Trump, Rodman and Kato

In the annals of social interaction, Trivial Pursuit is a very big deal. Word and board games had existed before 1982, when the brain tickler in a box became widely available, and of course people had gathered together for an evening of conversation before then. But no board game created for adults had ever become such a phenomenal success, even among those who didn’t play cards or chess and who thought children’s games like Monopoly were insomnia cures.

Although its impact on social life at the end of the 20th century was not as profound as that of the AIDS virus or the invention of e-mail, Trivial Pursuit did start its own little revolution, fought by a gregarious army of competitors willing to take off their Walkman earphones, turn off their computers and leave the cathode ray glow of their TV sets to play games designed for groups of grown-ups. And now there’s a 20th anniversary edition of the game that could lure a new generation away from their Palm Pilots, iPods and personal DVD players with questions about Nikes known by name, deposed communist leaders and Max Headroom.

Trivial Pursuit is fast, irreverent, simultaneously smart and silly. Two to six players move around a wheel by answering questions in six categories. Whoever’s seemingly normal mind is actually crammed with minutiae about sports, history, geography, science, literature, and arts and entertainment wins. Each version of the game contains about 4,000 questions on cards that are rotated in play, so enthusiasts can spend a lot of time huddling around a Trivial Pursuit board before hearing a question twice.

The mechanics of the game don’t begin to convey its charm. Who cares whether you know what bodily function can reach the breakneck speed of 100 miles an hour? Considering the possibilities is hilarious. And if you guess that a sneeze has extraordinary velocity and therefore move on to the next category, so much the better.

Trivial Pursuit mania peaked in 1984, when more than 20 million games were purchased in North America. What was its unprecedented sales record? It grossed $1.4 million on 40 million units in 36 months. Until then, any game that sold 1 million a year was considered a hit. Today, Trivial Pursuit is played in 26 countries and 17 languages, and nearly 80 million games have been sold throughout the world. More than a dozen editions have been issued, including special ones with questions devoted to movies, sports or topics dear to the hearts of a particular constituency, such as “Star Wars” fanatics or baby boomers. The 20th anniversary edition features questions that will remind those old enough to remember the ‘80s and ‘90s what a long, strange trip it’s been.

Remember Joey Buttafuoco? “Fantasy Island”? Smurfs and PacMan? You had to be there, and if you were, you just might know “What ‘Party of Five’ star prompted Mademoiselle reporter Suzan Colon to gush: ‘She let me feel them, they’re real, end of discussion’ ?” “Party of Five” is dead, as is Mademoiselle magazine. But they linger at the trivia party, where the ghosts of history and pop culture enjoy one last dance under the disco ball.

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Journalists’ brainchild

Scott Abbott, sports editor of the Canadian Press in Montreal, and Chris Haney, photo editor of the Montreal Gazette, were housemates in 1979, when they decided to invent a game. “The fact that we were journalists was key,” Abbott says. “We were used to facts and information. We had spent a lot of time sitting in taverns or newsrooms ruminating about weird facts or asking each other questions. A command of trivia is a way for true sports fans to prove they have a depth of knowledge about sports.”

Once they’d created a prototype, they recruited two friends to help them raise capital and market their invention. In three years they went through $100,000, self-publishing and selling games in Canada before finding a big American company that believed in Trivial Pursuit. “The name was really important to the game’s success,” Abbott says. “If it had been called Quiz 4000, it wouldn’t have been as good.”

How to play can be explained in less time than it takes to decimate a platter of hors d’oeuvres. Pursuit of victory may be trivial, but it’s also curiously addictive. The very nature of trivia is that it usually isn’t studied, rather absorbed by a kind of osmosis. The person who knows the answer to “How many plays did Shakespeare write?” is probably as surprised as anyone that 37 popped into mind, and longs to repeat that heady experience. As obscure as many of the questions appear to be, their scope is so broad that everyone knows or can guess some answers.

“People often have different strengths as players,” says John Chandler, senior vice president of marketing for Hasbro Games. “You could find yourself playing with people who are very worldly and learned, but they don’t know the first thing about ‘Seinfeld.’ And a person could not know much about science or literature, but if they come up with the necessary sports fact to answer the final question, they’re the hero of their team.”

