Original subtitles

(dramatic music)

[Narrator] It's one of the biggest

toy industry events of the year.

Toy Fair is incredibly hard to get into,

incredibly hard to get access to.

- Hey, how are ya? - Hi, good morning!

Scott Abbott?

- Scott Abbott? - Chris Haney.

[Narrator] And two men believe

they have an innovative new game idea.

At Toy Fair, you're gonna see 500 new games,

50 will get into stores.

Of those 50, five will be profitable.

Producing a board game,

it's like getting a camel through the head of a needle.

I'm sorry, gentlemen, you're not on my list.

(tense music)

[Scott] We're, uh, press.

They're attending the toy fair under a total guise.

Neither of them had any experience in game invention.

They really don't know

anything about board games as a product

and how to produce them.

[Narrator] But what's inside holds the key

to turning their idea into a revolutionary board game

that will go on to sell over 100 million copies

in more than 17 languages.

- A piece of macaroni? - Pasta.

A telephone?

[Narrator] And inspire the creation

of another iconic sensation.

Pictionary really introduced the concept

of what we know of today as party games.

If it's hard, let's go with it.

[Narrator] Together, they'll open up

a whole new category of games.

Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary

really created the adult board game market.

Taboo and Scattergories and Guesstures, Cranium

are direct descendants of Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary.

[Narrator] Giving rise to a multi-billion dollar industry.

But only if these outsiders can get through the door.

- [Receptionist] - What publication did

you say you're from?

(dramatic music)

(upbeat music)

[Narrator] By the late 1970s,

the toy industry is dominated

by games and gadgets for children,

leaving adults with few options

besides cards or family board games.

There really wasn't an adult gaming culture.

You know, we didn't think in terms of a game night.

The board game market

was more or less exclusively for children.

Brightly colored plastic,

things like Chutes and Ladders,

Candy Land,

big, colorful pieces,

bright, colorful boards.

The conventional wisdom

was that adults don't play board games.

(tense music)

[Narrator] But one fateful night,

two men tap into something

that could forever change this.

What's the capital of Uruguay?

Uh...

- Montevideo? - Ah!

Chris Haney was a photojournalist

for the Montreal Gazette.

Chris Haney is quite the character.

He's a dropout, but not unintelligent.

He's super creative,

super gregarious,

fun to be around,

and he's pretty ambitious.

He wants to be a millionaire by the time he's 30.

And Scott Abbott was a sports writer

for the Canadian news agencies.

Haney was really destitute.

He and his wife and child

were living with Scott Abbott

in a small apartment.

Neither of them really had a penny to spare.

News is a little bit stale,

and Haney and Abbott are looking for something more.

One evening, they were gonna play a game of Scrabble,

only to find that their Scrabble set

was missing some tiles.

[Scott] You wanna play another game?

Nah, I'd rather keep beating you at trivia questions.

- [Scott] (scoffs) - You can't beat me

when we don't keep score.

(Chris chuckling) (gentle music)

What if we did?

They have this idea that they can make a board game

that brings people together

and really capitalizes on their love of trivia.

[Narrator] By 1979, trivia game shows

have been getting big ratings for nearly 40 years.

The quiz show format is the hallmark

of American entertainment,

from the radio days to the television days.

Trivia becomes popular with radio shows

like "Take It or Leave It"

and later with shows on television like "Jeopardy."

People in the 80s,

they grew up watching "Jeopardy."

[Narrator] But while successful on the air,

a trivia board game is uncharted territory.

Neither of them had any experience in game invention.

But they knew a lot about a lot of things,

so they were the perfect guys, actually,

to write a trivia game.

So for Haney and Abbott,

the question simply was going to be,

what's this game going to look like?

They are trying to figure out the right game board,

and Abbott is sketching a square,

which is kind of boring.

It's too traditional.

It's very much like Monopoly.

(box thudding)

Here, try this.

It's bigger.

Maybe try a circle.

Ultimately, they landed on that beautiful classic circle.

