Pac-Man for Smart People

By RICHARD CORLISS

The creators of Trivial Pursuit roll out a sequel

One Los Angeles fan took the game with her on a Kenya safari. At President Reagan's ranch near Santa Barbara, visiting journalists play the game when not filing reports. An octet of New York trivia junkies spends every available weekend hour on the game. "We've played through till 4 a.m.," says Ringleader Holly Thorner, "then started again first thing in the morning. We've played at meals and eaten off the game board. When there was a power failure we played by candlelight. There's still wax on the board."

Not so much a board game, more a way of life--this is Trivial Pursuit, the hottest cardboard entertainment since Scrabble, a flash-flood fad that looks to become an agreeable long-term habit. And as millions of informaniacs from the Hamptons to the White House West were testing their trivia wits this summer, the three Canadians (two former journalists and a retired hockey goaltender) who dreamed up the game in 1979 were secreted in a motel on the outskirts of Toronto, crash-coursing the last 2,000 or so questions for the Genus II U.S. edition of Trivial Pursuit, due out next January. Scott Abbott and the brothers Chris and John Haney, multimillionaires and still in their mid-30s, could afford plusher accommodations, but, as Chris notes, "nobody bugs us, the phone doesn't ring, and we're only 20 feet from the motel bar." Strewn about the room are a globe, dozens of reference books and more than a few glasses of beer. In their rumpled clothes and their mood of heroic distraction, the young moguls look like harried grad students the night before finals.

Psst! They passed with honors. Trivial Pursuit has already sold more than 11 million copies in its Genus, Sports, Silver Screen and new Baby Boomer editions, bringing in $400 million for Selchow & Righter, which is now manufacturing a million games a week to meet the demand. This fall stores will be inundated with Trivial Pursuit calendars, cartoon books and pencil caddies. ABC-TV is planning to air a Trivial Pursuit special. And in January the Queen Elizabeth II sets sail on an eight-day Trivial Pursuit cruise, with Abbott and the Haneys aboard.

Success seems not to have spoiled the Trivial Trio; it has only increased their obsession with the money monster they created. Like proud parents with baby pictures, they push morsels of arcana on their visitors. "Who is the only U.S. President to have worn a Nazi uniform?" asks Chris Haney with an anarchic chortle. (Their answer: Ronald Reagan, in the 1942 movie Desperate Journey.) Then they turn back to their work, the Haneys calling out sample questions they have researched in advance, and Abbott, perched at the keyboard of a small computer, tinkering with the wording. ("I'm the only one who can chew gum and spell at the same time," he explains.) The choice of questions to be included depends entirely on their creators' reaction to them. "We trust each other's opinions," Chris says. "If everyone laughs, it's a winner. If half the room laughs and the other half is mad, it's probably still a winner because it's controversial."

The Pursuit team has three private categories into which most questions fall. The hardest ones are "stoppers," designed to trip up the trivia fiends. "In one edition," Abbott recalls, "we asked what hospital room number Ed Norton of The Honeymooners stayed in after being injured in a sewer explosion. Nobody in his right mind would know that. But somebody will." At the other extreme are the "mongies" (for mongoloid), "for people who are brain-dead at 1 in the morning," says Chris, "and they'll still get them right." Most questions, though, fall into "the broad middle ground, where any player feels he has a fair shot," says Chris. The best of these questions are the "snappers," short punchy questions with a kick. "Trivia," says Abbott, "isn't 'Who is Vanessa Williams?' Trivia is 'What's the name of the girl she posed with in all those pictures?'"

If Trivial Pursuit has suffered less from overexposure than the former Miss America, there are good reasons. First, the game is fun for more than one: you can be intellectually humiliated by all your friends all night long. Players must also exercise that most traditional of game skills, brain-mouth coordination; this is Pac-Man for smart people. Finally, the game exploits the baby-boom generation's love of disconnected facts. For anyone who came of age amid the blitz of ten-second commercials, three-sentence radio news reports, rock videos, the burgeoning soft-news industry and movies that are all special effects and incoherent plots--for anyone, that is, who has been trained to digest random bits of information the size and nutritional value of Pretz-l Nuggets--Trivial Pursuit is like condensed mother's milk.

As their empire has expanded, Abbott and the Haneys have hired a fact checker, to avoid repeating such mistakes as crediting Aldous Huxley with coining the phrase "brave new world" (it was Shakespeare). And with this marketing phenomenon have come the galloping imitations. More than 40 trivia boards are now available, from a Trivial Pursuit prototype, Jeopardy, to games sponsored by TIME, People and TV Guide. There are quizzes on Bible history and rock music, and the inevitable Sexual Trivia, with its searching questions on sperm counts, necrophilia and tribal puberty rites.

None of these games have so far led the public to beat a trivial retreat from the one and only. Nor are they likely to as long as its creators can keep tickling the cerebrum with flashes of wit and macabre whimsy. Back at the motel, Chris Haney rehearses a question from Genus II: "What did Stan the Wonderdog, the first dog in Spain to be fitted with contact lenses, not see on his first day wearing them?" Abbott chimes in with the answer: "The car that killed him." --By Richard Corliss. Reported by Adam Cohen/Toronto

With reporting by Adam Cohen/Toronto