Big Game

TO THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE AND SELL IT, TRIVIAL PURSUIT IS NOT WAY TO SPEND A PLEASANT EVENING

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"WE'VE WORKED HARD to get here and now we're on a treadmill keeping up," says Scott Abbott. "You don't just cash in your chips and walk away." It is July 1984 and for the past 16 days, Abbott, Chris Haney, and Haney's brother John have been secluded in a room at the Ascot Inn in suburban Toronto, the vertical blinds drawn against the seductive summer sky. There they have been crafting their sixth set of 6,000 questions -- their second edition on general topics -- for players of Trivial Pursuit.

Abbott mans the computer, editing out questions that have appeared in earlier editions. Some of the new questions seem too obscure even for trivia buffs . . . Where can you find the 100,000th piano made by Steinway & Sons? (The White House). Others pass through without a smile from their creators . . . What chemical is most widely used to keep swimming pools clean? (Chlorine). "We're through lot of our richest material," says Chris Haney on an afternoon in which the drone of questions is punctuated by too many silences.

He is a big, rumpled man of 34, a high school dropout who later became photo editor for The Gazette in Montreal. He invented Trivial Pursuit with Abbott, 35, a trim former sports editor for Canadian Press, who is equally quick with a biting remark or an infectious laugh. Each owns 22% of the company they formed, Horn Abbot Ltd. Their partners, with 18% each, are John Haney, 38, a former hockey player, bit actor, and bookstore manager, and Ed Werner, 35, a lawyer who played hockey with John at Colgate University and in Europe.

After work when they gather in the bar across the hall, the flashes of humor characteristic of their game come frequently as they savor stories of past years and questions of past weeks. . . . Who ran unopposed in the 1984 Hawaiian Democratic Primary and finished second? ("We were going to put Fighting Fritz Mondale.")

They speak of the freedom their wealth has brought -- their company's royalties will, they say, "very conservatively" exceed $50 million this year. But earlier, closeted in a motel room beneath two imitation candelabra chandeliers, they seem bored. The pursuit of trivia has begun to look a lot likework.

"THIS PLANT CAN BE thought of as a big machine. It has a capacity geared for the games of Selchow & Righter -- Parcheesi and Scrabble. Well, Trivial Pursuit comes along and demands four times that, five times that. You say, 'Put on a night shift ' Well, we don't have room for supplies."

Bob Bohnenberger joined Selchow & Righter Co, the U.S. producer of Trivial Pursuit, 35 years ago as a bookkeeper. He is now vice-president of production at the Holbrook, Long Island, plant. "I don't have room for more than two days of boxes," he says. "I try to keep a week's supply of cards, a week's supply of boards, a week's supply of plastic. . . . It's not just numbers on a piece of paper. There's a tremendous amount of volume here."

The process looks deceptively simple. A stack of elegant-looking, navy blue setup boxes is piled at the head of a 45-foot conveyer belt. A worker opens a box and puts in a sheet of waxed paper. As the box passes down the line, other hands put in game platforms, two boxes of question cards, a bag of plastic pieces and a die, a square, double-folded playing board, and lastly, a code card and instruction sheet. The box is checked and closed. A machine wraps the box in shrink-film, and another worker carts the games away.

In February of this year, with Selchow & Righter producing 63,000 games of Trivial Pursuit a week, back orders had passed a million. By August, back orders had reached 11 million games, and sales projections surpassed 20 million.

To handle the load, Bohnenberger decided to contract out much of the manufacturing operation. "There is no way with our staff [almost doubled in a year, from 80 to 150] and with our plant [100,000 square feet] that we could have increased production capacity tenfold without doing what I did," he says. Indeed, the Trivial Pursuit games expected to be sold in the United States this year alone will consume more than 70 million pounds of a special paper stock; will require the printing, cutting, collating, and boxing of more than 20 billion cards; and will enlist 2,000 to 3,000 workers at more than two dozen suppliers.

To put all this in perspective, consider that, in 1983, toy manufacturers nationwide shipped a total of $201 million of children's and adult board games to retailers and wholesalers. This year, if Selchow & Righter meets its projections, it will sell very nearly twice that much of a single game. Its revenues are projected to jump from $40 million in 1983 to more than $400 million in 1984.

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