Brand
A brand is an overall experience of a customer that distinguishes an organization or product from its rivals in the eyes of the customer. Brands are used in business and advertising. Name brands are sometimes distinguished from generic or store brands; the practice of branding is thought to have begun with the ancient Egyptians, who were known to have engaged in livestock branding as early as 2,700 BCE. Branding was used to differentiate one person’s cattle from another's by means of a distinctive symbol burned into the animal’s skin with a hot branding iron. If a person stole any of the cattle, anyone else who saw the symbol could deduce the actual owner. However, the term has been extended to mean a strategic personality for a product or company, so that ‘brand’ now suggests the values and promises that a consumer may perceive and buy into. Over time, the practice of branding objects extended to a broader range of packaging and goods offered for sale including oil, wine and fish sauce. Branding in terms of painting a cow with symbols or colors at flea markets was considered to be one of the oldest forms of the practice.
Branding is a set of marketing and communication methods that help to distinguish a company or products from competitors, aiming to create a lasting impression in the minds of customers. The key components that form a brand's toolbox include a brand’s identity, brand communication, brand awareness, brand loyalty, various branding strategies. Many companies believe that there is little to differentiate between several types of products in the 21st century, therefore branding is one of a few remaining forms of product differentiation. Brand equity is the measurable totality of a brand's worth and is validated by assessing the effectiveness of these branding components; as markets become dynamic and fluctuating, brand equity is a marketing technique to increase customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, with side effects like reduced price sensitivity. A brand is, in essence, a promise to its customers of what they can expect from products and may include emotional as well as functional benefits.
When a customer is familiar with a brand, or favours it incomparably to its competitors, this is when a corporation has reached a high level of brand equity. Special accounting standards have been devised to assess brand equity. In accounting, a brand defined as an intangible asset, is the most valuable asset on a corporation’s balance sheet. Brand owners manage their brands to create shareholder value, brand valuation is an important management technique that ascribes a monetary value to a brand, allows marketing investment to be managed to maximize shareholder value. Although only acquired brands appear on a company's balance sheet, the notion of putting a value on a brand forces marketing leaders to be focused on long term stewardship of the brand and managing for value; the word ‘brand’ is used as a metonym referring to the company, identified with a brand. Marque or make are used to denote a brand of motor vehicle, which may be distinguished from a car model. A concept brand is a brand, associated with an abstract concept, like breast cancer awareness or environmentalism, rather than a specific product, service, or business.
A commodity brand is a brand associated with a commodity. The word, derives from its original and current meaning as a firebrand, a burning piece of wood; that word comes from the Old High German and Old English byrnan and brinnan via Middle English as birnan and brond. Torches were used to indelibly mark items such as furniture and pottery, to permanently burn identifying marks into the skin of slaves and livestock; the firebrands were replaced with branding irons. The marks themselves took on the term and came to be associated with craftsmen's products. Through that association, the term acquired its current meaning. Branding and labelling have an ancient history. Branding began with the practice of branding livestock in order to deter theft. Images of the branding of cattle occur in ancient Egyptian tombs dating to around 2,700 BCE. Over time, purchasers realised that the brand provided information about origin as well as about ownership, could serve as a guide to quality. Branding was adapted by farmers and traders for use on other types of goods such as pottery and ceramics.
