Inside John Haney’s Caledon farmhouse, under a clock in his “man cave,” hangs a photograph of three siblings on a Spanish street, caught in a moment just before heading to the beach to write questions.
Loads and loads of questions.
It was 1980, and John, the eldest, his brother Chris and their sister Mary were turning the world around them into trivia for a board game idea that Chris and his friend Scott Abbott had sketched on a piece of paper in a Montreal kitchen the previous winter.
Chris and Mary are now gone. The questions, numbering in the thousands, remain.
Trivial Pursuit became a global phenomenon, selling 100 million copies in more than 26 countries and 17 languages. It inspired a memorable “Seinfeld” episode, and the cast of the “Big Chill” played it between takes. Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand sent thank-you notes on receiving copies and Princess Margaret reportedly tossed the game into the air after getting an answer wrong. It spawned more than 50 versions, from “Friends” to the Beatles, and proved a windfall for early investors who saw a $1,000 stake grow to $1 million.
That history is etched into Haney’s man cave, where collectible editions share space with photos of family and the game’s four creators: the Haney brothers, Abbott and Ed Werner.
“I’m surrounded by my past here,” says Haney. “It’s almost a shrine, which my wife tolerates.”
At 80, he is a new author and considering his legacy.
“My Trivial Pursuits: The Inside Story of the Board Game That Conquered the World” is the first personal account of the game’s creation. It’s a story, he says, that has taken him 10 years to write, and one he wanted to leave for his four children and four grandchildren.
“It means the world to me they now know the story behind the game and my part in it.”
At the heart of that story is Chris, who called John in 1979 with an idea for a game, setting the whole enterprise in motion. Chris died in 2010, his ashes scattered on the sixth hole at The Devil’s Pulpit, a nearby golf course he and Abbott built with their Trivial Pursuit earnings.
“Every time I play, I say hello and often drop a bottle of Heineken on his gravestone,” says Haney. “I think I’m jinxed because I can never get it in the fairway where he is; I’m always in the woods.”
Lately, Haney has been thinking about tucking a copy of his new book into his golf cart.
“I should just show it to him, hold it up in the air. Maybe he’s out there. I hope he is.”
What follows is an edited conversation.
What do people constantly get wrong about Trivial Pursuit’s origin story?
Everyone thinks we were American. It drives me crazy. It was an all-Canadian effort, one conceived in Montreal over a game of Scrabble, with Chris and Scott coming up with the lightbulb moment.
How did you turn everyday observations into interesting game questions?
Out of necessity, needing to write 6,000 questions. We’d walk into a bar, which we did quite often, and I would start looking at the liquor labels. I could see a bat on a bottle of Bacardi. So that would be a question, “What mammal is pictured on a bottle of Bacardi?” Then I’d look up bats: Do bats have eyes? It just went from one thing to another. My mind warped into that kind of mindset. Still does.
In the book, you reveal your then sister-in-law ultimately named the game.
Chris came up with Trivia Pursuit. And Sarah was standing there and said, why don’t you put an L on that? It’ll sound much better. That was a second sort of light bulb moment.
Your first sale was two boxes on consignment at a tobacconist in Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1981. When did you know the game was going to be a success?
A store in St. Catharines called Rahman’s bought about 24 games, and the guy said, you know, you guys are going to be big man. I said, “Give me a break, we’re just trying to break even.” We went from that to being mentioned by Johnny Carson at the 1984 Academy Awards when he said the winners would be a question in next year’s Trivial Pursuit. That was the ultimate moment we knew we had made it.
Trivial Pursuit is built on the premise that memory and recall is power; it’s how you win the game. At age 80, what does memory mean to you?
Memory is sounds, smells. A lot of times it relates to trivia questions: I can look at a bird and think of a question we wrote about a bird. It’s an odd brain I have now. Chris and I wrote upwards of 30,000 questions in the first five editions. That can blow out a lot of neurons, but it also creates memories stimulated by, sounds, movies, baseball scores.
Is it still fair to play the game with you?
Not really. We play at Christmas. (The kids) scramble to get me on their team, but I can’t get the new questions. I have no idea what’s going on in pop culture anymore. We were sort of experts in pop culture at one time, but now we’ve been passed like a freight train by AI, Google, and time and life.
Smartphones and AI have closed the knowledge gap the game was built on, and yet people are still packing pubs for trivia nights. Is Trivial Pursuit a relic or did it tap into a sense of human curiosity and play that technology can never replace?
I think we’re a relic, but we’re still relevant. Bar trivia is making a huge comeback — you see all kinds of organized events. In our day, none of it was organized: You’d walk into a bar and someone would start shooting sports questions across the table.
Are board games still relevant today? I’d like to think so. Trivial Pursuit has gone through various iterations including computer games, but the board game itself is still being sold, and I’d like to think families are still sitting around the table playing it.
We tapped into (something that was there). We didn’t coin the phrase, but we certainly took pop culture and put it in a box.
You write that when Hasbro bought the game in 2008, your fear was that you’d end up like Lizzie Magie, who invented the precursor to Monopoly but isn’t remembered for it. Was that fear warranted?
When we sold it for $80 million (U.S.), we had already sold upwards of 50 million games so we were doing quite well. We were glad to see our baby leave the nest. Hasbro has all the rights, owns all the parts, pieces, everything. We have zero input. But it’s nice to walk into the Best Buy here in Orangeville and see the latest version. There’s our little baby sitting on the shelf.
We’re not recognized in the street, never were. Young folks haven’t even heard of the game. We’ve transcended the need for our egos to be massaged.
(But) it makes me feel good that I wrote the book and maybe that will twig some interest.
Four of you created the game. Would the others have told a different story?
They have their own version, of course, but they haven’t written it; I have. We sort of live our own lives now: Scott’s up in North Bay; Ed’s down in the St. Catharines area. We don’t really see much of each other anymore, which is kind of sad. I wonder if Chris had lived whether we would have done it together. That would have been neat.
What do you think he would have thought of the book?
He was a very dark person; you couldn’t read him, even as a brother, but I’d like to think he would be thrilled: “Way to go, John, you’re the greatest older brother I’ve ever met. Well, the only one.” Hahaha.
Is there a question from the original edition you’re most proud of? And one you wish you could take back?
The one that always sticks in my mind, and it’s ridiculous, was: Was Humpty Dumpty pushed? The answer we put in was No. He was. Anyone who wants to know or care what the proper answer was can look in the book. We had 120 errors in the first edition. We corrected them in the second but it was inevitable with all the questions we wrote. I wouldn’t take any back.
I do want to tell you my best and latest trivia question: What American university did Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney represent in 1985, when in his only varsity appearance as a hockey goaltender, he stopped five shots in half a period against Colgate University, where Trivial Pursuit co-creator John Haney had starred in goal 15 years earlier?
Answer: Harvard.
