exploiting my youth – Page 2

Never the same game twice

My last essay was a critique of nostalgia, and so to mix things up this post will be a discussion of something from my youth for which I have a great deal of affection, and that is Parker Brothers graphic design from the 1970s. This is admittedly a niche interest, even for me, but I hope you’ll be indulgent. Perhaps you, too, will come to love these beautiful and strange designs.

From around 1970 to 1980, the Salem, Massachusetts-based Parker Brothers (now a brand of Hasbro) published games whose innovative and fanciful designs drew inspiration from Pop Art, Op Art, and Madison Avenue advertising. They had boxes, boards, and components that reflected the most current techniques of printing and plastics molding. They were witty, silly, and weird. The other main players in American games at the time were Milton-Bradley, whose art tended towards cartoony, corny, and flat designs, and Ideal, whose games (like Mousetrap) were mostly showcases for their novel plastic components.

Parker Brothers design stood out for its style and sophistication, and even as a young nerd I could see that it was special. In fact, I believe they were my introduction, at the age of seven, to the whole concept of graphic design. This isn’t to say that the games were good in the sense of being fun or engaging to play; a lot of them were re-skinned versions of the basic race-around-the-board type that had been popular since the Uncle Wiggly Game. But they looked amazing and they were different.

There’s not a lot of sources of information about the company, but there is one very interesting book, The Game Makers : the Story of Parker Brothers from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit, which was written by Philip Orbanes in 2004 and published by Harvard Business School Press. From this book I learned that starting with its founding in 1883, Parker Brothers was a family owned operation, and its ethos was decidedly conservative. It produced child-friendly tabletop games that it purchased from independent creators, with little to no research and development and with a small factory that printed simple boards and boxes and made components from simple materials.

Along the way they picked up some major properties, like Monopoly and Cluedo, which was rebranded in America as Clue, but they didn’t develop these in-house and they didn’t really have a marketing strategy of any kind. But all that changed in 1968 when the company was sold to General Mills—yes, that General Mills, of Cheerios fame. After the departure of one president who wanted to cash out and retire, and the death of another who died of lung cancer, executive vice president Ranny Barton took the helm, and he immediately replaced the head of manufacturing and the head of sales. Orbanes writes:

In one fell swoop, Ranny Barton had changed Parker Brothers from a family-run, conservative operation to one now seeking high-flying M.B.A;s and marketing wizards in a quest to again double sales. Ranny […] would oversee a group of executives who were experts (165-166).

For the first time, the company had project leaders and marketing staff (largely on loan from General Mills). They brought in professionals in design, production, and printing. They bought a new state-of-the art press capable of much finer detail and vibrant colors, and they switched to making their components out of injection molded plastic. They were out to compete, and that meant to advertise on the new medium of television, and to be distinctive.

Okay, that’s more than enough backstory. Let’s look at some of the games from this time.

Waterworks (1972)

I remember coming across a used copy of this game at a school tag sale when I was in first grade. It looked like nothing else I’d ever seen. The cover art was sparse and focused on its photography. The text was set in Blippo, which seemed shockingly futuristic (it was actually designed in 1969). Most of all, the diegetic title on the manhole cover felt absolutely tangible. I splurged on the 30-cent purchase (my allowance at the time was a quarter).

Inside, the cards were wonderful, featuring detailed, photorealistic depictions of pipe fittings, handles, and spouts. They came in a draw/discard bathtub. And there were tiny brass monkey wrenches (perhaps using the existing Clue wrench molds). Everything was designed to be tactile and engaging.

Waterworks was designed by Mattiene Moustakas, although whether she designed the gameplay and components, or illustrated the cards, or both, is unclear. She certainly has a crazy resume. As for the play, a modern gamer will recognize it as a tile placing game such as Carcassonne; one chained one’s cards together to make a line from handle to spout, while playing pipe junctions and leaks on the opponent’s spread. It was…ok. It was certainly different from the card games I’d played, which were basically War and Solitaire¹.

