#167: Clue – When Murder Becomes a Game

The Empire Builders Podcast

Anthony Pratt wanted to elevate playing board games from games of chance to thinking games. His wife was responsible for keeping it random.

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young.

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Dave Young:

Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here with Stephen Semple.

Today, Stephen told me we’re going to talk about the board game Clue, Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick. Something like that.

Stephen Semple:

There you go.

Dave Young:

It’s been a long time. It’s been a long time since I’ve played Clue.

Stephen Semple:

Did you play Clue much as a kid?

Dave Young:

Not really.

Stephen Semple:

No? Okay.

Dave Young:

It was never my type of game, and I’m not sure why.

Stephen Semple:

Okay. Well, because you would’ve had to play it with your sisters. That’s probably the problem.

Dave Young:

Yeah, that’s probably it.

Stephen Semple:

More therapy for Dave about to [inaudible 00:02:01] right now.

Dave Young:

Yeah, you had to think. There was that thinking involved and eliminating things and…

Stephen Semple:

Well, it’s interesting that you bring up the whole concept of thinking because when Clue came out, so it was created in 1949, when Clue came out, pre-World War II games, especially for kids, were like these mindless games of chance or things that required a little bit of a degree of skill. That was sort of all the games. There were not really any games that were thinking games. And Clue was sort of one of the first ones to come along to break into that whole genre of how do we make a game that’s more of a thinking game and, frankly, it’s not just a kid game as an adult game.

Dave Young:

Sure, yeah. And then it became a movie and all kinds of things.

Stephen Semple:

Oh, all kinds of things. And the original name was not Clue. The original name was Cluedo, so C-L-U-E-D-O, Cluedo.

Dave Young:

Cluedo.

Stephen Semple:

And it was created by Andrew Pratt. Today it’s owned by Hasbro, and they sold like 150 million games. So it’s gone on to become like a really big deal and, look, if you ask most people about Clue, they know what it is.

Dave Young:

Surely. Yeah. We all played it.

Stephen Semple:

So it’s pre-World War II and games were mindless games of chance and whatnot, and there’s nothing in between, and Anthony Pratt decides he wants to develop a game.

Now, he was a pianist before the war, and he often did entertainment at murder mystery parties, and he remembers people love the murder mystery parties.

Dave Young:

Murder mystery parties have been going on that long?

Stephen Semple:

Yes. Yeah.

Dave Young:

See, I had no idea about that.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

Okay.

Stephen Semple:

And they were really hugely popular. It was driven by, remember there’s Agatha Christie, when she was writing in her prime, was just huge. There was a whole Agatha Christie thing, and so that fueled a lot of these murder mystery parties.

So here he is, it’s World War II, they’re in bunkers, killing time, trying to figure out how to create things that are fun. He starts thinking about, like, how could you build a murder mystery game that you could play. He’s reading Agatha Christie books and discovers there’s all these archetypes and whatnot. That’s how he came up with the idea about, well, how about a colonel and a professor and a femme fatale and an entitled rich and a servant? Those are all characters that were pretty common in Agatha Christie novels. Like not all of them, but not uncommon.

Dave Young:

And all known murderers.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

No, I don’t…

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, right. He sets them in a mansion and his wife suggests using these tropes. But the original game had very different weapons than today so it was like fire poker, bomb, poison. And the real question was, how do you make the outcome different every time? So how do you create that unknown variable? He and his wife loved playing bridge. So what they realized is if you incorporate cards into it, it creates a random solution.

Dave Young:

Sure.

Stephen Semple:

So that’s where the whole idea of the cards being distributed out and a few cards being put into the envelope and basically you pull out the cards, it remains hidden. It’s kind of this mystery card dynamic, and actually it kind of becomes a little bit of a math puzzle in terms of how you actually…

Dave Young:

Yeah, yeah. You’re deducing things, right?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

It’s like what is revealed versus what isn’t?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. So there’s this social experience, plus it’s logical, and plus it’s opportunity to role-play a little bit, it really creates this unique, fun, interactive, involved board game.

Now was released as Cluedo in the UK, but his original idea for the name you’d like even better. He called it Murder.

Dave Young:

Murder.

Stephen Semple:

Murder. So in 1945, when he goes to pitch it to game manufacturers, they go, “Yeah, people don’t want their kids playing a game called Murder.”

Dave Young:

Yeah. Have you thought of Arson?

Stephen Semple:

Right. So he sells it to this company called Waddingtons, which is a big game company in the UK. They liked the game, didn’t like the name, so they call it Cluedo. They also changed the weapons at that point more to household items, so pipe wrench, rope, candlestick.

There’s a problem, though. So Waddingtons has bought the game. There’s still a lot of rationing. We forget, at the end of World War II in Europe, how long rationing went on for. My parents immigrated from the North of Ireland to Canada in 1954, and my mom will talk about how there weren’t many things still being rationed, but there were some things still rationed in the UK in 1954.

Dave Young:

Wow.

Stephen Semple:

That’s like a decade after the end of World War II, and there was still rationing. And one of the things that surprised them is when they arrived in North America was just the abundance of stuff, like the shelves being full. That was just-

Dave Young:

All we had to do was stop shipping stuff to Europe and the Pacific and, all of a sudden, the stores are full again.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, but rationing on certain key things still went on for a long time so basically, his game’s kind of on hold indefinitely. Like four years later, it’s 1949, and they still haven’t been able to come up with enough cardboard to publish this game in the UK.

