Rules of the game changed for Parker Brothers

For a century, the games company he founded, Parker Brothers, was a living model of how to win in the game of business by playing by the rules. And while some modern market marauders might doubt this, Parker and his employees had fun doing it.

But not all the time, Philip E. Orbanes tells us, not unexpectedly. The games business, like many others, is cyclical. As in baseball, building a winning lineup can take quite a while -- and the dry spells can be long.

Still, Parker Brothers, family-owned and housed in a warren of wood buildings in Salem for most of its lifetime, offers an enviable model of entrepreneurship.

By holding high standards and following conservative principles, it became an icon, only to be caught up at the end in a fatal web of technological change and bad corporate decisions. Its catalog of classic games now belongs to Hasbro Corp.

To those who loved Parker Brothers and saw its fall, Orbanes writes, "It seemed painfully ironic that the house built by the Monopoly game found itself mortgaged to the hilt, unable to pay its own rent, [and] forced to bow out and declare bankruptcy."

It was in 1883 that George Parker, at age 16, devised a board game he called Banking, built around the lure of money. His friends loved it and talked him into publishing it. He did, traveling by train from his home in Medford to Boston, Providence, Worcester, and Salem, selling over five weeks all 500 copies he'd had printed. His net profit was $80 -- about $1,300 today, by Orbanes's calculations -- and he was hooked on games for life.

Setting up shop in Salem, first on his own and later with his brothers Charles and Edward as partners, Parker by 1900 was a major force in the national games arena with winners such as "The Office Boy Game," and "Tiddley Winks." Hundreds more followed, including "Ping-Pong," which George Parker discovered while on a sales trip to England in 1902, all the way through Flinch, Sorry, Clue, Careers, Boggle, Nerf balls, and even Atari games.

Hidden behind this stellar lineup was another now all-but-forgotten success -- a line of hand-cut wood picture puzzles that first came out in 1908 and remained in production into the 1950s.

And, of course, there was Monopoly, the champion of them all. George Parker at first turned it down in 1932, saying it was too complicated. His son-in-law, Robert Barton, reversed that error four years later and the rest is, well, history.

That brief lapse, though, really was just a result of a cautious outlook embodied in principles George Parker wrote down over the years. Some read like rules for a board game: "Find winning moves." "When faced with a choice, make the move with the most potential benefit versus risk."

Orbanes, while praising Parker's business rules as a surefire recipe for success, doesn't overlook the duds that sometimes ensued. Nor does he mince words about tumultuous years after Barton sold the firm to General Mills in 1968.

Barton's reasons included a worry that estate taxes ultimately would force a sale anyhow. But the shift from benign family ownership to a market-driven corporate culture, along with the impact electronics would have on the games industry, was more than the company could withstand. Twice more the corporate structure changed before Hasbro, almost mercifully, stepped in.

The Salem plant was closed in 1991.

Orbanes, who now runs his own games company, Winning Moves Inc., in Danvers, writes engagingly and with the love of a devoted insider. He also had access to Robert Barton, before his death in 1995, to Robert's son, Randolph, who ran the firm for its absentee owners from 1974 to 1984 and now is retired, and to company archives.

The Parker Brothers Salem factory was torn down in 1994. A 266-unit apartment complex now stands in its place. It's named The Jefferson. It might have been called Broadway or Park Place, in honor of Monopoly's most expensive addresses. Most of its residents probably know little about the fabled past of the land beneath them.

"The Game Makers" could fill that void.

Jerry Ackerman is a freelance writer and former Globe reporter and editor. He can be reached at jerryackerman@hotmail.com.