The Inventors (1974)

I’ve mentioned before that the 1970s had a strange retro fad for “old-timey” things, by which I mean Americana from about 1890 to 1905. I am at a loss to explain this. It was a time of serious social problems, from race relations to stagflation. Perhaps there was a longing for a mythical past. The counterculture had drawn heavily on Art Nouveau in poster design, and maybe this trend was breaking into the wider culture. In any case, The Inventors was themed around patenting odd Victorian-looking inventions. The cover art was a highly staged studio shot with models in costumes with props. It featured many of the gadgets referenced in the game, as well as an inventor holding the game itself on his lap, and that kind of self-referentiality was catnip for me. (By the way, the text on the bottom right is in a typeface called Desdemona, which originated in Vienna and has always sounds drama club to me.)

The board features a pastiche of Victorian typography and day-glo colors. It features two different tracks to circle the board, but the filigrees and other ornamentation make it seem much more complex. There are handsome cards that feature descriptions of the various inventions to be patented. But the real star of the show is the centerpiece, “the incredible patent picker, move maker machine.”

This chunky bad boy held the metal clip-on numbers that were the game’s patents, and the “push-pull” dispenser never really worked because the invention cards would bend and fray when you stuck them in. But that didn’t matter, because the real attraction was the dice chute. You placed the dice into the hopper and hit a plunger and they would roll into the tub below, all while ringing a bell.

The Inventors was designed by Jeffrey Breslow, who was a student of Marvin Glass, a powerhouse designer that has created many of the most recognizable toys of the 20th century. Breslow, working with Glass, also designed Ants in the Pants. As for The Inventors’ gameplay: meh. It vaguely resembles Monopoly in that players attempt to succeed financially by developing their properties. But for the most part it’s circling the board in parallel to one’s opponents, with perishingly few actions that directly affect the other players.

The Magnificent Race (1975)

Another old-timey game, The Magnificent Race obviously takes inspiration from Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. The players must circumnavigate the globe using cars, ships, planes, and balloons. The gimmick of the game is a non-player-character (before there even were NPCs) called Dastardly Dan, represented by a purple marble, who can interfere in, and even win, the titular race.

The game’s board shares its typography, color palette, and even curvilinear forms with the Inventors’ board, and I’m pretty sure the same designer did both. One innovation to this board is the paths are not directional, and players may move their arrows in any direction. This may not seem like a particularly distinctive feature today, but it was unusual in 1975.

The components here pull out all the stops. There are big chunky arrows used as player markers, layout cards on which to place “advantages,” a pegboard to track overall progress around the world, and a spinner with colored marbles (including Dastardly Dan) that determines the winner of each of the series of small races that make up the game. Each player drops in a number of marbles based upon their advantages, the device is spun, and the first to drop into a divot near the center wins.

When everything is set up it’s pretty impressive. Fun fact: the groovy fake money for the game is printed on green and purple paper that isn’t shelf-stable. I know this because the bills in the copy I purchased for my kids many decades later crumble apart at the slightest touch.

The game was designed by Bill Cooke, who co-designed Boggle (also originally published by Parker Brothers). On his Facebook page Cooke has photos including the original schematic drawings for the spinner. But for me the real attraction is the scratchy, cartoony pen drawings, which recall some of the more elaborate designs of Milton Glaser. I would dearly love to know who the illustrator was for these.

As for the gameplay…this one’s a real let-down. All of the bells and whistles can’t hide that at its core it’s a random chase around the board. However, the spinner is a lot of fun, especially when the Dastardly Dan marble wins.

Bonkers (1978)

Or to refer to it by its full name as printed on the box, This Game is Bonkers. This was not a game my family owned but I played it at friends’ houses and it had an earworm-y television commercial that probably most Americans in their 50s can still sing today.

In the Bonkers graphic design Parker Brothers reached an apotheosis. For years they had been cribbing from the cheekier parts of Madison Avenue; here they went full-on Peter Max with shooting stars, lightning bolts, volumetric arrows, and exclamation points everywhere. The board starts pretty empty, but players fill in the spaces with U-shaped cards that change the flow of movement, directing tokens forwards and backwards and eventually into spaces that score or remove points.