Forms of branding or proto-branding emerged spontaneously and independently throughout Africa and Europe at different times, depending on local conditions. Seals, which acted as quasi-brands, have been found on early Chinese products of the Qin Dynasty. Identity marks, such as stamps on ceramics, were used in ancient Egypt. Diana Twede has argued that the "consumer packaging functions of protection and communication have been necessary whenever packages were the object of transactions", she has shown that amphorae used in Mediterranean trade between 1,500 and 500 BCE exhibited a wide variety of shapes and markings, which consumers used to glean information about the type of goods and the quality. Systematic use of stamped labels dates from around the fourth century BCE. In a pre-literate society, the shape of the amphora and its pictorial markings conveyed information about the contents, region of o
Frogger
Frogger is a 1981 arcade game developed by Konami. It was licensed for North American distribution by Sega-Gremlin and worldwide by Sega itself, it is regarded as a classic from the golden age of video arcade games, noted for its novel gameplay and theme. The object of the game is to direct frogs to their homes one by one by crossing a busy road and navigating a river full of hazards. Frogger was positively followed by several clones and sequels. By 2005, Frogger in its various home video game incarnations had sold 20 million copies worldwide, including 5 million in the United States; the game found its way including television and music. The objective of the game is to guide a frog to each of the empty "frog homes" at the top of the screen; the game starts depending on the settings used by the operator. Losing them all ends the game; the only player control is the 4 direction joystick used to navigate the frog. Frogger is two players alternating; the frog starts at the bottom of the screen, which contains a horizontal road occupied by cars and bulldozers speeding along it.
The player must guide the frog between opposing lanes of traffic to avoid becoming roadkill, which results in a loss of a life. After the road, there is a median strip separating the two major parts of the screen; the upper portion of the screen consists of a river with logs and turtles, all moving horizontally across the screen. By jumping on swiftly moving logs and the backs of turtles and alligators the player can guide their frog to safety; the player must avoid snakes and the open mouths of alligators. A brightly colored lady frog may be carried for bonus points; the top of the screen contains five "frog homes," which are the destinations for each frog. These sometimes contain lurking alligators; the game's opening tune is the first verse of a Japanese children's song called Inu No Omawarisan. Other Japanese tunes that are played during gameplay include the themes to the anime Hana no Ko Lunlun and Araiguma Rascal; the United States release kept the opening song intact and added "Yankee Doodle."
Softline in 1982 stated that "Frogger has earned the ominous distinction of being'the arcade game with the most ways to die.'" There are many different ways to lose a life, including: being hit by or running into a road vehicle, jumping into the river's water, running into snakes, otters or an alligator's jaws in the river, jumping into a home invaded by an alligator, staying on top of a diving turtle until it has submerged, riding a log, alligator, or turtle off the side of the screen, jumping into a home occupied by a frog, jumping into the side of a home or the bush, or running out of time. When all five frogs are in their homes, the game progresses to the next level with increased difficulty. After five levels, the game gets easier before yet again getting progressively harder after each level; the player has 30 seconds. Every forward step scores 10 points, every frog arriving safely home scores 50 points. 10 points are awarded per each unused 1⁄2 second of time. Guiding a lady frog home or eating a fly scores 200 points each, when all 5 frogs reach home to end the level the player earns 1,000 points.
A single bonus frog is 20,000 points. 99,990 points is the maximum high score. Frogger was ported to many contemporary home systems. Several platforms were capable of accepting both ROM cartridges and magnetic media, so systems such as the Commodore 64 received multiple versions of the game. Sierra On-Line gained the magnetic media rights and sublicensed them to developers who published for systems not supported by Sierra; because of that the Atari 2600 received multiple releases: a cartridge and a cassette for the Supercharger. Sierra released disk and/or tape ports for the C64, Apple II, the original 128K Macintosh, IBM PC, Atari 2600 Supercharger, as well as cartridge versions for the TRS-80 Color Computer Parker Brothers received the license from Sega for cartridge versions and produced cartridge ports of Frogger for the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, ColecoVision, Atari 8-bit family, TI-99/4A, VIC-20, Commodore 64. Parker Brothers sold three million cartridges, it was the company's most successful first-year product, beating the sales and revenues of its previous best-seller, Merlin.