[Jackie] A circular board game

is something that had not been done before.

At first glance, it might look like

maybe an old wagon wheel.

There was a circular path

that had six spokes and a center.

[Narrator] Each spoke represents

a different category to test players.

It was perfect from the vision they had for their game.

They split up the categories by types

like arts and literature

or science and nature,

sports and leisure,

entertainment, history, geography.

With colored spaces around the board

for each of the different categories.

If you landed on that color,

you got a question from that category.

What do we got?

[Narrator] With the categories down,

they now need to work out how to keep score.

You could have a score pad off to the side

that said I had 20 points and you had 15 points,

but it's off to the side and it's numbers.

But Abbott feels that this is inelegant.

So eventually, he comes up with this pie piece

and the pie wedge.

It sounds very simplistic, right?

But it echoed the pattern on the board itself,

and it's kind of cool that your piece

was also the way you kept score.

If you got it right,

then you got the little piece of the pie.

Your wedges created the tension

that you get from watching sports.

Who's in the lead?

What's gonna happen next?

It was a unique invention

that I don't think has really been replicated since.

[Narrator] After they play test the game,

Haney and Abbott add a few more challenges.

In order to win,

a seventh question had to be answered correctly.

The last question you have to answer

in the middle of the board,

you don't get to pick the topic.

[Philip] You had to land on the center space

by exact count.

Now, this can be very frustrating.

When designing a game,

you don't want people who are behind

to feel like they can't win,

and so we do these things called catch-up features

that gives everyone the feeling

that they're still in the game.

Finally, someone gets that complete circle,

and visually, it's like,

"I did it. I completed it."

What should we call it?

Something with trivia.

Trivia Hunt?

Trivia Quest?

Trivia Pursuit?

(intense music)

Originally, they come up with the name Trivia Pursuit,

which is a great name in and of itself.

But then Chris Haney's wife, Sarah,

said, "You know, it would sound better

if it was Trivial Pursuit."

It's a Trivial Pursuit

because, ultimately, you guys are spending hours

sitting here arguing over

who knows what Ar is the symbol of on the periodic table.

(bottle clinking)

Trivial Pursuit came together in one night,

which is quite an amazing feat,

and it was a remarkably simple conception.

[Narrator] However, when it comes to

actually producing the game,

they don't know where to begin.

Abbott and Haney really have no idea how to go about it.

Having a great idea isn't good enough.

(tense music)

[Narrator] But they are resourceful journalists.

What publication did you say you're from?

Um, we are stringers.

Okay, that's fine.

Amazing. Thank you.

One of the wonderful things about their profession

is that they could in fact go into a toy fair

and start asking questions.

They abuse the privilege

and they use their press credentials

to get into the Montreal Toy Fair.

Now, it sounds like a fun bit of research, pranksterism,

however, that kind of shenanigan can easily get you fired.

They interview so many toy executives

to find out how do you get a game manufactured?

Oh, okay, this is how you print a game,

and these are people that make the plastic pieces,

and, okay, we're gonna need dice,

and we're gonna need a box maker,

and we're gonna need a company that folds boards.

Obviously, I didn't have as much time

as I thought I would have.

I think we can sell it with this.

- It's good. - It's good.

They wanted Trivial Pursuit to be

a really high quality board game.

And to produce a high quality board game,

you are gonna need a fair amount of funds.

Publishing a board game is not cheap

when you do it on your own.

They've learned that it's gonna cost $40,000,

which, of course, was a lot of money at the time.

- Okay, what do we got? - Alright.

And the question really was, "How do we raise the money?"

The way that they came up with

was to offer shares. Between them.

They own 80% of the company,

so 20% of it would be parceled out.

We're calling it Trivial Pursuit.

Look, I'm sorry, guys.

I can't help you on this.

(tense music)

When they're going around asking for support,

they hit some barriers.

Because they were rolling with these ideas

and things were flowing,

they thought the rest of the process

was gonna be easy.

It is incredibly stressful for them.

