According to Hasbro, since Charles Darrow patented the game in 1935, approximately 750 million people have played the game, making it "the most played (commercial)
board game in the world." The 1999 Guinness Book of Records cited Hasbro's previous statistic of 500 million people having played Monopoly. Games Magazine has inducted Monopoly into its Hall of Fame. The mascot for the game is a monocle-wearing man, wearing morning dress, named Rich Uncle Pennybags (often referred to as Mr. Monopoly).Monopoly can be traced back to 1904, when a Quaker woman named Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips created a game through which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George (it was intended to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies). Her game, The Landlord's Game, was commercially published a few years later. Other interested game players redeveloped the game and some made their own sets. Lizzie herself patented a revised edition of the game in 1904, and similar games were published commercially. By the early 1930s, a board game named Monopoly was created much like the version of Monopoly sold by Parker Brothers and its parent companies throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st. The Parker Brothers' version was created by Charles Todd but sold to them by Charles Darrow. Several people, mostly in the U.S. Midwest and near the U.S. East Coast, contributed to the game's design and evolution.
By the 1970s, the game's early history had been lost (at least one historian has argued that it was purposely suppressed), and the idea that it had been created solely by Charles Darrow had become popular folklore. This was stated in the 1974 book The Monopoly Book: Strategy and Tactics of the World's Most Popular Game, by Maxine Brady, and even in the instructions of the game itself. As Professor Ralph Anspach fought Parker Brothers and its then parent company, General Mills, over the trademarks of the Monopoly board game, much of the early history of the game was "rediscovered".
Because of the lengthy court process, and appeals, the legal status of Parker Brothers' trademarks on the game was not settled until the mid-1980s. The game's name remains a registered trademark of Parker Brothers, as do its specific design elements. Parker Brothers' current corporate parent, Hasbro, again acknowledges only the role of Charles Darrow in the creation of the game. Anspach published a book about his research, called The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle (and republished as Monopolygate), in which he makes his case about the purposeful suppression of the game's early history and development.
This is the original version sold by Charles Darrow, and later by Parker Brothers. The board consists of forty spaces containing twenty-eight properties (twenty-two colored Streets, four Railroads, and two Utilities), three Chance spaces, three Community Chest spaces, a Luxury Tax space, an Income Tax space, and the four corner squares: GO, Jail, Free Parking, and Go to Jail. In the U.S. versions shown below, the properties are named after locations in (or near) Atlantic City, New Jersey. However, as of September 2008, the layout of the board has been modified to more closely match the foreign-released versions, as shown in the two board layouts below. The notable changes are the colors of Mediterranean and Baltic Avenues changing from purple to brown, and the adaptation of the flat $200 Income Tax (formerly the player's choice of 10% of their total holdings OR $200) and increased $100 Luxury Tax (upped from $75) amounts. Similar color/amount changes are used in the U.S. Edition of the "Here And Now: World Edition" game, and are also used in the most recent version of the McDonald's Monopoly promotion.
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