![]() ![]() In 1994, scandal rocked the Scrabblesphere when Hasbro announced plans to remove nearly 200 words deemed too offensive for the official Scrabble dictionary. took over after Selchow collapsed in the 1980s and when Coleco went bankrupt, Hasbro Inc. Butts received a total of $265,000 in royalties Brunot got nearly $1.5 million. In 1971, Brunot and Butts sold the game's rights to a company called Selchow & Righter. Nearly 4 million Scrabble sets were sold in 1954 alone. By 1952, Brunot's homegrown assembly line was churning out more than 2,000 sets a week. When the chairman of Macy's discovered the game on vacation and decided to stock his shelves with it, the game exploded. Brunot's contributions were significant: he came up with the iconic color scheme (pastel pink, baby-blue, indigo and bright red), devised the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles to make a word, and conceived the name "Scrabble." The first Scrabble factory was an abandoned schoolhouse in rural Connecticut, where Brunot and several gracious friends manufactured 12 games an hour. When a New Yorker named James Brunot contacted Butts about mass-producing the game, he readily handed the operation over. At first he simply called his creation "it" before switching to "Lexiko," then "Criss-Cross Words." The Patent Office rejected his application not once, but twice, and on top of that, he couldn't settle on a name. For more than a decade he tweaked and tinkered with the rules while trying and continually failing to attract a corporate sponsor. He then chose the frequency and the distribution of the tiles by counting letters on the pages of the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune and The Saturday Evening Post. After determining what he believed were the most enduring games in history board games, numbers games like dice or cards and letter games like crossword puzzles he combined all three. Scrabble was conceived during the Great Depression by an unemployed New York architect named Alfred Mosher Butts, who figured Americans could use a bit of distraction during the bleak economic times. In fact, when Senegal hosted the French Scrabble World championship this summer, its government commissioned a special Scrabble song to mark the occasion. An artist commemorated the 60th birthday of Prince Charles and the board game by creating a portrait of the Prince entirely composed of Scrabble tiles.) In countries like Senegal, Scrabble is an official sport. (That coincidence did not go unnoticed in Britain. Even Queen Elizabeth II is a fan, perhaps in part because her first son was born the very same year that "Scrabble" became a trademark. Madonna and Martha Stewart love it, as do Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Keanu Reeves and "Junk Bond King" Michael Milken, who organized a Scrabble tournament in the early 1990s at the white-collar prison where he was serving time for securities fraud. More than 150 million Scrabble sets have been sold in 121 countries since its creation in 1931. ![]() Fatsis would know: while researching Word Freak, his bestselling 2001 book about the game's most fanatical players, he became a self-proclaimed word freak himself, and he's not alone. Follow a "mockable emblem of Eisenhower-era family values, a stand-in for geekiness, a pasttime so decidely unhip that it's hip," former Wall Street Journal reporter Stefan Fatsis once wrote about the best-selling board game Scrabble, which turned 60 on Tuesday. ![]()
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