They had a dream, they had a game,

they just couldn't get it made.

(birds chirping) (tense music)

[Narrator] While Chris Haney and Scott Abbot

believe Trivial Pursuit is a winning game idea,

they can't afford to get it made.

- (Scott sighing) - Yeah?

Abbott and Haney needed investors.

They weren't wealthy individuals,

they didn't have bankers who would believe in them.

[Narrator] Instead, they try a new approach.

One that's way ahead of its time.

So we can really sell

on the quality of materials that we're using.

They essentially needed crowdfunding

in an era before the internet.

[Narrator] Eventually, their grassroots campaign pays off.

So they ended up taking on 34 investors.

None of the investors contributed more than $2,000.

They have all the pieces put together.

They have the concept and the idea.

They have everything except for the questions.

What are the questions gonna be?

And that turns out to be the hardest part.

The heart of Trivial Pursuit

is in the questions on all of those cards.

They believe that they had to supply

a thousand questions for each category

in order to make the game have sufficient replayability.

A thousand questions for six categories

equals 6,000 questions.

They have to hit that sweet spot

where enough people will be able to get the question right,

but not everybody's gonna get the question right.

That's very hard to do for a hundred questions,

it's nearly impossible for 6,000.

This took hundreds and hundreds and hundreds

of manpower hours and months of work.

Chris Haney decides he's gonna devote himself full-time

to making this game a success.

He's got no money,

he's barely supporting his family,

his wife's pregnant.

It is a remarkable move.

And then Abbott quits his job.

They go into massive debt.

The creation of this game is a make-or-break moment

for these two men.

Haney and Abbott go to the ends of the earth

to find all of these fascinating trivia bits.

They looked at encyclopedias, almanacs, newspapers,

(tense music)

But also started looking at mundane objects

like ketchup bottles and restaurant menus.

[Chris] What's the first listed ingredient of ketchup?

Tomatoes, right?

(Scott chuckling)

[Narrator] Then one night, after months of struggling

to come up with 6,000 questions...

This is great.

[Narrator] Haney discovers a shortcut.

Who's the host of "Tonight Show"

since October 1st, 1962?

Johnny Carson.

There were a lot of reference books on the market,

and in particular,

there was one that was called

"The Super Trivia Encyclopedia."

Lex Luthor, Superman's archenemy,

one-time Superboy's best friend.

It was alphabetical,

it had lots and lots of facts,

and it made it a great resource

to sort of pull information

to formulate the original questions.

[Narrator] Thanks to "The Super Trivia Encyclopedia,"

Trivial Pursuit is finally ready to hit shelves

in November of 1981. (dramatic music)

Haney and Abbott decided that their first run

should be 1,100 copies.

[Narrator] But their timing couldn't be worse.

There's a recession in 1981,

that is really bad news for a toy maker

who has a new product coming on the market

and one that is more expensive than most of its competitors.

Trivial Pursuit was retailing for roughly $30 at the time.

Back in that era,

you could buy Monopoly for less than $10.

Who in the world is gonna pay $35

for a box of cards that you burn through?

It doesn't make any sense.

People certainly don't have a lot of money,

and the idea of spending that much on a board game

is insane.

But it appealed to adults and it challenged you,

and a lot of those questions were difficult,

and everybody kinda liked that.

And that's what made it really different

and also made it very much more appealing to grownups.

(upbeat music) (die thudding)

The guys start selling it into local stores around Canada.

The more people that discovered Trivial Pursuit,

the more people loved it.

(bottles and glass clinking)

Here, cheers!

They'd sold out of their first production run.

Trivial Pursuit said that you can make a game

that can cost a lot of money,

and if the game has it, people buy them.

Of course, the guys were ecstatic

and kind of riding high on that excitement.

They went ahead and pushed for a second print run,

but this one was really ambitious.

Here's to 20,000 units.

- 20,000 Units. - 20,000 Units.

Even if we sell all 20,000 units,

we're still gonna be in the red.

(tense music)

The board was a quad-fold board

and then therefore very expensive.

