It becomes obvious that there is a murderer on the loose in the house, and the player must discover who it is or become the next victim.Īt the end of the 1970s, Ken Williams sought to set up a company for enterprise software for the market-dominating Apple II computer. However, dead bodies (of the other people) begin appearing. Initially, the player has to search the house in order to find a hidden cache of jewels. Green, a surgeon Joe, a grave-digger Bill, a butcher and Daisy, a cook. The mansion contains many interesting rooms and seven other people: Tom, a plumber Sam, a mechanic Sally, a seamstress Dr. The player is soon locked inside the house with no other option than to explore. In return, he received 5,000 pounds.The game starts near an abandoned Victorian mansion. In 1953, Clue’s creator sold the foreign rights to the game to Waddington’s after the game manufacturer told him that it was not selling well. (Some estimates top 150 million.) “It’s still a steady seller.”īut despite Clue’s enduring success-it earned its spot in the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2017-neither Anthony Pratt nor his family reaped a significant financial reward. “You might get away with saying it’s the fourth- or fifth-most-popular game,” after Chess, Checkers, Monopoly and Scrabble, Ricketts said-though figures vary and manufacturers are loath to disclose the total number of units sold. And the game’s simplicity makes it broadly appealing to adults as well as children. Game curator Ricketts says Agatha Christie’s bestselling mystery novels, which came out around the same time as Clue, likely boosted the game’s appeal. TV spinoffs include a “Simpsons” version, which features a poisoned donut as a weapon, and a “Golden Girls” version, in which the suspect did not commit murder, but ate the last piece of cheesecake. Film-related riffs include a Star Wars Clue, with a three-dimensional game board, and an Alfred Hitchcock version that allows players to assume the roles of characters from The Birds or Psycho. In addition to inspiring a 1985 film, a touring musical, and a handful of game shows, Clue has spawned dozens of international editions and numerous pop-culture spinoff versions. Orchid has a fancier career-she’s a working scientist with a Ph.D.-but she comes with a sinister background, having been expelled from her Swiss boarding school after a (dun dun dun!) near-fatal daffodil-poisoning incident. Orchid, the adopted daughter of the mansion’s owner. White, replacing her with the more accomplished Dr. In 2016, Hasbro’s Clue killed off the housekeeper Mrs. One of the most significant changes to Clue in the last 70 years, says Ricketts, came with the introduction of a rare new character. The mansion, meanwhile, got a spa and home theater. In 2008, suspects received updated 21st-century identities among them, Colonel Mustard the military man became Jack Mustard the soccer star, and Professor Plum the archaeologist became Victor Plum, a smartypants billionaire video-game-designer. Versions sold in the 1960s had animated-looking characters, mirroring the growing popularity of Saturday morning cartoons, and the 1980s versions adopted the slick style of the decade. “When I was little he was forever pointing out sites of famous murders to me.”ĩ Fascinating Artifacts Found in King Tut's TombĬharacters have evolved through the decades to keep up with fashion, hairstyles and pop-culture trends. “The first (1949) version would look very old-fashioned now,” says Nicolas Ricketts, curator of table games at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Bantry of “Gossington Hall” are informed by their maid of a comely blonde corpse in their dusty library.)“He was fascinated by the criminal mind,” Davies said of her father. (Certainly his game carried strong echoes of novels like Agatha Christie’s 1942 The Body In The Library, in which the staid Colonel and Mrs. In a 2009 interview, his daughter Marcia Davies said her father was an avid reader of murder fiction by Raymond Chandler and others. His wife, Elva, assisted, designing the game board on their dining-room table.īy that time, Pratt had become something of a crime aficionado. The longtime Birmingham resident, who worked in a local munitions factory during the war, invented the suspects and weapons between 19, as a way to pass the long nights stuck indoors during air-raid blackouts. Years later, during World War II, Pratt recreated those murder-mystery parlor games in miniature, as a board game called Murder! (later Clue).
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