Charles Darrow - Commercial Sales

Commercial Sales

By 1934, Darrow started having the game printed on cardboard, and sold copies in long white boxes to Wanamaker's Department Store in Philadelphia. Later that year, Darrow showed his game first to Milton Bradley and later to Parker Brothers. The latter company rejected the game for three (not 52 as is popularly believed) "fundamental errors", which included the game's length and complexity.

Darrow reinvested money from the sales into smaller sets, sold in black cardboard boxes, with boards sold separately from the sets. After Darrow started to take orders from other Philadelphia department stores, Parker Brothers reconsidered.

Parker Brothers negotiated the rights from Darrow to produce the game in large scale. Darrow sought and received U.S. Patent 2,026,082 on the game in 1935, which Parker Brothers acquired. Within a year, 20,000 sets of the game were being produced every week. Monopoly ended up being the best-selling board game in America that year, and it made Darrow the first millionaire game designer in history.

Darrow was later promoted as the sole inventor of the game, though later research has shown that Magie, Jesse Raiford, Ruth Hoskins, Louis and Ferdinand Thun, and Daniel Layman, among others, were collectively responsible for virtually all of game's significant elements. Despite this, current owners Hasbro list only Charles Darrow by name on their official website.

A posed photograph of Charles B. Darrow and a credit to him appear on the Parker Brothers Stock Exchange game Bulls and Bears copyrighted in 1936.