A new memoir by Trivial Pursuit co-creator John Haney looks back at the inspiration, the unlikely road to massive global success and the local entrepreneurs who turned a simple quiz game into a global phenomenon.
It started with a game of Scrabble, a conversation around a kitchen table in Montreal and a suggestion that would eventually make three Canadians very wealthy.
On Dec. 15, 1979, Chris Haney returned from grocery shopping with yet another Scrabble set. His brother John Haney, who lives on a farm north of Toronto, recalls that Chris had bought at least six over the years, prompting him to remark that there must be a lot of money in board games.
His friend Scott Abbott, a sports writer for the Montreal Gazette who was boarding at the house, was sitting at the kitchen table. Chris made the historic suggestion that they invent their own game. Abbott agreed, and the two began sketching out an idea for a trivia-based board game.
Abbott drew a circle on a piece of paper, added a smaller circle inside it, then a central hub and six spokes. Sound familiar?
Shortly after, Chris called his brother John and asked if he wanted to join them.
“Trivial Pursuit was born,” John Haney recalls.
The early days of Trivial Pursuit were considerably less glamorous than the worldwide success that followed. For Haney, it was long working days, improvised research, questionable accommodations and plenty of laughs.
One particularly memorable period involved spending a winter in Nerja, Spain, with his brother Chris, writing questions and testing them on fellow beachgoers.
Back in Toronto, Haney, Chris and Abbott spent time assembling question cards around their “Superbrain” computer at the Ascot Inn, across from Woodbine Racetrack. One exhausting day ended with the three arguing.
“We shut down work after arguing over whether earth was a planet,” Haney recalls. “Google didn’t exist back then.”
Haney spent weeks at Toronto’s main reference library, while the team collected potential questions from newspapers, magazines, museums, libraries on both sides of the Atlantic and friends eager to contribute obscure facts.
Sometimes the inspiration came from the most unexpected places.
A Bacardi rum label prompted the question: What mammal appears on a bottle of Bacardi rum? The answer was a bat.
A trip down the grocery aisle produced another question: How many holes are there in a standard round Ritz cracker?
The answer: seven.
When it finally came time to release their trivial baby into the world, the original game was officially called Trivial Pursuit: Master Game – Genus Edition. The word “Master” was intended to suggest general knowledge, while “Genus” hinted that additional editions would follow.
The six categories came naturally from the board’s six spokes and corresponding spaces. The team simply needed six different identifiers to organize the questions.
But figuring out how players would score points took considerably longer.
Abbot came up with the distinctive round playing piece that mirrored the board. Its six wedges would represent correctly answered questions in each category.
The rest is history.
Creating the game was one challenge. Convincing retailers to sell it was another.
Haney remembers personally visiting stores and trying to persuade owners to stock Trivial Pursuit. It wasn’t easy, but the team persisted.
Haney remembers working with the team in a Niagara-on-the-Lake warehouse overlooking the mouth of the Niagara River. They assembled the games, packed them into boxes and loaded the finished products into an aging brown van for deliveries to Toronto twice a week.
It was a decidedly grassroots operation for a product that would eventually take over the world.
Although Trivial Pursuit was a success, one of the defining early moments for Haney was on April 9, 1984, when Johnny Carson hosted the Academy Awards.
During his opening monologue, Carson joked about fame and the irony that the previous year’s award winners might soon become trivia questions.
“Tonight’s winner is next year’s question in Trivial Pursuit,” Carson told the global TV audience.
The joke was a remarkable endorsement of the game’s reach.
What had begun as a conversation between friends in Montreal had become one of the biggest board-game success stories in history.
Haney wants readers to take away from his memoir is just how Canadian the Trivial Pursuit story really is.
“They will learn that Trivial Pursuit is as Canadian as maple syrup, beavers and the Toronto Maple Leafs not winning the Stanley Cup,” he says. “That it was born during the worst economic times since the Great Depression when money was tight, interest rates hovered around 20 per cent, inflation was rampant and unemployment high.”
Writing about the game’s origins, for Haney, celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit and the unpredictable journey that follows.
“And that when you come to a fork in the road, take it. A great idea is always worth a Trivial Pursuit, he adds.