Coleco released stand-alone Mini-Arcade tabletop versions of Frogger, along with Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, sold three million units combined. Frogger was ported to the 1983 Gakken Compact Vision TV Boy as one of the 6 launch titles. Ed Driscoll reviewed the Atari VCS version of Frogger in The Space Gamer No. 58. Driscoll commented that, "All in all, if you liked the arcade version, this should save you a lot of quarters; the price is in line with most cartridges. It proves that Atari isn't the only one making home versions of the major arcade games for the VCS."Danny Goodman of Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games wrote in 1983 that the Atari 2600 version of Frogger, "is one of the most detailed translations I have seen", noting the addition of the wraparound screen. In 2013, Entertainment Weekly named Frogger
Video game crash of 1983
The video game crash of 1983 was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985 in America. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of game consoles and available games, waning interest in console games in favor of personal computers. Revenues peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983 fell to around $100 million by 1985. The crash was a serious event which abruptly ended what is retrospectively considered the second generation of console video gaming in North America. Lasting about two years, the crash shook the then-booming industry, led to the bankruptcy of several companies producing home computers and video game consoles in the region. Analysts of the time expressed doubts about the long-term viability of video game consoles and software; the North American video game console industry recovered a few years mostly due to the widespread success of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. Prior to 1982, the most significant home console was the Atari VCS.
The Atari VCS was launched in 1977. In 1980, Atari's licensed version of Space Invaders from Taito became the console's killer application. Spurred by the success of the Atari VCS, other consoles were introduced, both from Atari and other companies: Atari 5200, ColecoVision, Odyssey² and Intellivision. In addition to this and Coleco created devices that allowed them to play Atari 2600 games on their consoles; each of these consoles had its own library of games produced by the console maker, many had large libraries of games produced by third-party developers. In 1982, analysts noticed trends of saturation, mentioning that the amount of new software coming in will only allow a few big hits, that retailers had too much floor space for systems, along with price drops for home computers could result in an industry shakeup. In addition, the rapid growth of the video game industry led to an increased demand for video games, but which the manufacturers over-projected. An analyst for Goldman Sachs had stated in 1983 that the demand for video games was up 100% from 1982, but the manufacturing output increased by 175%, creating a surplus in the market.
Raymond Kassar, the CEO of Atari, had recognized in 1982 that there would become a point of saturation for the industry, but did not expect this to occur until about half of American households had a video game console. In 1979, Atari unveiled the Atari 400 and 800 computers, built around a chipset meant for use in a game console, which retailed for the same price as their respective names. In 1981, IBM introduced the IBM 5150 PC with a $1,565 base price, while Sinclair Research introduced its low-end ZX81 microcomputer for £70. By 1982, new desktop computer designs were providing better color graphics and sound than game consoles and personal computer sales were booming; the TI 99/4A and the Atari 400 were both at $349, the Tandy Color Computer sold at $379, Commodore International had just reduced the price of the VIC-20 to $199 and the C64 to $499. Because computers had more memory and faster processors than a console, they permitted more sophisticated games. A 1984 compendium of reviews of Atari 8-bit software used 198 pages for games compared to 167 for all other software types.
Home computers could be used for tasks such as word processing and home accounting. Games were easier to distribute, since they could be sold on floppy disks or cassette tapes instead of ROM cartridges; this opened the field to a cottage industry of third-party software developers. Writeable storage media allowed players to save games in progress, a useful feature for complex games, not available on the consoles of the era. In 1982, a price war began between Commodore and Texas Instruments, home computers became as inexpensive as video-game consoles. Dan Gutman, founder in 1982 of Video Games Player magazine, recalled in 1987 that "People asked themselves,'Why should I buy a video game system when I can buy a computer that will play games and do so much more?'" The Boston Phoenix stated in September 1983 about the cancellation of the Intellivision III, "Who was going to pay $200-plus for a machine that could only play games?" Commodore explicitly targeted video game players. Spokesman William Shatner asked in VIC-20 commercials "Why buy just a video game from Atari or Intellivision?", stating that "unlike games, it has a real computer keyboard" yet "plays great games too".