The design couldn’t be more frenetic or bold. Unfortunately, the graphics promise a zanier time than the gameplay delivers. The mechanic of players altering the rules of the game as they go is a good one (see modern games like Fluxx), but that’s not really what’s happening here; instead, the normal clockwise race around the board is being lengthened by digressions. It’s still a fixed track. But man, does it look great.

Bonkers was designed by local boy Paul J. Gruen, who lived in West Newbury, just a half-hour drive from Parker Brothers. He also designed Pay Day (1972) for Parker Brothers, another game whose original graphics had pop art origins—in this case with illustrations resembling those of Heinz Edelmann, character designer for the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine (1968).

That’s enough

I could go on for hours, and it probably feels like I have already. There’s so many wonderful designs from this period: Vertigo (1970), Masterpiece (1970), 10-Four Good Buddy (1976), The Mad Magazine Game (1979). Even the original Boggle (1973) cover art is a crazy snapshot of a time of weird innovation: it didn’t actually feature the game².

As the 70s ended, Parker Brothers swung heavily into electronics with toys like Merlin (1978) and their own line of cartridges for the Atari 2600. And in 1985, General Mills merged the company with Kenner, then sold it to Tonka in 1987, before everything eventually got bought up by Hasbro in 1991. But for a brief time in the 70s, Parker Brothers was the one game company that was distinctive, brassy, different. The games themselves were hit-or-miss, but the design always landed.

As an aside, I learned the version of Solitaire I knew from my mom, which was a hard-as-nails version that I have never seen anyone else play, so I don’t even know what it would be called. Years later I would learn that most kids played Klondike, which I would scoff at as a baby game. ↩︎
Also it was set in Optima! ↩︎

We hear the playback and it seems so long ago

I suppose I should mention here that this is a comic essay and I am exaggerating for, you know, effect. I grew up in a podunk town in the middle of bupkis, so that no doubt is reflected here. If you had a cool 80s childhood that was different, then good for you.

These days the popular conception is that the 1980’s were all pink and aqua, but they were actually surprisingly brown if you lived through them. The success of Stranger Things (at least before its las season), the rise in retro synth-pop as practiced by artists like Chapell Roan, the popularity of $30 vinyl versions of albums one can stream for free, a revival of shoulder pads and denim jackets, the number of YouTube reaction videos for the Goonies—all of these point to an interest in the decade of Reagan and Thatcher that goes far beyond the nostalgia of aging Gen-Xers, and speaks to the generation of kids out there longing for a time before smart phones ruined everything. This amuses me because I am old enough to remember the 1980’s revival of the 1950’s, and even the 1970’s revival of the 1900’s, which was a pretty darn weird thing if you think of it.

Of course, when you look at the 80’s through rose-tinted (and leopard-print-framed) nostalgia glasses when you weren’t even yet alive in the 20th century, you are going to get things wrong, especially if you’re being lied to by Netflix. Correcting perceived misconceptions of the time of my youth—when nobody asked—is the most old-man thing ever, but I just turned 58, so here I go.

'OK, boomer': la frase edadista que triunfa en las redes — actually I’m Gen-X, but no one under 40 knows the difference

I. The music wasn’t that cool

I am grateful, really, that Netflix has popularized Kate Bush for the TikTok set, but the truth is back in the 1980’s no one outside of the UK was listening to her (except me, I was cool)¹. I remember playing my copy of Hounds of Love for my long-suffering high school girlfriend and her declaring the record “strange” and me “weird.”

These days, when a movie or tv show is set in the 1980s, the soundtracks are all songs by Echo and the Bunnymen, Elvis Costello, etc. Likewise, Spotify playlists and Sirius radio stations would have you believe the decade’s music was entirely New Wave. But in reality, fm radio playlists were 60% Michael Jackson, 30% Madonna, and the rest was made up of Hair Bands, Yacht Rock, and Pop Country (Kenny Rodgers was very hot around 1982). College radio stations might play Punk or New Wave, but only college kids listened to college radio. Rap was still being invented at the time but it was strictly segregated.

