THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (7 page)

Another early game influence eventually evolved into one of Sackson’s finest games, Acquire (made by 3M Co. in the firm’s Bookshelf Games line). A game of investment and corporate empire building, Acquire requires an absolute minimum of luck and a high degree of skill. Players try to build chains of hotels which, when merged, provide dividends toward their final financial postures. Sackson got the idea for it from the old game of Lotto.

“I bought Lotto when I was a kid, and found it rather dull. But I began to be fascinated by the numbers on the check sheet and started to form patterns with them. Later on, this notion suggested working up a war game with pieces growing as empires that engaged in battle when they touched one another on the board. Still later, I changed my mind and saw it as a business game, with the pieces representing hotel chains.”

Sackson’s excellent book,
A Gamut of Games,
published by Random House, has been succeeded by a regular column in
Strategy and Tactics,
a periodical devoted to war games. (His feature is the only one in the magazine not dedicated exclusively to military games.)

Sackson has found American game firms extremely fair and honest in their dealings with professional freelance inventors. “They may drive a hard bargain, but I have always found them extremely trustworthy. They have integrity,” he says.

“The trouble with this business is that so much depends on luck. You can send off the prototype of a new game to a company and have it bomb out. Had it been there a month sooner, or if it were submitted a month later, it might have been bought. The odds are not good, either. Parker may come out with half a dozen brand-new titles in a year, but they cull them from literally thousands of submissions.”

There is one ultimate advantage the professional has over the amateur: experience. Sackson says: “The more you do, the easier it becomes. Ten years ago, my first ideas were unplayable and I’d have to go through many steps of refinement. Nowadays, I’m able to run through all of the major alternatives in my head, so that a first draft of a new game idea of mine is always playable. From there on in, it’s a matter of fine tuning.”

Sackson’s approach to freelancing is cool and professional in tone. He is ever the thinker, a slightly bemused scholar whose love for his hobby has led him to study and analyze it exhaustively.

In great contrast to Sackson’s approach is the intense, positively Lugosian “mad genius” of Marvin Glass, a man who has no use for the term “play value” and refuses to study children to see what kinds of toys they prefer.

One might wonder how far a freelance designer can go with such unconventional attitudes. In Marvin Glass’s case, they were no hindrance at all. He is the most successful freelance toy inventor in America. The only by-lined designer in the industry, Glass heads a Chicago studio whose products account for a turnover of $125 to $150 million per year— approximately 5
percent
of all domestic retail toy sales. At Milton Bradley, for instance, about $17 million in sales was tallied in 1963. But by 1968, volume had risen to $45 million, of which about 25 percent was brought in by Marvin Glass products. At Schaper, the Glass toys helped sales increase by 30 percent, while at Ideal, Glass products resulted in a degree of growth comparable to that at Milton Bradley. Toy companies going public have often emphasized their connection with Glass’s studio in their investors’ prospectuses.

One might expect a designer as successful and influential as Glass to harbor warm feelings for the toy trade. He doesn’t. “The toy industry calls itself creative,” he has said. “It is not so. The designer must try to be creative in the face of overwhelming cliche's.”

Play value? Glass calls it a myth, a verbal crutch used by toy buyers who want to somehow justify their decisions when some plaything appeals to them. “It’s just an abstract concept that nobody has ever defined.”

As far as getting ideas from children is concerned, Glass is extremely skeptical. “I rarely derive anything useful from kids’ behavior. You can’t ask them what kind of toys they love. Chances are they will tell you what they think
you
want to hear.” Women designers? He rarely hires them; they are “too opinionated.” Toy designers? “It helps if a toy designer is emotionally retarded.” Most of his staff is over forty. “Youth has nothing to do with capacity or ability.”

Countless words have been written about Glass, attempting to classify him as a human being, a businessman, a prophet, and a devil’s advocate. He has been called a genius, an egomaniac, a philosopher, a hedonist, a giant, and a machine. One journalist told of Glass’s need to bury himself in work at least fourteen to sixteen hours a day. At home, he plays generous host while absenting himself to give advice to friends on the phone.

