Who Really Invented Monopoly? The Story the Box Never Told
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, the story most people know about Monopoly is charming—and false. It was never just the invention of one down-on-his-luck salesman. The real roots of the game stretch back to a politically charged board game called The Landlord’s Game, created by a woman named Lizzie Magie to warn people about the dangers of unchecked greed. Her game was borrowed, reworked, and eventually published without her name on the box. Mary Pilon, author of The Monopolists, is here to share how Charles Darrow got the credit, how Parker Brothers sold the story, and why the truth behind Monopoly is far more interesting than fiction.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.0 | And we return to our American stories. |
| 0:17.7 | Up next, a story on one of the most iconic board games ever made. We're talking about |
| 0:23.2 | monopoly. The most widely told story on how it came to be is that the game was invented by a former |
| 0:29.7 | heater salesman named Charles Darrow, who created the board game amid the Great Depression and |
| 0:35.8 | sold it to the Parker brothers in the 1930s. But the truth |
| 0:39.2 | is more complicated. Here to tell the real story of Monopoly is Mary Pillon, author of The Monopolis. |
| 0:47.3 | Take it away, Mary. |
| 0:48.5 | How did I make it big? I know how. To play the game, I buy real estate, hotels, fancy cars, even railroads. |
| 0:55.9 | And I take chances to make it big. |
| 0:58.3 | Uh-oh. |
| 0:59.1 | You've got to play the game. |
| 1:00.7 | My Monopoly game. |
| 1:03.0 | The story of Monopoly that I learned as a kid that was tucked in my family's board game box and millions of others was that this man, Charles Darrow, |
| 1:11.9 | invented the game during, you know, kind of the darkest hours of the Great Depression. |
| 1:16.8 | And then the story went that he was down on his luck. He was struggling to find work as so many |
| 1:22.3 | Americans were at that time. And he goes into his basement and he innovates. And he creates |
| 1:27.4 | this game to remind his family |
| 1:29.6 | of better times, vacationing in Atlantic City. And, you know, he sells the game and it becomes |
| 1:36.1 | this surprise hit, saving him and Parker Brothers from the brink of destruction. For decades, that's how |
| 1:42.5 | the story was told. The problem is it's not true. |
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