Commodore's ownership of chip fabricator MOS Technology allowed manufacture of integrated circuits in-house, so the VIC-20 and C64 sold for much lower prices than competing home computers. "I've been in retailing 30 years and I have never seen any category of goods get on a self-destruct pattern like this", a Service Merchandise executive told The New York Times in June 1983. The price war was so severe that in September Coleco CEO Arnold Greenberg welcomed rumors of an IBM'Peanut' home computer b
Scrabble
Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles bearing a single letter onto a board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns, be included in a standard dictionary or lexicon; the name is a trademark of Mattel in most of the world, but of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada. The game is available in 29 languages. There are around 4,000 Scrabble clubs around the world; the game is played by two to four players on a square board with a 15×15 grid of cells, each of which accommodates a single letter tile. In official club and tournament games, play is between two players or between two teams each of which collaborates on a single rack; the board is marked with "premium" squares, which multiply the number of points awarded: eight dark red "triple-word" squares, 17 pale red "double-word" squares, of which one, the center square, is marked with a star or other symbol.
In 2008, Hasbro changed the colors of the premium squares to orange for TW, red for DW, blue for DL, green for TL, but the original premium square color scheme is still preferred for Scrabble boards used in tournaments. In an English-language set, the game contains 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and a point value ranging from 1 to 10; the number of points for each lettered tile is based on the letter's frequency in standard English. The game has two blank tiles that are unmarked and carry no point value; the blank tiles can be used as substitutes for any letter. Other language sets use different letter set distributions with different point values. Tiles are made of wood or plastic and are 19 by 19 millimetres square and 4 mm thick, making them smaller than the squares on the board. Only the rosewood tiles of the deluxe edition varies the width up to 2 mm for different letters. Travelling versions of the game have smaller tiles; the capital letter is printed in black at the centre of the tile face and the letter's point value printed in a smaller font at the bottom right corner.
S is one of the most valuable tiles in English-language Scrabble because it can be appended to many words to pluralize them. Q is considered the most troublesome letter, as all words with it contain U. J is difficult to play due to its low frequency and a scarcity of words having it at the end. C and V may be troublesome in the endgame, since no two-letter words with them exist, save for CH in the Collins Scrabble Words lexicon. In 1938, American architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called Lexiko; the two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out by performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources, including The New York Times. The new game, which he called "Criss-Crosswords," added the 15×15 gameboard and the crossword-style game play, he manufactured a few sets himself, but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day. In 1948, James Brunot, a resident of Newtown and one of the few owners of the original Criss-Crosswords game, bought the rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting Butts a royalty on every unit sold.
Though he left most of the game unchanged, Brunot rearranged the "premium" squares of the board and simplified the rules. In 1949, Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, a section of Newtown, they lost money. According to legend, Scrabble's big break came in 1952 when Jack Straus, president of Macy's, played the game on vacation. Upon returning from vacation, he was surprised to find, he placed a large order and within a year, "everyone had to have one."In 1952, unable to meet demand himself, Brunot sold manufacturing rights to Long Island-based Selchow and Righter, one of the manufacturers who, like Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley Company, had rejected the game. In its second year as a Selchow and Righter-built product, nearly four million sets were sold. Selchow and Righter bought the trademark to the game in 1972. JW Spear began selling the game in Australia and the UK on January 19, 1955; the company is now a subsidiary of Mattel. In 1986, Selchow and Righter was sold to Coleco.
Hasbro purchased the company's assets, including Parcheesi. In 1984, Scrabble was turned into a daytime game show on NBC. Scrabble ran from July 1984 to March 1990, with a second run from January to June 1993; the show was hosted by Chuck Woolery. Its tagline in promotional broadcasts was "Every man. In 2011, a new TV variation of Scrabble
Toy
A toy is an item, used in play one designed for such use. Playing with toys can be an enjoyable means of training young children for life in society. Different materials like wood, clay and plastic are used to make toys. Many items are designed to serve as toys, but goods produced for other purposes can be used. For instance, a small child may fold an ordinary piece of paper into an airplane shape and "fly it". Newer forms of toys include interactive digital entertainment; some toys are produced as collectors' items and are intended for display only. The origin of toys is prehistoric; the origin of the word "toy" is unknown, but it is believed that it was first used in the 14th century. Toys are made for children; the oldest known doll toy is thought to be 4,000 years old. Playing with toys is considered to be important when it comes to growing up and learning about the world around us. Younger children use toys to discover their identity, help their bodies grow strong, learn cause and effect, explore relationships, practice skills they will need as adults.