And the scoring wedges, that was custom tooling.

It was a really well-made product,

but unfortunately, they spent about $75 a game.

They lost their shirts

on the first printing of Trivial Pursuit.

- (glass thudding) - How much?

A quarter of a million.

How much?

I'm sure they had the same feeling,

"Oh my God, what do we do now?"

Quarter of a million.

(tense music)

[Narrator] Already in the red from their first sales run,

Haney and Abbott go even deeper in debt,

borrowing $70,000 to get Trivial Pursuit

back on Canadian shelves.

They were stressed beyond belief,

and they really didn't know yet

whether this adventure that they had gone on

was going to lead to destitution

or eventual riches beyond compare.

The guys knew that they had to grow,

so they head

to New York Toy Fair,

which is one of the biggest toy fairs

in the entire world.

At the New York Toy Fair,

they try selling directly to specific retail stores

in an effort to get them to stock Trivial Pursuit

so that it can have some kind of a growth outside of Canada.

But 1982 could not have been a worse time

to come to Toy Fair

with a traditional box-board game.

This was the height of the video game craze

and the trade was concluding

that board games were relics of the past.

Most stores are not interested.

They don't want to stock this unproven,

rather serious looking,

rather expensive game.

They walk away from New York Toy Fair

with just a few hundred orders.

It was pretty devastating

and pretty much one of the lowest points

that the team hit.

[Narrator] Then things quickly go from bad to worse.

Stress was mounting for Chris Haney.

He had a family, his wife was pregnant,

and he was trying to figure out,

"How can I make this game a success?"

Haney internalized a lot of the stress

because of the debt that he had incurred,

the failure of Trivial Pursuit to catch on.

Haney's a young guy trying to make this happen.

Let's just say he was indulging a lot.

[Jackie] One evening, he's out with his friends,

he's having a drink at a bar,

and he just collapses.

They take him to the hospital. (ambulance siren wailing)

Chris Haney has put everything on the line

to develop this thing,

and it seems like the pressure has finally gotten to him.

[Narrator] As Haney's life hangs in the balance,

(upbeat music)

2,700 miles away, a recent college grad

is about to have his own life-changing experience.

Alright, you ready?

Uh, an arch.

An ear.

- Yeah. - Yeah.

Yeah, come on.

Rob Angel is an extremely smart, creative guy.

He graduated from college with his degree in business.

He's a bit of a free spirit.

He is creative, and competitive,

and ambitious,

but he's working as a waiter in Washington state.

It's a piece of macaroni.

- That's guitar. - Smashed up guitar.

- My guitar. - Oh.

Rob and his roommates,

they were all doing what they could to make ends meet,

and rather than going out at night spending money,

they stayed in and they played games.

It's a piece of grass.

- A blade of grass. - Come on.

They were playing a game.

One of them would draw it out on paper

and they all had to guess what that word was.

It's a football.

It was charades on paper.

Um...

- Uh, anything? - Yeah, yeah, anything.

Just go for it.

Give it a go. Any word.

Just come up with one on the spot.

As they played it so often,

they struggled with what's the next word to come up with.

What Rob Angel found was

just coming up with random words

was kind of a drag.

Yeah. If you didn't have a good idea,

you needed some prompting.

Here, here, I got an idea.

Just use...

Just use this.

Just pick a random word.

That should do it. Yeah.

And that's where Angel turned to opening up the dictionary

and choosing words.

Full English breakfast.

- Yes. - Oh. Oh.

- Nice. - (friends laughing)

They're having a wild amount of fun with it.

Their game nights get bigger and bigger.

- Uh... - A shark?

- Yes. - Oh!

And eventually, Rob Angel realizes,

"You know what, I think this would be a great board game."

[Narrator] Instinctively, Rob even comes up

with the perfect name.

Picture plus dictionary equals Pictionary.

It's that simple.

But it needs to be something

that's gonna be a saleable game,

not a dictionary and a pencil.

