NEW YORK—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Sept. 24, 2002—Today, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani took center stage to lead the celebration of the TRIVIAL PURSUIT game's 20th anniversary at Toys "R" Us Times Square. The festivities included soccer champion, Mia Hamm and former dot.com icon, The Sock Puppet, as mystery guests, who with Mr. Giuliani, broke into comedic banter onstage at the international flagship store for Toys "R" Us. The event closed with the Village People's performance of "YMCA," which brought the crowd to their feet. These notables and thousands of others from the past 20 years are part of Hasbro, Inc.'s new TRIVIAL PURSUIT 20th ANNIVERSARY EDITION game.

   It was not, as we say, "an instant hit". There was, in fact, a moment when the Canadian brothers who invented the game realized that, mathematically, there was no way in hell they could break even. This is when they turned to their friends and asked them to buy stock in their nerdy venture. Even with their friend's annoying Canadian money behind it, the brothers were hosed. But like all great Canadian business success stories, it wasn't until a big American company—Parker Brothers who was later acquired by Hasbro, Inc.—bought their product that the real bacon came in.
   And so it began: the history of Trivial Pursuit, like so many other unlikely successes, joining the ranks of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics and MTV's Jackass.
   It's hard to remember a time when Trivial Pursuit was not with us; it's also hard to remember when trivia was not an everyday part of our intellectual life. In fact, it seems that trivia might have, during the long dark night that was the 1980s, become synonymous with knowledge.

Question: What former New York Mayor's last name appears in the spell check of Microsoft Word?
Answer: Giuliani (Rudolph)

How does one exercise the intellect? The New York Times crossword puzzle? The word jumble next to Marmaduke in the Post-Gazette? Inviting the Mormon missionaries in for tea?
   Not all of us have the IQ to attend MENSA parties. So how does one become an intellectual? Show up at the neighborhood art gallery and drink free beer? Hang out around the record shop and inquire after hard-to-find Ornette Coleman recordings?
   What is the intellect anyway? That which compels us to think global yet drink local? Is it that we see the intellect as some have seen the consciousness, a black box that only allows us to know what goes in and what comes out?
   Trivia can, at times, distance the well-read intellectual from the couch potato, but the couch potato fairs well at the latest edition of Trivial Pursuit, the 20th Anniversary Edition, because the questions survey a knowledge-base that goes no deeper than box-office Hollywood film, network-television sit-com and drama, CNN-spun news, and SportsCenter's Sunday Conversation. What made the original Genus edition venerable was that the questions quizzed us on things that we might have learned in high school if we were paying any attention (but probably not since Lee Iacocca and the development of the assembly line received more attention in the 1980s high school history classroom than the Third Reich). Now, thanks to this brand new edition of the steady old stand-by in the cadet blue box, we no longer have to feel embarrassed for our engineering or business school friends who don't know the answer to such grimace-inducing questions as Who wrote The Great Gatsby>? or what was Edward Albee's first full-length play? This version of the game is more democratic, a reflection of the millennial interest in celebrating what makes our civilization great: moving pictures and media conglomerates.

Question: True or False, "Blowjobs" is recognized by Microsoft Word's spellchecker?
Answer: True

Can it be that the game is getting easier because the world is less confusing to us, less baffling, less complex and awe-inspiring? Can we, as a civilization, after so many years of sleepless nights and ridiculously large microwave ovens and DOS 6.0 and Larry Birds and Michael Jordans and magna cum laudes in business administration and gym memberships shout into the big black night, "Veni, vidi, vici"?
   The Genus edition has a healthy preoccupation with Japan, Russia, and Ronald Reagan—all three of which have ceased to be a threat. The new edition has a thing for Friends, Seinfeld, and Jon-Benet Ramsey, two of which are still around but no one really cares. A comedian once said that our government scandals aren't nearly as murky and labyrinthine as before, and our wars are as antiseptic and soulless as Atari 2600. Genus reflects a country's fascination with Watergate and Vietnam, while the new version bows to blowjobs and smart bombs.
   So are we going to hell in a Martha Stewart hand basket? In all likelihood, no. Is the world less complex? We wish. Are we our own worst enemy? Go to the middle of the board and await your next question.

The World Trade Center
To Catch A Thief
Spiro T. Agnew
Casino Royale
Salad dressing
Cassius Clay

Twelve
The Trumpet
Hiroshima
Z
Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player

Tokyo
Deliverance
Milhouse
To arms, to arms
Hearing
The Piña Colada

West Berlin
Mrs. Robinson
Ronald Reagan
Blonde
Meltdown
Two under par on a hole

It could be a poem in a journal of post-modern literature. It could be a writing prompt given to an intro to creative writing class. But as you might have guessed, these are the answers, verbatim, from four cards appearing in the Genus edition, and they form, in a gestalt way, a picture of a world.
   The official Trivial Pursuit Web site declares that the newest edition covers everything "from the Berlin Wall to Silicon Valley." Is there irony in this juxtaposition or is it just our own Democro-centric, Capitalo-centric view of history that causes such claims? Are the fall of Silicon Valley and the Enron swindle watershed moments in the history of our country? Is an impending war with Iraq nothing more than a political rope-a-dope to distract the American people from the nation's anemic economy? These are questions that political scientists and historians salivate over. These are the questions that will never be found in any trivia game. They are more likely to be found on local nightly news polls and the home page of America Online.

Question: What now scandalized power broker who bilked shareholders out of millions appears in the Microsoft Word spell check when you type the name "Elron"?
Answer: Enron

When I was a kid, about eleven or twelve, I didn't know any of the answers but I would admonish the adults around the table for their poor etiquette: not putting the cards back in the box the correct way, calling the pies "cheeses". It made me so upset. Marylin Monroe? Auschwitz? Jesse Owens? Pontius Pilate (a name I didn't know that I knew until it was asked in the form of a question)? How did they know this stuff? Sitting around the oak table in my grandmother's house playing while the beer cans accumulated and the snow piled up and the car engines warmed to take us to midnight Mass, I can remember feeling a sense of awe at the knowledge the adults displayed. I remember feeling so useless unless I was the one asking the questions.
   After Mass we would resume play but never with the same verve as before. We never, ever finished those games. My uncles were too drunk. Everyone was tired. It was just a game, after all. And I would drift off to sleep with names and places in my head—answers separated from their questions: Bikini Atoll, Khrushchev, the Louvre, Henry Ford, the Tropic of Cancer, Babe Ruth, Knute Rockne, the Four Horsemen, Henry Kissinger....

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