Adults on occasion use toys to form and strengthen social bonds, help in therapy, to remember and reinforce lessons from their youth. Most children have been said to play such as sticks and rocks. Toys and games have been unearthed from the sites of ancient civilizations, they have been written about in some of the oldest literature. Toys excavated from the Indus valley civilization include small carts, whistles shaped like birds, toy monkeys which could slide down a string; the earliest toys are made from materials found in nature, such as rocks and clay. Thousands of years ago, Egyptian children played with dolls that had wigs and movable limbs which were made from stone and wood. In Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, children played with dolls made of wax or terracotta, sticks and arrows, yo-yos; when Greek children girls, came of age it was customary for them to sacrifice the toys of their childhood to the gods. On the eve of their wedding, young girls around fourteen would offer their dolls in a temple as a rite of passage into adulthood.
The oldest known mechanical puzzle comes from Greece and appeared in the 3rd century BCE. The game consisted of a square divided into 14 parts, the aim was to create different shapes from these pieces. In Iran "puzzle-locks" were made as early as the 17th century. Toys became more widespread with the changing attitudes towards children engendered by the Enlightenment. Children began to be seen as people in and of themselves, as opposed to extensions of their household and that they had a right to flourish and enjoy their childhood; the variety and number of toys that were manufactured during the 18th century rose. He created puzzles on eight themes – the World, Asia, America and Wales, Ireland and Scotland; the rocking horse was developed at the same time in England with the wealthy as it was thought to develop children's balance for riding real horses. Blowing bubbles from leftover washing up soap became a popular pastime, as shown in the painting The Soap Bubble by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.
Other popular toys included hoops, toy wagons, spinning wheels and puppets. The first board games were produced by John Jefferys in the 1750s, including A Journey Through Europe; the game was similar to modern board games. In the nineteenth century, the emphasis was put on toys that had an educational purpose to them, such as puzzles, books and board games. Religiously themed toys were popular, including a model Noah's Ark with miniature animals and objects from other Bible scenes. With growing prosperity among the middle class, children had more leisure time on their hands, which led to the application of industrial methods to the manufacture of toys. More complex mechanical and optics-based toys were invented. Carpenter and Westley began to mass-produce the kaleidoscope, invented by Sir David Brewster in 1817, had sold over 200,000 items within three months in London and Paris; the company was able to mass-produce magic lanterns for use in phantasmagoria and galanty shows, by developing a method of mass production using a copper plate printing process.
Popular imagery on the lanterns included royalty and fauna, geographical/man-made structures from around the world. The modern zoetrope was invented in 1833 by British mathematician William George Horner and was popularized in the 1860s. Wood and porcelain dolls in miniature doll houses were popular with middle class girls, while boys played with marbles and toy trains; the golden age of toy development was at the turn of the 20th century. Real wages were rising in the Western world, allowing working-class families to afford toys for their children, industrial techniques of precision engineering and mass production was able to provide the supply to meet this rising demand. Intellectual emphasis was increasingly being placed on the importance of a wholesome and happy childhood for the future development of children. William Harbutt, an English painter, invented plasticine in 1897, in 1900 commercial production of the material as a children's toy began. Frank Hornby was a visionary in toy development and manufacture and was responsible for the invention and production of
Video game console
A video game console is a computer device that outputs a video signal or visual image to display a video game that one or more people can play. The term "video game console" is used to distinguish a console machine designed for consumers to use for playing video games, in contrast to arcade machines or home computers. An arcade machine consists of a video game computer, game controller and speakers housed in large chassis. A home computer is a personal computer designed for home use for a variety of purposes, such as bookkeeping, accessing the Internet and playing video games. While arcades and computers are expensive or “technical” devices, video game consoles were designed with affordability and accessibility to the general public in mind. Unlike similar consumer electronics such as music players and movie players, which use industry-wide standard formats, video game consoles use proprietary formats which compete with each other for market share. There are various types of video game consoles, including home video game consoles, handheld game consoles and dedicated consoles.