[Narrator] As the blueprint of an idea

begins to form in Angel's mind,

a shaken Chris Haney is released from the hospital.

They thought he had a heart attack,

said it was due to stress

of trying to get this game off the ground.

He was burning through life pretty fast.

He did recover from it,

but his health was never really the same.

[Narrator] After their failure at New York Toy Fair,

Haney and Abbott returned to their home market.

People really liked the game around Canada.

[Danielle] It sold lots of copies

and people really engaged in it.

[Narrator] But they're still in the red.

To reach beyond the border and break into the US market,

they're gonna need help.

What they need is to do something

other than selling directly to a retail store.

The idea with licensing is

you give another manufacturer

the rights to produce your product

in exchange for a percentage royalty.

It can be anywhere from like 3 to 5% royalty on their sales.

Scott Abbott and Chris Haney were demanding 15%.

Three times the average of the guy was getting Scrabble.

A lot of people were really reluctant

to commit to this kind of thing.

There's a ton of risks.

The game was difficult to produce.

Both Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers,

the two biggest game companies,

passed on it.

It's too expensive.

Maybe it's sold in Canada because it's Canadian by nature.

It's not gonna sell here.

[Narrator] Running out of options and money,

they set their sights on a smaller company.

- So we've got- - 1,000 cards.

Each card has six questions,

one for each category,

so you got 6,000 questions in one box.

They managed to get a meeting with Selchow and Righter.

Selchow and Righter made a lot of money with Parcheesi

and then of course, eventually, Scrabble.

As you can see here, you've got the board.

Abbott and Haney leveraged every penny they had.

They need to recoup their losses

and make sure it wasn't sort of shelved

in the dust bin of history.

[Narrator] Selchow and Righter is their last hope.

Without a US distributor,

it's game over for Haney and Abbott.

(tense music)

So you got 6,000 questions in one box?

[Narrator] In 1982, the fate of Trivial Pursuit

hinges on the outcome of one meeting.

So, as you can see here,

you got the board,

you'll roll a dice,

and when you get to these squares,

you gotta answer a question

to try and get a piece of the pie.

There are so many intangibles

that go into the eventual success or failure of a game

that are just out of your control.

Timing is one.

The replay value alone is gonna be crazy.

Selchow and Righter missed the boat

when it comes to electronic games.

Suddenly, they see an opportunity

to regain some ground in the marketplace.

- Thank you so much, really. - Yeah, thank you so much.

The discussions with Selchow and Righter

go really, really well

and they land a massive deal.

For the team, I think that that was incredibly validating.

They were hungry for products like this.

Haney and Abbott negotiate a very favorable deal

with Selchow and Righter

for 15% royalty rate

and $75,000 upfront.

Very, very rich terms for those days.

[Narrator] With their new partner's connections,

Haney and Abbott finally have a shot

at matching their Canadian success in the US.

Selchow and Righter hired a public relations company.

The brilliant woman, Linda Pezzano.

Come. Sit.

She was indescribable in a lot of ways.

She had a lot of energy.

She knew what she was doing.

She knew how to get it done.

Linda, as a good PR person,

would be looking for all kinds of media opportunities

to promote games.

She did a lot of clever things

that had never been done before.

[Linda] I have an idea.

The big PR strategy was to send out copies of it

to the celebrities

who were mentioned in the trivia questions.

It was really a way to kind of get a buzz going

amongst famous people.

It really kind of positioned it

into the mainstream culture.

All the cool Hollywood stars are playing Trivial Pursuit,

and, of course, that means lots of normal people go,

"Oh, if they're playing, I should check it out."

Trivial Pursuit really was the beginning

of so-called guerilla marketing.

You're gonna get Wayne Gretzky?

[Linda] Why not?

Meryl Streep is playing, so she must be cool.

When Johnny Carson mentioned Trivial Pursuit,

that was the ultimate endorsement in the culture.

I knew in January of '84 we had a tiger by the tail.

(upbeat music)

You just knew.

The calls, all of a sudden, started coming in.