Many games expose sore losers and bullies, and Trivial Pursuit has been known to reveal its share of character traits. While shopping for a distributor for their brainchild, Abbott and Haney were rejected by a number of companies that said the game would make people feel stupid. Turning down Trivial Pursuit is an executive decision on a par with not backing EBay, but such reasoning wasn’t entirely off the mark. The game didn’t sell well in Japan, some think, because the Japanese consider it bad manners to go to someone’s house and beat them at something, especially brainpower.

Friendships have been forged and lost over Trivial Pursuit. Easygoing folks just play for fun. The intellectually vain refuse to participate, not wanting gaps in their knowledge made public. Know-it-alls who really do can find their popularity suffers.

Gary Johnson, now senior producer and head writer of “Jeopardy!,” enjoyed playing at family gatherings when he was a writer for the original “Hollywood Squares.” “I’m pretty hard to beat, and a lot of times people didn’t want to play with me,” he says. “There would be teams of two or three set up, and they’d make me play alone.”

Trivial Pursuit rode into the Information Age on a gust of galloping media penetration and celebrity journalism. “The fact that we live in a time when celebrities are exposed, dissected, celebrated and castigated on a daily basis is helpful to this kind of game,” Abbott says. “It wouldn’t have worked in the Middle Ages, when the locals never got more than a few miles from home and didn’t have TV.”

It was the right amusement for a time when information wasn’t just power, it was fun. “Late Show With David Letterman” also debuted in 1982, with a sense of humor similar to the one that made the game’s questions such knee slappers. A taste for absurdity, as well as an ear for double entendres, is needed to write questions like “What Pennsylvania institution changed its name to Arcadia University in 2001, after Web filters began blocking its old moniker?” (Once you hear that “Beaver College” is the answer, will you ever forget?)

Spy Magazine, another cultural phenomenon cherished by those with an appreciation of the arcane, came out in 1986. “The access to information about everything and everybody, access to gushes of data, has increased since the Web has become part of our lives,” says Kurt Andersen, one of the founders of Spy. “The sensibility of the magazine, its obsessiveness, all these connections that we made and the density of information in it was a Web thing before there was a Web.”

It isn’t a Trivial Pursuit question: Which came first, the quickening pace of technological and cultural change or the taste for entertainment infused with a passion for data? Yet it all happened in the ‘80s, and it continues. A full-time staff of five writer-researchers works at Hasbro Games’ headquarters in Massachusetts, keeping a bank of questions filled, ready for the next edition.

Thanks to their diligence, a sports nut or a Cal Ripken Jr. fan can become trivia king for a night when asked: “What infielder was named MVP of baseball’s All Star Game during both Bush presidencies?”

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Who wants to be a brainiac?

A sampling of questions from the 20th anniversary edition:

Global View: What holiday do trigger-happy Bavarians ring in with a Weihnachtsschutzen salute of gunfire from ceremonial pistols?

Sound & Screen: What trash-TV host popularized the expression “Zip it, fathead” in the 1980s?

News: What U.S. senator’s announcement of his 2002 retirement inspired pollster Sam Watts to quip: “I guess the 19th century is over now”?

The Written Word: What society queen limited the premiere issue of her Living in Style magazine to just 58 photos of herself?

Innovations: What’s in your hand if you’re clutching a prized Mirado Black Warrior?

Game Time: What freestyler is featured on the first BMX game available for the PS2, GameCube and Xbox?

News: What rental company got free publicity in 2000 from endless TV news shots of its van lugging ballots from Miami to Tallahassee?

Innovations: Which malady inspires the most online searches -- allergies, erectile dysfunction or hemorrhoids?

News: What Republican was chided by his dad for not having “the greatest smarts in the world” and for focusing in college on “booze and broads”?

Sound & Screen: What do the Chinese call Chinese food, according to Chandler on “Friends”?

Answers: Christmas; Morton Downey Jr.; Jesse Helms; Ivana Trump; a pencil; Dave Mirra; Ryder; allergies; Dan Quayle; food.

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Where are they now?

Some of the people and fads of the last 20 years seem to have been born to be Trivial Pursuit questions:

Joey Buttafuoco

“Fantasy Island”

Suzanne Somers and the ThighMaster

Anna Nicole Smith

The Village People

Chia Pet

Hulk Hogan

Kato Kaelin

Tanning beds

The Spice Girls

Tonya Harding

Smurfs

John Tesh

Paula Jones

Donald Trump

PacMan

The dancing baby from “Ally McBeal”

Dolly the cloned sheep

The Pets.com sock puppet

Dennis Rodman