Hasbro’s iconic board game Monopoly is “passing GO” into its 90th year in the market, with more than half a billion purchases made around the world since its retail launch in 1935.

Philadelphia heater salesman Charles Darrow initially developed Monopoly in 1929 during the Great Depression. After losing his job and witnessing widespread financial hardship in his community, Darrow felt that he and his neighbors needed an aspirational escape from their day-to-day distress, and this ironically inspired him to create a game about making money, building houses and collecting rent.

Darrow constructed the first prototype of the game by repurposing his wife’s oilcloth table covering as the board, sketching out the real estate properties, whittling houses and hotels out of scraps of wood, and using charms from a bracelet belonging to his niece as gamepieces. But without realizing how deeply Monopoly would eventually penetrate the market (it currently has 99% brand awareness worldwide), now-defunct toyco Parker Brothers initially turned down Darrow’s pitch for the game, identifying more than 45 design flaws.

“People believe that Monopoly takes a long time to play today, but in its original form, it was even longer,” says Brian Baker, Hasbro’s SVP of board games. “[Parker Brothers] felt like a lot of work had to be done to speed up the gameplay, [such as] standardizing the property prices, game pieces and graphic design to make sure that Monopoly had mass-market appeal, and that people didn’t necessarily require experience in real estate or property trading to be able to play.”

Another roadblock cropped up when Darrow admitted—after Monopoly launched—that he had repurposed existing mechanics from other property-style games of the era, including Lizzie Magie’s The Landlord’s Game (1906). As a result, Parker Brothers had to pay an additional US$500 (approximately US$9,450 today) to acquire Magie’s 1924 game patent in order to avoid potentially harmful lawsuits.

Since acquiring Parker Brothers in 1991, Hasbro has produced a wealth of new Monopoly editions, including licensed versions featuring Pokémon, Nintendo, Dragon Ball, Harry Potter and Hello Kitty. The brand has also expanded to include life-sized escape-room activations and Scopely’s free-to-play Monopoly GO! mobile game, which has generated more than US$3 billion in revenue through ads and in-game purchases since it launched in April 2023.

The franchise’s next evolution is on the horizon as Hasbro Entertainment prepares to bring the legendary game to the big screen, with a live-action feature film in early development at Lionsgate and LuckyChap (Margot Robbie’s production banner).

This story originally appeared in Kidscreen’s Q2 2025 magazine issue.