We wound up shipping,

it was 20 million in one year.

Monopoly and Scrabble, in their best years,

probably sold about 4 million pieces.

So this was five times the sale

of these two wildly popular games.

In 1984,

Trivial Pursuit makes over 800 million in profits,

which is incredible.

Trivial Pursuit came out of nowhere.

It really had an appeal to both your childlike

and adult-like nature.

It became a touchstone for everybody of that age.

Trivial Pursuit comes along and creates a party.

[Narrator] While millions are now playing Trivial Pursuit

across two countries,

Rob Angel is still stuck on how to bring his game to life.

(doorbell rings)

Rob Angel spent months agonizing over

how do you commercialize this game?

One of the biggest challenges

was how does he get all of those words into the game box?

Rob's mom sends him a care package,

and in that package is a copy of Trivial Pursuit.

And that is an absolute kismet moment for Pictionary.

Trivial Pursuit made him understand that's how you do it.

You make a card-based game.

The fact that Trivial Pursuit came out

with a thousand cards in every box,

that's a breakthrough in play that this is quite repeatable.

That's setting a perfect precedent for Pictionary.

[Narrator] But finding the right kinds of words

is no easy task.

Rob actually kind of becomes a little bit obsessed

with the word list.

He realizes that having the perfect set of words

can actually make a difference

to how players interact with Pictionary.

He literally started at the beginning of the dictionary

trying to choose the best words

to include on the cards for Pictionary.

His goal is to come up with 6,000 different words.

And he personally approved every word

to make sure it was something

that somebody could figure out how to draw.

So Rob Angel essentially breaks it up

into four categories.

The first category, people, places, or animals.

The second is objects.

The third is actions

and the fourth is challenge,

essentially a harder word to draw.

Okay, okay.

If it's hard, let's go with it.

We gotta trial that out and see if it works.

He play-tested a lot with friends and family.

He got two of his best friends to help him.

Gary Everson was a graphic designer.

Terry Langston came in to help do the operations

and allow Rob to be the creative.

One of Rob's early concerns with Pictionary was

if you allowed players to draw forever,

it would get kind of clunky and slow down

and be boring.

It's a bit slow pace, right?

I feel like we should maybe time it.

Give you like a 60-second max.

He realized a simple time limit

would solve that problem.

- Yeah. - Alright, is it, uh...

[Narrator] But soon, a bigger problem emerges.

Pictionary really is two teams against each other,

seeing who can guess the most words.

So when it's your turn,

you draw a card and you draw

and you try to get your teammates to guess

what it is you're drawing.

You have to wait for the other team

- to guess. - Alright?

It's kind of lost that luster

from when he first was playing charades on paper.

With charades, everybody's involved.

When you start applying rules,

you start to diminish that kind of energy.

They work only in their own little teams,

and a whole game slows down.

[Narrator] While Angel struggles to keep the fun alive,

Trivial Pursuit can barely keep their game on the shelves.

Thank you.

[Narrator] But its meteoric success

attracts some unwanted attention.

(tense music)

We're being sued?!

(tense music)

(soft music)

(tense music)

We're being sued?!

Fred L. Worth,

the author of "The Super Trivia Encyclopedia,"

which was one of the texts that they used

to write some of these questions,

ended up suing the creators of Trivial Pursuit

because he said that they had used

hundreds of his facts in their game.

Frank L. Worth put one false fact into the book,

which was that the famous detective Columbo's first name

was Philip, which is incorrect,

and they actually printed the wrong name

in the Trivial Pursuit game,

and that's how he knew that they had used his book.

His belief was that with all the money

that was eventually being made from Trivial Pursuit,

that he was entitled to a substantial settlement.

[Narrator] While Haney and Abbott

prepared to defend their game,

Rob Angel introduces a revolutionary change to his.

Who's ready to kick Pictionary up a notch?

- What you got? - This, my friends,

is all play.

So many board games rely on the idea of a turn.

"It's my turn. It's your turn."

