Trivial
Pursuit
Trivial Pursuit is a board game in
which progress is determined by a player's ability to answer
general knowledge and popular culture questions. The game was
created in 1979 by Canadian Scott Abbott, a sports editor for The
Canadian Press, and Chris Haney, a photo editor for Montreal's The
Gazette. After finding pieces of their Scrabble game missing, they
decided to create their own game. With the help of John Haney and
Ed Werner, they completed development of the game, which was
released in 1982. In North America, the game's popularity peaked in
1984, a year in which over 20 million games were sold. The rights
to the game were licensed to Parker Brothers (now part of Hasbro)
in 1988, after initially being turned down by the Virgin Group; in
2008, Hasbro bought out the rights in full, for US$80 million. As
of 2004, nearly 88 million games had been sold in 26 countries and
17 languages. Northern Plastics of Elroy, Wisconsin produced
30,000,000 games between 1983 and 1985. An online version of
Trivial Pursuit was launched in September, 2003.
Dozens of question sets have been released for the game. The
question cards are organized into themes; for instance, in the
standard Genus question set, questions in green deal with science
and nature. Some question sets have been designed for younger
players, and others for a specific time period or as promotional
tie-ins (such as Star Wars, Saturday Night Live, and The Lord of
the Rings movies).
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