So when a television show or movie tries to play it cool with a Post Punk/New Wave soundtrack (and yes, I’m looking at you, Stranger Things) remember that we all want to think we were cooler kids than we really were².

II. Design wasn’t totally radical

If you think of the eighties look, you probably are imagining some combination of pink, purple, aqua, and neon (“Miami Style”) or of angular floating shapes and zigzags atop backgrounds made up of repeating patterns of dot, lines, and squiggles (“Memphis Style³“). Or maybe you’re thinking of a mixture of both⁴. And if one is to go by the VH1 series I ♥ the 80’s, your conception would be true. But the truth is these styles were entirely the domain of MTV bumpers and overpriced boutiques that sold earrings made from shards of broken CDs⁵.

In reality, most design in the 80s was inherited from the 70s, which means a lot of browns and yellows, denim and tee shirts. It was the design of strip malls, K-marts, and ranch houses—but not cool mid-century ranch houses, cheap 70’s ranch houses with a lot of lucite. It was the age of particle board and the plastic shopping bag and those little springy doorstops that got all bent and never worked.

III. Punks weren’t everywhere

I was going to write a bit here about how in the 1980s it was de rigueur for crowd scenes in movies to feature a punk rocker with eyeliner and an enormous hairspray mohawk, or even violent gangs of these exotic creatures robbing convenience stores and fighting zombies, but it turns out that somebody else already wrote that better than I would.

I will add that punk culture was definitely a thing, but as a movement it was a lot less flashy, and more insular, and largely kept to itself. My wife had a punk era in her teens and she’s super cool. Real punk culture was rich in vernacular style and a DIY ethos. But mainstream America found punks to be scary and local news stories blamed them for everything that was wrong in society, and so fake, threatening punks were everywhere in movies and tv.

Also, valley-speak was entirely made up for that one Frank Zappa song.

IV. It was something of a hellscape

Look, I’m nostalgic for my childhood just like everyone else. I love my original 1980 Rubik’s Cube for which I still the original Ideal⁶-branded plastic case. But the 80s were not a good time to be alive if you were a woman, or black, or queer, or any combination of those. It was the decade when the Hippies made way for the Yuppies, and we elected a senile, jelly bean eating, horoscope believing B-movie actor who ruined everything. The myth of the Welfare Queen upset the squares so much that they tore apart the intricate support systems that fed starving children. Even as the Cold War was winding down, the U.S. couldn’t keep its imperialist hands out of Central America. Also, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was an objectively awful cartoon.

This all may sound like a lot of complaints from a cranky old dude, but my motives are pure. I am a pathologically nostalgic person (just look at my tag cloud), but I am also aware of the toxic nature of nostalgia. As kids, my generation were brought up being told about the wondrous world of Boomer culture, of how everything was peace and love and drugs and sexual liberation and how each and every one of them had attended both Woodstock and Altamont. And how much the music today sucked, and how lazy and cynical the kids were. And I was determined that when I was older I would never let my own nostalgia cloud my memory, and I would not think that my childhood was more special and magical because I grew up when I did.

Now let me tell you why Talking Heads was the greatest band ever.

She was huge in the UK, which is one way they’re better than us. ↩︎
Except, of course, for me with my Laurie Anderson and my wife with her Smiths. ↩︎
Which originated in Milan, Italy, although it was named after Memphis, Tennessee, by way of a Bob Dylan song. Look, the 80s didn’t really make sense. ↩︎
It’s a free country. ↩︎
CDs were actually everywhere in the 80s. ↩︎
R.I.P. ↩︎

Roque & roll

In the summer of 1981 my family took a cross-country trip from our tiny college town of Eureka, Illinois to spend the summer Claremont, California, where we would live in a loaner house that was part of an affluent retirement community. My father was on sabbatical from his professorship and planned to spend a few months writing. I have many memories of this trip, but the three big ones were: 1) going to Disneyland, where I was able to experience Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and the 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea: Submarine Ride, both of which are now but memories; 2) the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is now a classic but at the time arrived seemingly out of nowhere with almost no promotion (Superman II was supposed to be the biggest movie that year); and 3) afternoons playing roque.