What is the driving force behind this fiercely independent idea man? No one knows. He has been married four times, twice to the same woman, and has been seeing an analyst for enough years to purchase a half interest in the practice. Formerly a psychologist, he is a voracious reader (five or six books a week), and has a collection of paintings and sculptures which includes Picasso and Chagall originals. His Evanston, Illinois, home (once featured in a
Playboy
photo spread) is a sybaritic Paradise, complete with swimming pools, grottoes, and saunas. He keeps two chefs (one just for Chinese cuisine), but eats very lightly. He goes through an average of three packs of cigarettes a day.

To some, this melange of habits, vices, insights, and opinionations may suggest the perfect Renaissance man. Certainly Glass lives in the material splendor of a latter-day Venetian prince. But there is more than a hint of joylessness behind this glittering facade.

Having reached the pinnacle of success in his field, Glass seems to be haunted by the same spiritual apathy that torments so many so-called successful men. Beset with doubts and regrets, Glass cannot see a Barbie Doll in the window of a toy store without getting a jealous twinge. If only
be
could have created it... Yet he belittles the industry itself: “What does it prove if I’m the foremost toy designer? I sometimes regret not being able to create skyscrapers or symphonies, things that people consider far more significant socially.”

While Glass complains, the rest of the toy industry reaps the fruits of his toil. The roster of Glass “hits” is long, including Odd Ogg, King Zor the dinosaur, Mister Machine, Yakkity Yak Teeth, Robot Commando, Kissy Doll, Mouse Trap, and many more. Many of his products are automated, with batteries enabling them to walk, talk, and otherwise perform.

Sporadic criticism has been leveled at him for making mechanized toys that turn the child into a spectator instead of a participant. He demurs: “I think a toy, like any other product, should be able to use any source of energy that is relevant to it. There are plenty of battery-run toys that require the child’s participation.”

Mouse Trap, by Ideal, is one of Glass’s greatest successes. A three-dimensional game placing elements of a toy into a competitive situation, it was the first of a new category of products variously called toy games, action games, and threedimensional games. The goal of Mouse Trap is to be the player with the last remaining mouse (game piece) on the board. In the process of play, a surrealistic monstrosity of a mouse trap is built, piece by piece. Mice that land in the danger spot are trapped and eliminated.

But the real appeal of the game is the intricate accuracy of the trap itself when triggered: first a player turns a crank which rotates a pair of brightly colored plastic gears. The gears snap a lever with a stop sign on the end, causing the sign to slap a shoe hanging from a lamppost. The shoe kicks a bucket poised at the top of a set of stairs. A metal ball rolls out of the bucket, down the stairs, and along a twisty rainpipe. At the end of the rainpipe is a pole with an upturned palm at the upper end. The ball joggles the pole and the hand pushes a bowling ball off a precarious perch; it drops into a bathtub with a hole in it, falls through the hole, and lands on a diving board, causing a diver to leap into the air and fall in a bucket. The bucket jounces a large cage at the top of a post, and the cage careens down on the unsuspecting mouse.

The quality control involved in making Mouse Trap is beyond belief.

“We opened in Pittsburgh with Mouse Trap,” said Herb Sand, a vice president at Ideal, sounding like the producer of a new play. “In marketing you can almost predict what will be a flop or a hit. But you never can predict a phenomenon. It took off a bit slowly in the initial market, but by the following Toy Fair, Mouse Trap was selling phenomenally. Since then, it has remained a popular game, and we are thinking of recycling it again soon with a new heavy TV ad campaign.”

Glass considers the complex futility implicit in Mouse Trap to be his comment on the depersonalization of modern society. Several of his ideas have evolved from his satiric turn of mind—like those oversize spectacles that novelty stores began selling a few years ago. “I got the idea for them from a talk with a scholar,” said Glass. “He was wearing glasses with heavy frames and the longer he spoke, and the more important the things he said, the bigger his glasses seemed to grow until they were covering his entire face.” Over four million pairs of Super-Specs have been sold.