You're on the clock.

[Suzanne] The all play category lets everybody

compete to answer at once.

Angel decides that 55% of the words

will be in the all play category.

All play basically builds the whole game back up

to that charades-level energy that it had originally.

- Diving. - Kite.

Everyone was kind of looking to see

who would yell out the answer first.

- Come on, okay, come on. - More, more, more.

- Give me more. - All play was revolutionary

and a principle that game designers today

still love to try to incorporate when they can

because it guarantees that players are playing the game.

[Narrator] With the pieces coming together,

now, Rob needs graphic designer, Gary Everson,

to create the board.

Everson takes his first swing

at the Pictionary game board,

and it is a bit of a mess.

It was very creative, it was very unique,

but it didn't capture what Rob had envisioned.

It doesn't even really feel like it's a game board.

You don't know where you're supposed to go,

what you're supposed to do,

and Angel is pretty disappointed.

They were trying to make a game

that would appeal to adults,

so it needed to have a sophisticated look.

Rob was very famous for

what he would call taking a personal timeout,

and he would just go off to the corner and he would think.

He's looking through some of the papers on his desk

and he saw a tri-fold brochure.

He said, "Well, wait, can we do that?"

Gary eventually created the prototype for

a tri-fold board,

which was something unique in the industry

at that point in time.

The board folded in a different way.

It was blue with silver,

so it looked very sophisticated.

The cards were nicely designed

so they felt good in your hand.

It was a showpiece kind of game

that you would leave sitting out

on your coffee table.

They put together a pitch,

and they convinced Rob's uncle, Jerome,

to lend them $35,000,

which was enough to create the first 1,000 games.

So Rob and his partners set the date

of a launch party for Pictionary

for June 1st, 1985,

and everything was going as planned,

and then he got a call from his printer.

They had misquoted the job. (tense music)

The printer tells them,

"Well, we can't assemble these for you,"

and they had everything delivered to Rob's house.

They had to hand correlate

a thousand games with 500 cards per game.

That's a half a million cards.

These guys were exceptionally stressed out.

[Narrator] While Rob races to put his game together,

(tense music) (gavel thudding)

Haney and Abbott fight to keep theirs from falling apart.

Haney and Abbott were worried by this lawsuit.

It's quite clear where they took this from.

They did literally just lift it out of the book.

This lawsuit is worth $300 million,

and if the judge rules against them,

it could sink Trivial Pursuit.

This is a make-or-break moment

for Trivial Pursuit.

Ultimately, the judge determined

that you cannot copyright facts,

and so the lawsuit was thrown out.

It took about three years

before they were out of the woods

and they were gonna make money on Trivial Pursuit.

It only took about four and a half years

for them to realize that they were gonna be fabulously rich.

In 1984,

the sales of Trivial Pursuit in United States

were not 200,000 or 250,000,

they were 20 million sets.

Trivial Pursuit was a runaway success.

It was hugely popular.

It actually spawned a ton of offshoot games.

Baby Boomer, Sports, Silver Screen,

all the rest of them.

It actually becomes sort of

this little mini empire of different games

that all center around trivia.

(tense music)

[Narrator] Meanwhile, with his printer

refusing to organize half a million word cards into boxes,

Angel rushes to prepare Pictionary for launch.

And they had parties with their friends

where they supplied pizza and beer,

and everybody went and dropped a card into a box.

Eventually, they got it done

and made it to the launch party.

They did an initial launch

where they were selling the games directly to consumers.

When Rob first went out to sell,

he only sold a few hundred,

then it sort of stopped.

And the guys were sitting there with about six or 700 games.

It's at this point where he comes to the realization that

it's gonna take a lot more

to get the public interested

in what he thinks is a great game.

Then they realize that they should be thinking about

selling it to retailers.

Thank you so much for having me in.

Rob contacted Nordstrom

and explained he's a local guy

and he's invented a board game.

Would they give him some consideration?

- Let's see. - Okay.

So here is a breakdown of the rules.