Although Ralph Baer had built working game consoles by 1966, it was nearly a decade before the Pong game made them commonplace in regular people's living rooms. Through evolution over the 1990s and 2000s, game consoles have expanded to offer additional functions such as CD players, DVD players, Blu-ray disc players, web browsers, set-top boxes and more; the first video games appeared in the 1960s. They were played on massive computers connected to vector displays, not analog televisions. Ralph H. Baer conceived the idea of a home video game in 1951. In the late 1960s, while working for Sanders Associates, Baer created a series of video game console designs. One of these designs, which gained the nickname of the 1966 "Brown Box", featured changeable game modes and was demonstrated to several TV manufacturers leading to an agreement between Sanders Associates and Magnavox. In 1972, Magnavox released the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console which could be connected to a TV set. Ralph Baer's initial design had called for a huge row of switches that would allow players to turn on and off certain components of the console to create different games like tennis, volleyball and chase.
Magnavox replaced the switch design with separate cartridges for each game. Although Baer had sketched up ideas for cartridges that could include new components for new games, the carts released by Magnavox all served the same function as the switches and allowed players to choose from the Odyssey's built-in games; the Odyssey sold about 100,000 units, making it moderately successful, it was not until Atari's arcade game Pong popularized video games that the public began to take more notice of the emerging industry. By autumn 1975, bowing to the popularity of Pong, canceled the Odyssey and released a scaled-down version that played only Pong and hockey, the Odyssey 100. A second, "higher end" console, the Odyssey 200, was released with the 100 and added on-screen scoring, up to four players, a third game—Smash. Released with Atari's own home Pong console through Sears, these consoles jump-started the consumer market. All three of the new consoles used simpler designs than the original Odyssey did with no board game pieces or extra cartridges.
In the years that followed, the market saw many companies rushing similar consoles to market. After General Instrument released their inexpensive microchips, each containing a complete console on a single chip, many small developers began releasing consoles that looked different externally, but internally were playing the same games. Most of the consoles from this era were dedicated consoles playing only the games that came with the console; these video game consoles were just called video games because there was little reason to distinguish the two yet. While a few companies like Atari and newcomer Coleco pushed the envelope, the market became flooded with simple, similar video games. Fairchild released the Fairchild Video Entertainment System in 1976. While there had been previous game consoles that used cartridges, either the cartridges had no information and served the same function as flipping switches or the console itself was empty and the cartridge contained all of the game components.
The VES, contained a programmable microprocessor so its cartridges only needed a single ROM chip to store microprocessor instructions. RCA and Atari soon released their own cartridge-based consoles, the RCA Studio II and the Atari 2600, respectively; the first handheld game console with interchangeable cartridges was the Microvision designed by Smith Engineering, distributed and sold by Milton-Bradley in 1979. Crippled by a small, fragile LCD display and a narrow selection of games, it was discontinued two years later; the Epoch Game Pocket Computer was released in Japan in 1984. The Game Pocket Computer featured an LCD screen with 75 X 64 resolution and could produce graphics at about the same level as early Atari 2600 games; the system sold poorly, as a result, only five games were made for it. Nintendo's Game & Watch series of dedicated game systems proved more successful, it helped to establish handheld gaming as popular and lasted until 1991. Many Game & Watch games were re-released on Nintendo's subsequent handheld systems.