Ideas like Super-Specs are so much the lifeblood of his business that Glass takes CIA-like precautions to prevent anyone from getting a glimpse of next year’s Christmas goods. The “fortress,” his Chicago headquarters, has no windows and is constantly patrolled by guards. Visitors are escorted up a staircase to Glass’s office, and no farther. Even the firm’s silent partner reputedly has never been allowed into the design shop. Closed-circuit TV cameras keep watch over every doorway, and triple locks secure all portals. The locks are changed periodically, and only three full sets of keys are ever maintained. Glass holds one set, while the owners of the other pair are unknown, even to each other.

In this cloak-and-dagger setting, Marvin Glass holds counsel with his staff (“an idea session without a lot of shouting is a bad one”), demanding of them the same combination of audacity and professionalism that produced the Glass classics. “It takes a creative individual to go for an innovative idea,” he believes. “There are few people like that. I think a good deal of my success has been that I broke the rules right at the start. Today, among my people, I try to foster the necessity of rule breaking in design. The world needs unconventional people.”

In the case of Marvin Glass, breaking rules has paid off. But the wall of inertia in the toy industry, as elsewhere, is no doubt as solid as ever, and “wild genius” remains suspect.

“Marvin Glass has a rare and singular talent,” one toy executive remarked. “He has to be left alone to dream his big dreams. But we can always bring them back down to the realm of practicality.”

It started by mistake in a New Haven laboratory, and turned into a bonanza by sheer chance on New York’s Fifth Avenue. There has never been a more accidental toy.

Maybe it had to be. Who could have sat down and deliberately designed a piece of pink goo that stretches like taffy, shatters when struck sharply with a hammer, picks up newsprint and photos in color, molds like clay, flows like molasses, and—when rolled into a ball—bounces like mad?

It’s the ultimate plaything: unstructured, nontoxic, fascinating to all ages, harmless to child and furniture alike, with more play value built into it by nature than countless re-search-and-development engineers have been able to pack into myriads of high-price toys.

The prodigy is Silly Putty, still as unique and popular today as it was almost twenty-five years ago, when it was accidentally developed in a General Electric research lab.

“There were a lot of little toy companies like us in the old days,” reminisced Peter Hodgson, the goateed president of Silly Putty. “We were all scramblers and could only afford to rent a small room to show our wares at the Toy Fair.” When Hodgson first introduced the stuff, many buyers tried to talk him out of selling it, predicting that the firm wouldn’t last a year. But twelve months later, at the next Toy Fair, the same buyers would walk back into the Silly Putty showroom and wonder that Hodgson and his crazy product were back for another season. Then they’d ask whether the toy was still being sold for only a dollar.

“Well,” grinned Hodgson, “it’s nearly a quarter of a century later, and we’re still around, and we still sell for only a buck ... so / think we’ve got hold of something good.”

The publisher of a leading toy trade publication laughs at Hodgson’s understatement. “Something good! Pete adores Silly Putty. He’s fascinated to death by it. Can you think of any other toy company that, after two decades, still makes only one item?”

Silly Putty did try to introduce a new toy a few seasons back. It was called “Moonshine” and it stretched like taffy, broke when struck, picked up newsprint, molded and flowed and bounced. The only difference between it and regular Silly Putty was that Moonshine was lunar green, rather than pink, had a slightly heavier consistency, and glowed in the dark. But after some unexciting preliminary test-marketing, Moonshine was discontinued.

Such conservatism of line development is unique in the American toy industry, where most companies create hordes of new items each year. Others will put almost anything in a box, but not Hodgson. Caution and conservatism are his watchwords when it comes to marketing Silly Putty and expanding the product line. “We may not be Mattel,” Hodgson explained, “but we do have our peace of mind.”

The firm could still become a multiline operation, but if that ever happens, it will be only after Hodgson conducts exhaustive marketing tests and utilizes other sophisticated procedures. He feels his first responsibility is to get Silly Putty into as many homes as he can; and even after all the years it’s been around, there is still room for new sales.

It is generally recognized that the moldable goo is unique in the way it works. While there have been numerous imitations, none of them has solved the technical bugs which Silly Putty engineers ironed out long ago.