLOBAL CULTURE NOW, ISN’T IT?

TRIVIAL Pursuit is credited with sparking the worldwide craze for pub quizzes, and it has certainly made its mark on the public consciousness in many countries with nations such as Russia licensing their own versions.

It has many celebrity fans. The Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini once said: “God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.”

Ted Cruz, the runner-up to Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2016 once said: “Twenty years from now if there is some obscure Trivial Pursuit question, I am confident I will be the answer.

WHAT HAPPENED TO HANEY AND ABBOTT?

ABBOTT always told Haney they would stay rich if they didn’t do stupid things like buy racehorses. He duly bought himself a horse and it was very successful, leading him to establish his own stables. He bought an ice hockey team as well, and with Haney he established the prestigious Devil’s Pulpit golf complex in Ontario.

Haney’s ambition was to have enough money to travel to Europe by ship, and he eventually did so and took up residence in Marbella where he became friendly with his neighbour, a certain Sean Connery. He was once asked if he regretted dropping out of high school. “Yeah,” he replied, “I should have done it earlier.” After a long illness, Haney died in 2010, aged 59.