The VES continued to be sold at a profit after 1977, both Bally and Magnavox brought their own programmable cartridge-based consoles to the market. However, i
Trivial Pursuit
Trivial Pursuit is a board game from Canada in which winning is determined by a player's ability to answer general knowledge and popular culture questions. Dozens of question sets have been released for the game; the question cards are organized into themes. Some question sets have been designed for younger players, others for a specific time period or as promotional tie-ins; the game was created on December 15, 1979 in Montreal in Quebec, by Canadian Chris Haney, a photo editor for Montreal's The Gazette, Scott Abbott, a sports editor for The Canadian Press. After finding pieces of their Scrabble game missing, they decided to create their own game. With the help of John Haney and Ed Werner, they completed development of the game, released in 1981. In North America, the game's popularity peaked in 1984, a year in which over 20 million games were sold; the rights to the game were licensed to Selchow and Righter in 1982 to Parker Brothers in 1988, after being turned down by the Virgin Group. As of 2014, more than 100 million games had been sold in 17 languages.
Northern Plastics of Elroy, Wisconsin produced 30,000,000 games between 1983 and 1985. In December 1993, Trivial Pursuit was named to the "Games Hall of Fame" by Games magazine. An online version of Trivial Pursuit was launched in September 2003; the object of the game is to move around the board by answering trivia questions. Questions are split into six categories, with each one having its own color to identify itself; the game includes a board, playing pieces, question cards, a box, small plastic wedges to fit into the playing pieces, a dice. Playing pieces used in Trivial Pursuit are round and divided into six sections, similar to a cheese triangle. A small plastic wedge, sometimes called cheese, can be placed into each of these sections to mark each player's progress. During the game, players move their playing pieces around a track, shaped like a wheel with six spokes; this track is divided into spaces of different colors, the center of the board is a hexagonal "hub" space. At the end of each spoke is a "category headquarters" space.
When a player's counter lands on a square, the player answers a question according to its color, which corresponds to one of the six categories. If the player answers the question his turn continues. Wedges are fitted into a player's piece; some spaces say "roll again," giving an extra roll of the die to the player. The hub is a "wild" space. Questions must be answered without any outside assistance. Any number of playing pieces may occupy the same space at the same time. A variant rule ends a player's turn on collecting a wedge, preventing a single knowledgeable player from running the board. Once a player has collected one wedge of each color and filled up his playing piece, he must return to the hub and answer a question in a category selected by the other players. If this question is answered that player wins the game. Otherwise, the player must try again on the next turn. Over the years, numerous editions of Trivial Pursuit have been produced specializing in various fields; the original version is known as the Genus edition.
Several different general knowledge editions have followed. Other editions include Junior Edition, All-Star Sports, Baby Boomers, 1980s, All About the 80s, 1990s. In the United Kingdom, Trivial Pursuit players complained that the 2006 version of the game was dumbed down in comparison to previous editions, with easier questions and more focus on celebrities and show business. In October 1984, Fred L. Worth, author of The Trivia Encyclopedia, Super Trivia, Super Trivia II, filed a $300 million lawsuit against the distributors of Trivial Pursuit, he claimed that more than a quarter of the questions in the game's Genus Edition had been taken from his books to the point of reproducing typographical errors and deliberately placed misinformation. One of the questions in Trivial Pursuit was "What was Columbo's first name?" with the answer "Philip". That information had been fabricated to catch anyone; the inventors of Trivial Pursuit acknowledged that Worth's books were among their sources, but argued that this was not improper and that facts are not protected by copyright.
The district court judge agreed. The decision was appealed, in September 1987 the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the ruling. Worth asked the Supreme Court of the United States to review the case, but the Court declined, denying certiorari in March 1988. In 1994, David Wall of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, launched a lawsuit against the game's creators, he claimed that in the fall of 1979, he and a friend were hitchhiking near Sydney, Nova Scotia, when they were picked up by Chris Haney. Wall claimed that he told Haney about his idea for the game in detail, including the shape of the markers. Wall's mother testified she found drawings of his that looked like plans for a Trivial Pursuit-like game, but the drawings had
