Monopoly had done well for Charles Darrow and his family, making them rich practically overnight. Charles and Esther Darrow sent their son Richard to a facility in New Jersey that would be able to care for him better than they were able to. They also bought a farm nearby to visit. But while their fortunes seemed bigger than ever, trouble was brewing elsewhere. Parker Brothers had made a disturbing discovery. Charles Darrow hadn’t made Monopoly. After Robert had published the game, a vice-president of Parker Brothers wrote to Robert about previously released versions of the game like The Landlord’s Game, and Finance, saying: “lawyers had investigated the situation and found that Darrow had appropriated the discarded name Monopoly—and further, that Finance was on the market quite some time before Monopoly.” Robert in turn asked Charles Darrow to sign an affidavit stating that his version of the game’s history was correct—something that he refused to do. Robert used Charles Darrow’s lie to his advantage. According to the University of Iowa, he had a secret meeting with Charles in NUMBER_TOKEN, where he leveraged the inevitable legal costs from defending the game to secure Parker Brothers’ worldwide rights to distributing Monopoly. But even with the deception revealed, Robert decided that the origin story was too good to pass up. People became emotionally attached to rags-to-riches stories like Charles Darrow, they identified with the story-teller. And more importantly, they thought that if Charles Darrow could do it, so could they. And Parker Brothers was undeterred in seeking to seal its hold on Monopoly. Because Charles Darrow had stated he first published the game on July NUMBER_TOKEN, NUMBER_TOKEN, Parker Brothers only had until July NUMBER_TOKEN, NUMBER_TOKEN due to a two-year limit on patent applications. They missed this deadline. Still, they filed for a patent on August NUMBER_TOKEN, NUMBER_TOKEN and despite two previously filed patents on The Landlord’s Game, they got it for reasons unknown. And now, Parker Bros. was left to cover up the facts. Despite having stepped down as CEO of Parker Brothers, in November NUMBER_TOKEN, George Parker himself traveled out to Arlington, Virginia in order to tie up one loose end of Monopoly’s messy business: preventing a lawsuit from Elizabeth. George succeeded in finding Elizabeth and told her that Parker Brothers had come across The Landlord’s Game and that he wanted to buy the patent. George also told her that he wanted to publish two more of her games, Elizabeth was elated, and sold the game to him for $NUMBER_TOKEN, with no royalties. Next, they went after Dan’s Finance. That Finance was already on the market and had been outselling Monopoly was dangerous. So Robert and his team purchased Finance from their publisher, Knapp Electric for $NUMBER_TOKEN. An easy solution. Their next issue was a larger one: rival board game juggernaut Milton Bradley had published their own game based on Finance called Easy Money. Because Milton Bradley was a large rival to Parker Brothers, buying them out was out of the question. So they went through a different avenue to achieve their goals. Parker Brothers went after Milton Bradley with a legal action, claiming that Easy Money infringed on their patent for Monopoly. In the end, the two companies came to a resolution that seemed
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