Milton Bradley Comes Out Of The Closet

Absolutely the best part of any friend’s house in the 1960’s was the game closet. Television advertising must have been very effective because every family owned shelves filled with classic board games like Monopoly, Clue and Parchesi.

In the days before Atari, board games filled many an hour of our childhood. My friend Gary Costa and I often hoped for rain during the summer so we could stay inside, play games and drink Tang.

A rainy summer day in sixth grade might start with a game of Trouble. The game was slow but the Pop-O-Matic dice made it all worthwhile. Later we might move into a game of Life before heading to the basement to run the slot cars for a break.

Eventually we’d get bored and start rummaging deeper into the game closet. Most of the game boxes on the bottom of the pile had flattened out and spilled their pieces. Sorry pieces mixed with Monopoly hotels and caroms on the floor but at least we knew where to look if game parts were missing. Games at the bottom of the closet were either too easy or too hard but that didn’t stop us from pulling them out.

There was no shame in a game of Chutes and Ladders as long as out friends at school never found out. On the very bottom was Scrabble in that familiar dark brown box. I am convinced that our parents played Scrabble in the days before kids but hadn’t had a peaceful evening in the twelve years since. That explains why it worked its way to the bottom of the game closet stack – even lower than Candy Land.

It is naïve to think that board games were a product of the 60’s. The earliest games are 2,500 years old, according to the somewhat reliable Wikipedia. As for the classic games we played, many were golden oldies by the 1960’s. Those include Chutes and Ladders (1943), Candy Land (1949), Yahtzee (1956), Monopoly (1935), and Scrabble (1938).

The Game of Life has an especially long history. A lithographer named Milton Bradley created The Checkered Game of Life in 1861 as a new game to be played on a checker board. The company survived and 100 years later The New Game of Life was introduced (and endorsed by Art Linkletter).
Board game companies have fallen on hard times in these days of video games. Hasbro purchased Milton Bradley in 1984. The company, which was best known for Mr. Potato Head and GI Joe, also gobbled up Coleco, Tonka, Kenner and Parker Brothers in the 1990’s.
There is no research to back this up, but I would guess that most baby boomers have a game closet of their own. They probably scavenged games from their childhood or repurchased them in the hopes that their kids would find as much pleasure in playing them as they did. Eventually Nintendo and its competitors won the kids’ hearts and minds but those board games wait silently in the closet.

Our game closet fits the description. Classics like Life, Clue and Monopoly are stuffed under Mousetrap and various editions of Trivial Pursuit. Unlike most household toys, we can’t seem to let go of those childhood games so there they sit.

Maybe it’s time for the PS3 to power down and for Milton Bradley to come out of the closet.
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The Flipside - October 2008