• #167: Clue – When Murder Becomes a Game

  • Aug 21 2024
  • Length: 14 mins
  • Podcast

#167: Clue – When Murder Becomes a Game

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  • 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. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So here's one of those. [JS Pest Control Ad] 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?
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