But Watson, who works at Waddingtons, he comes up with a workaround, and what he decides to do is he… They have a relationship with Parker Brothers. So he approaches Parker Brothers and he says, “Why don’t we do this in the US? Why don’t we publish this game in the US?” But they rename it Clue.

Dave Young:

Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.

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Dave Young:

Let’s pick up our story of where we left off and, trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.

Stephen Semple:

So in 1949, they released it in the US, and it sells great. It sells fabulous. Because the thought is this, when times are bad, people want a distraction. When times are good, they want a challenge. And in the US in 1949, times are pretty good. Times are pretty good.

Dave Young:

[inaudible 00:08:42] Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Semple:

So this actually leads to, like Clue is one of the first World War II, what we call mind games, and it actually led to a rise in those types of games. They really didn’t exist much before Clue. So Clue is like a game-changer. First year sells 25,000 units in the United States. It’s this American success, and it really makes Waddingtons confident to do it in the UK.

Now, here’s where things get a little bit sad. In 1953, Waddingtons decides to buy out Pratt. So Pratt’s hardly made anything on this. For whatever reason, he was not part of the US deal. So they offer him 5,000 pounds for the international rights for Clue, which is basically equivalent of about $220,000 today. He’s struggling, he’s now got a young family, all that other stuff so he accepts. Sadly, he accepts the payment, and Waddingtons and Parker Brothers goes on to make huge money with Clue.

That’s the sad part of this is that he did not get good advice on accepting the offer, but he is still recognized as being the creator of this really amazing game that really changed the game landscape for a board game.

Dave Young:

It is sad that he, I was going to say, gave up, but I don’t think he gave up. He made the decision that he made for his family at the time, and he needed the money, so-

Stephen Semple:

Sometimes that’s the case.

Dave Young:

… sometimes that’s what you do.

Stephen Semple:

Yep. But here’s the thing that I found interesting is as he was building this game, like we always talk about looking around for inspiration. So the first thing is he was like, “Okay, these murder mystery parties are really popular. How do I simplify it and make it a game? Because hosting a murder mystery party is kind of complicated so how do I take this idea and make it a game?”

He looked to Agatha Christie and he said, “Oh, look at all these tropes. There’s all these tropes, so those would make for good characters for this game.” So he was inspired by literature. Murder mystery literature gave him some of the inspiration in terms of the characters and the setting.

Then the next step that I found interesting was, “Well, how do I make it random, how do I create a random part because that’s what makes it a game,” was he drew inspiration from cards, from bridge.

Dave Young:

Yeah. Have you read anything about… Is there a thread that connects Clue to phenomenon like Dungeons and Dragons? You’re playing this fantasy game that’s also random-driven, but has constraints and has tropes. You’re a warlock, or you’re a troll, or you’re a bard, or different roles that people play. And I would imagine that they all come from that same desire to sort of act out and solve problems and-

Stephen Semple:

I’m not aware of any direct link between it, but it’s interesting observation you bring up.

The thing I do know from my research into it is that Clue was really the ground-breaker that made it for these types of games. It opened the way for people to start thinking about how can I even maybe lean even further into the role-playing, but even when you’re doing the role-playing, there needs to be this element of randomness to it?

Now, the difference between Clue and Dungeons and Dragons, Clue, there’s an end. Solve the mystery, you go on, you replay the game. With Dungeons and Dragons, there’s this constant quest and improvement and escalation and whatnot.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Clue paved the way and probably started putting some of these other game developers into this state of going, “What else can we do down this line?”

Dave Young:

I’m coming to a realization, as we sit here and talk about this, that maybe the reason I never got into it was because I didn’t play the game with people that got into it with a mindset that it was a role-playing game. It’s like, “Oh, well, you’re the butler. Okay, so you’re the butler, roll the dice.” And when I played it as a kid, nobody acted like they were the butler. Nobody acted like Colonel Mustard.

Stephen Semple:

And you didn’t have to-

Dave Young:

No, you didn’t have to-

Stephen Semple:

… but you could.

Dave Young:

… because you could, and I think I was maybe playing with a bunch of people that just didn’t know you could even. I think you miss an element of creativity and fun when you don’t do it.

Stephen Semple:

Yes. And they probably could’ve leaned into it a little bit more heavily to give people the idea that this is like a murder mystery. This is a variation of a murder mystery party, but that’s where the inspiration came from.

We think about Clue as being a great game, and it was a successful game, but I don’t think we recognize how much of a ground-breaker Clue was for other things. And, again, the thing I found that was cool is he figured out how to put this game drawing inspiration from literature, drawing inspiration from playing cards and drawing inspiration from murder mystery parties. So he said, “Okay, how do I pull all this together into a game?” which I thought was pretty cool.

Dave Young:

Love it. We all love games. Well, thanks for bringing this one, Stephen. I didn’t have a clue before this week.

Stephen Semple:

You may now want to play Clue, but you’ll be… I can hardly wait to hear your rendition of Miss Scarlet. That’s all I’m saying.

Dave Young:

Miss Scarlet, yes. Next time we’re together, let’s play.

Stephen Semple:

All right.

Dave Young:

Thanks, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:

Talk to you later.

Dave Young:

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