I remember the day my father first described the sport of roque to my mom, my brother Rob, and me over the dinner table. He said that a group of the retirees at the village were all hooked on a game that was sort of like pool, except instead of a table, it was played on a big hard court, and the players used mallets and hoops like croquet, but you hit your ball using a cueball, and also there was also a sort of a curb around the entire court, so that players could make bank shots, like the rails of a billiards table. I was confused but intrigued, and then my dad said that if we were interested, we were allowed to use the roque court when no one else was there—as long as we took part in its cleaning and upkeep.

The next day, Rob and I watched a game and it was fascinating. The court was only a short walk away in a central shared area of the community, surrounded by short palm trees. It was recessed into the ground and dog-eared at each corner, resembling an emerald gem cut. The surface was warm red clay, much like that of a clay tennis court, and it was dusty and got on the soles of the shoes of the elderly gentlemen who carefully and precisely lined up their shots. The mallets were short, compared to croquet mallets, and they had a soft rubber head on one side, for better control and possible spin on the cueball. The wickets were thick metal and were permanently anchored in place by cement below the clay. And boy howdy were the players serious. There was absolutely no talking when someone was taking his turn, and usually none after as well, unless to murmur approval for a good shot or to sympathetically click their tongues for a bad one.

My father had apparently petitioned the locals on Rob’s and my behalf—perhaps he realized we had little to do that summer on a daily basis—because a couple of the aged fellows took us aside and took us through the rules, which were mostly the same as croquet’s except when they weren’t. They showed us the proper way of holding the mallet straight up between the legs and making contact with the cueball. But most importantly, they showed us how to maintain the court. It had to be swept clean of debris (the California foliage produced stray leaves year-round). It had to be lightly sprinkled with water, to prevent cracking in the sun. When it inevitably did crack, there was a reserve of clay powder that was sifted into the fissure by hand and wetted. Finally there was a large metal roller, pushed like a lawn mower, that was used to keep everything level.

If the sport of roque is remembered at all today, it’s as a plot point in Steven King’s 1977 novel The Shining (but not in the Kubrick film adaptation of 1980). In the novel, the haunted Overlook Hotel features a roque court, and towards the start of the book the hotel’s owner, Stuart Ullman, describes the structure to Jack Torrance, the troubled author who has taken on a position as winter caretaker:

“It was Derwent who added the roque court I saw you admiring when you arrived.”

“Roque?”

“A British forebear of our croquet, Mr. Torrance. Croquet is bastardized roque. According to legend, Derwent learned the game from his social secretary and fell completely in love with it. Ours may be the finest roque court in America.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Jack said gravely. A roque court, a topiary full of hedge animals out front, what next? A life-sized Uncle Wiggily game behind the equipment shed?

Late in the novel, after he has been possessed by the malevolent spirit of the hotel, Jack uses a roque mallet to terrorize his wife and child, as well as to mutilate his own face (early King novels, am I right?). It’s remarkable that King went so out of his way to feature a forgotten sport and then get absolutely nothing right about its history. Roque is an American invention, developed in New York and named by Samuel Crosby in 1899; the name was derived by removing the first and last letters of “croquet.” Croquet itself was not a particularly old sport at the time. The earliest description of that game comes from 1856 in London, although it seems likely to have derived from previous vernacular sources. When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, the Queen of Heart’s croquet game, played with flamingo mallets and hedgehog balls, was a reflection of a recent craze for the invention.

Roque was something of an overnight sensation at the turn of the century. The innovations it brought to croquet greatly increased opportunities for skillful play, and the permanent courts, which required a significant investment of resources, made it into a serious sport for serious players. Competitive roque was played by two teams of two players and high-level play included the technique of hitting your ball into your partner’s ball, thus pushing the two balls along in tandem.