- I'll let you read... - The idea

of being in a department store like Nordstrom,

it's a high-end adult store.

That was a key moment in their journey.

[Rob] Alright, so here we have it.

Pictionary.

To get into a department store like Nordstrom

would be a major victory for them.

I think if you give it a chance,

you'll see how fun it is.

[Steve] If this meeting doesn't go well

and they're not able to convey how great this game is...

- (intense music) - We don't sell games.

[Steve] This could be the end of it.

(soft music)

[Narrator] Rob Angel knows

getting Pictionary into Nordstrom

is his last hope

and he won't take no for an answer.

What we found is that once people get a chance to play,

they kind of fall in love with it.

Let's see how we can draw this.

So...

- Uh, a person? - Yep. Yeah.

- Um, a man? - Hmm.

Uh, is that a slide?

- No, no, no. - No.

- A tree trunk, I don't... - No, not quite.

- Am I bad at this game? - It is, it is...

No, no, you're not bad. So...

Angel is tenacious and persistent

and pushes Nordstrom hard.

I could demo this in your stores if you like.

We could drop off the games in person.

We could hand deliver them

and whatever you don't sell,

we're happy to pick up.

And he comes up with a deal

that Nordstrom just can't say no to.

Just because I've never seen

anything like this before, okay?

To have Pictionary on the shelves at Nordstrom

brings Pictionary an incredible amount of credibility

and a huge amount of exposure.

(upbeat music)

Rob and the guys literally were in the stores

demonstrating the game.

Once people got engaged with the game,

they wanted to do it, and more importantly,

they wanted to share it with their friends.

Quickly, he was able to get distribution

in a number of local stores

right there in the Seattle area.

[Narrator] But to take Pictionary national,

Rob turns to marketing whiz Linda Pezzano

to work her magic.

They went to her to create

the same kind of excitement around Pictionary

that she had on Trivial Pursuit.

It was really about how do you get as many hands and minds

engaged with the game as possible

and really building word of mouth in grassroots marketing.

Everything is bigger these days.

We'll market it better by making it smaller.

We created a thing we called a pick pack,

which was five cards,

a pad, and a golf pencil.

We would get on airplanes at the time

with bags full of them

and hand them to everybody.

When you have a Linda, you don't give up.

She was sending invitations in the mail

with Pictionary cards.

She knew how to reach out to the press.

She did all the right things.

[Rob] I like it.

In 1986 to 1989, the game went wild.

200,000 units was considered a good seller back in the day

and Pictionary was selling millions.

We're talking $200 million in sales.

(upbeat music)

[Narrator] To date, Pictionary has sold

over 38 Million copies in 60 countries.

Around the year 2000,

Rob called up his partners and he said,

"Guys, I think it's time for us to do something else."

They were ready to focus on their families

and their lives

and to go to the next chapter.

And so they sold the game to Mattel Toy Company.

So they cashed in, sold it to Mattel

for somewhere north of $20 million.

He was developing Pictionary for over 17 years.

They took it as far as they needed to take it.

[Narrator] Not to be outdone,

Trivial Pursuit has sold over 50 editions

and made over $2 billion to date.

Haney and Abbott, they not only created this iconic game,

but they became extraordinarily wealthy doing so.

[Narrator] Together, Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary

pioneered the adult board game,

the largest segment of the market today.

Trivial Pursuit was so wildly successful

it kicked open the door for games for adults.

And if that's true,

then Pictionary knocked it off its hinges.

Pictionary really introduced the concept

of what we know of today as party games to the market.

Games like Scattergories or Cranium,

they are direct descendants

of Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary.

It really was something that people hadn't done before,

but suddenly you've got this,

and people want a name for it,

and they started to call it game night.

Not only do adults play games,

they buy games.

In 2022, the game market

was about $18 billion in sales in the United States.

And of that, $11 billion were games

that were targeted towards the adult game player.

So that's billion with a B.

They're great games, they're timeless games.

People will still be playing them another 40 years from now.

(intense music)