Both The Canadian Encyclopedia and the Strong National Museum of Play put sales of Trivial Pursuit above 100 million copies. The game began in 1979 with a conversation over a different board game. This timeline follows the story from those two pages and says so where their details differ; how a turn works also draws on Hasbro’s own instructions.
15 December 1979: a Scrabble night and a one-word answer
The Canadian Encyclopedia says the Canadian journalists Chris Haney and Scott Abbott devised the game on the afternoon and evening of 15 December 1979. According to the encyclopedia, the pair were playing Scrabble at Haney’s home in Montreal when Haney realised he had bought his sixth copy of the game, possibly because of missing pieces, and wondered aloud whether they could come up with a similarly successful game of their own. When he asked what it might be about, Abbott answered “trivia”. In a few hours they had the basic idea: a trivia board game with questions divided into six broad categories.
The encyclopedia adds that Haney and Abbott have refuted rumours that the game was created in a bar or while drunk, and it notes that a 1988 CBC television film depicted the invention in a very different setting.
The next two years: a toy fair, 32 investors and 6,000 questions
The Canadian Encyclopedia reports that the pair realised they needed to learn about designing, producing and marketing board games. They went to a Montreal toy fair posing as a reporter-photographer team working on a story, and Haney recalled leaving with “$10,000 worth of information”. Chris Haney’s brother John, a former professional hockey player, and John’s friend Ed Werner, a corporate lawyer, joined to help with the business side.
Money was not easy to find. The encyclopedia says the board game market was not especially dynamic in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with action figures dominating the toy market, and that some people thought the pair were con men because of a chain-letter scheme they had once run. They offered shares for a $1,000 investment and raised $40,000 from 32 investors. The encyclopedia says it took about two years to write the 6,000 initial questions and receive enough orders for the first production run.
1981 to 1984: from word of mouth to 20 million copies
The encyclopedia says the game was introduced in Canada in 1981 and made its inventors millionaires by 1982, almost entirely by word of mouth. By 1982 the Canadian production line was assembling 3,500 games a day, all sold as soon as they reached shelves, and 100,000 copies had sold in Canada by the end of that year. The United States followed in 1982, and by 1984 the encyclopedia reports 20 million copies sold.
The Strong museum fills in the publishing side. It says the pair began producing the game under their company Horn Abbott Ltd in 1981, with an initial print run of 1,100 copies, and licensed it in 1982 to the publisher Selchow and Righter, which sold 1.3 million copies in 1983 alone. Parker Brothers licensed the game in 1988, and Hasbro bought the full rights in 2008. The encyclopedia gives the price of that 2008 sale as $80 million.
Six colours, six categories: how a turn works
The encyclopedia describes a game for two to six players or teams, with an estimated playing time of roughly 80 to 90 minutes. Each player moves a token with six empty triangular spaces around the board and lands on tiles in one of six colours, each linked to a category:
- orange for sports and leisure
- yellow for history
- blue for geography
- pink for entertainment
- green for science and nature
- brown, later purple, for arts and literature
Hasbro’s Classic Edition instructions say that a correct answer on a coloured question space means another roll, and a wrong answer ends the turn. A coloured wedge is earned only by answering correctly on a category headquarters space. The encyclopedia gives a simpler account, and other editions may differ. The Strong museum adds that once a player has collected a wedge of each colour, they must land on the central space and answer a question in a category chosen by their opponents.
Rumours, rivals and two lawsuits
The encyclopedia says the game survived two lawsuits. In 1984 the author Fred L. Worth argued that he was owed money because Haney and Abbott had referred to trivia he had gathered in his own trivia books; the encyclopedia reports that the court rejected Worth’s claim. In a second case, which lasted 13 years, David Wall of Nova Scotia claimed he had given Haney the idea for the game, but a judge did not accept the claim.
After the board: editions, game shows and a daily quiz
The encyclopedia says at least 50 special editions had been published by 2014, along with arcade, home video and online versions, and television game shows in the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain. The Strong museum describes editions that remap the six colours onto new subjects, from a sports edition in 1983 to a Star Wars edition in 1997, and says other companies released their own question sets compatible with the game. It also mentions a game show that ran for one season in the 1990s and was revived in 2024 with host LeVar Burton, plus an online daily quiz from Hasbro.
The recognition has come in stages. The encyclopedia says the game was named to the Games Hall of Fame in 1993, and the Strong museum’s blog describes it as one of the 2026 inductees into the National Toy Hall of Fame. The encyclopedia quotes Time magazine calling it “the biggest phenomenon in game history”.
The bottom line
Both pages agree on the core of the story: Haney and Abbott invented the game in 1979, it went into production in 1981, and sales passed 100 million copies. They differ in emphasis, with the encyclopedia focusing on the inventors’ path and the museum on the publishing and the game’s later editions. Sales figures and dates here are as those two institutions report them, and the lawsuit outcomes are as the encyclopedia describes them.
Sources
- Trivial Pursuit, The Canadian Encyclopedia, article by Taylor C. Noakes, published 19 September 2024, read 27 October 2026 (thecanadianencyclopedia.ca)
- Nothing Trivial about It, The Strong National Museum of Play blog, by Chris Bensch, read 27 October 2026 (museumofplay.org)
- Trivial Pursuit Classic Edition game instructions, Hasbro (copyright 1981, 2016 Hasbro; PDF copy read 27 October 2026)
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