How big did roque get? It was a sport in the 1904 Olympics, replacing croquet, which was an event in 1900. The United States won all the medals, largely because roque wasn’t played outside of the country. In his 1954 novel Sweet Thursday, a sequel to Cannery Row, John Steinbeck spends a chapter describing how the town of Pacific Grove, California became torn apart by a rivalry between retiree players and fans of two opposing roque teams:

Once, during its history, Pacific Grove was in trouble, deep trouble. You see, when the town was founded many old people moved to the retreat, people you’d think didn’t have anything to retreat from. These old people became grumpy after a while and got to interfering in everything and causing trouble, until a philanthropist named Deems presented the town with two roque courts.

Roque is a complicated kind of croquet, with narrow wickets and short-handled mallets. You play off the sidelines, like billiards. Very complicated, it is. They say it develops character.

In the novel, Deems, the benefactor who paid for the courts regretted the rift they were causing and had them bulldozed in the dead of night right before a big tournament.

While I was researching the history of roque for this essay, I discovered that in its basic form it did not use a cueball, and that the version I had been taught was called “two-ball” roque. There was also, apparently, a version called “royal” roque, but what that entailed I can only imagine. In any case, roque’s popularity faded quickly after World War II. The American Roque League last published official rules in 1959 and the National Two Ball Roque Association last published its rules in 1961. In 2004 the American Roque and Croquet Association suspended its national roque tournaments.

A 2011 article in Croquet World Online Magazine details the construction of a contemporary court in Stuart, Florida. Its builder, Chris Bullock, remembered the game from having played it at Cape Cod in the 1950’s. The article say that Mr. Bullock and his friends play a new variant, “golf” roque, designed to be faster-playing. This article, now more than a decade old, is the most recent mention of play I could find, and I wonder if Bullock’s court sparked new interest or if it was the last of the dodos.

Whether or not there’s anyone left playing the game today, roque left a lasting impression in my mind, mostly for the memory of one ill-fated evening. It was late in my family’s stay in Claremont and Rob and I were a bit squirrelly with the realization that we were heading home soon after two and a half months. And we were going to miss roque. Generally we played in the late mornings because those were the only times that the courts were free. But that evening Rob and I decided we wanted to play late.

It had been raining that day, which of course is rare in southern California, and the court was a bit tacky, but we were determined to go through the upkeep routine, because that was in its own way as fun as playing. There was a sizable crack and I thought we should really fill that in as much as we could so we heaped on a few handfuls of the clay dust, but it wasn’t really settling in place, so we pulled out the hose and soaked the pile through. The court around the crack was already saturated and excess water from our repair attempt was puddling.

Now we had a sticky mound of clay that was noticeably higher than the rest of the court. So we did what seemed obvious—we pulled out the roller and set to work, running it back and forth as if we were making a pie crust. The mound was not getting smaller, so we took running starts; and then disaster struck: a layer of the court peeled off entirely, stuck to the roller, leaving a gash about two feet long, six inches wide, and maybe a quarter of an inch thick. The tacky clay had crumbled unevenly and the exposed surface was pockmarked and cratered.

We were horrified. We had been entrusted with the use and care of these men’s most prized possession, their passion in life, and we had ruined it. I was absolutely losing it while Rob was trying to figure out how we might fix things. The answer seemed to be more clay, and more rolling, but now nothing stuck at all. Any powder we put down just added the smear stuck to the roller, which would not scrape off. Darkness was falling, and we were supposed to return to the house. Eventually, we simply gave up. We replaced the roller and the hose and walked back in shame. We didn’t tell our parents, but we knew that the next day there would be a reckoning. I didn’t sleep well that night.

Late the next morning, Rob and I walked slowly out the back door and onto the path that lead to the scene of our crime. I played through scenarios in my head, mostly involving us having to somehow pay for the damage with a lien on any future wages, which were more than a decade off. I also imagined the sad retirees returning home to their wives and trying to hold back the tears. But instead, what greeted us was nothing of the sort. There were four old guys, lost deep in play at a forgotten sport. The court was immaculate. Nothing was ever said.